Steroids

(continued)

1. Determine the total number of professional football players in the NFL. For extra effect, make sure to include demographics information. I'll save you some time. At the beginning of the 2006 season, there were 1,137 African Americans, 559 Anglo Americans, and 32 “other.” That comes to a total of 1,728 total people who are professional football players.
   
2. Determine the total number of high schoolers that go on to play NCAA football. That's about 5.7 percent of high schoolers that play football, so around 1 in 17 go on to play NCAA football at some level in college-- regardless of the division.
   
3. Determine the proportion of matriculating college football players who get drafted into the NFL. That's about 1.8 percent. So, 1 college football player out of every 50 will go on to be in the NFL.
   
4. Run the numbers. The probability of anyone-- regardless of race-- being able to make a career out of football is approximately 8 in 10,000. These might seem like good odds, but to put it in perspective, across the entire population, approximately 1 in 80 people will one day die in a car crash, 1 in 200 are born with polydactyly (6 fingers on each hand), and approximately 1 in 10,000 people in the population will develop a severe reaction (i.e., paralysis, organ failure, and/or death) from getting most vaccinations. On the upside, you're still safe from lightening strikes (1 in 200,000) and winning the lottery (1 in 20,000,000+, depending on the game).
   

In case you're interested in the figures for some sports other than football, I'll give you the quick run down of the likelihoods of a high school athlete playing professionally in his/her respective sport:

• Men's basketball: 3 in 10,000.


• Women's basketball: 1 in 5,000.


• Baseball: 1 in 200.


• Ice Hockey: 1 in 300.


• Soccer: 1 in 1,250.

At cursory inspection, it looks like some sports are better bets than others, but keep in mind football teams tend to be large pools (many schools with around 100 players), whereas baseball teams, for example, tend to be inherently relatively small (20 players at best-- including benches).

On the plus side, there are a total of 301,270 active doctors in the United States. That means of the 16.4 million kids currently in high school, it's reasonable to assume that about 2% will turn into doctors at some point in their lives. In 2004, there were 1.2 million accountants and auditors in the country, so it's reasonable to assume that 7% of high schoolers will be accountants. I'll let you run your own percentages, but as of 2004, there were 1.8 million managers, 444k CEO-type people, around 280k IT managers, like me, a million IT lackeys, 1.4 million engineers, and most interesting, 6.8 million food servers.

I think that last one-- the food servers-- probably has some co-mingling of data with with the high school athletics rejects, but that's just a guess. There are a bunch of other fields I could mention, but as we quickly start to realize, there is a much better chance of little “Johnny Q” and little “Suzy Q” growing up to be something other than a professional athlete.

Now, if we could only get that message through delusional parents' heads, maybe then their equally delusional kids would be less inclined to shave years off their lives by using steroids. ... or maybe not. Maybe we should just increase steroid availability. I mean, I wouldn't want there to be a shortage of food servers out there. Every society is going to have loser kids, so we might as well give them some sort of false hope for which to dream. After all, we took away their tranquilizers (read: cigarettes and alcohol) back in the 1980s, and they were pissed enough about that to start shooting up schools. God knows what would happen if we took away their steroids and wet dreams of sports stardom.

So anyway, there you have it. The whole steroid use thing is pointless. We've already seen that the chances are extraordinarily small that any given athlete will make the “magic 8” per 10k-- regardless of whether or not they use steroids. Sure, the 4 hours a day they spend during football season could be better allocated toward homework and more likely career paths, but parents would rather blow smoke up their boys' asses than reality-check their ridiculously unlikely ambition. By the time a kid hits 13 he still believes the proverbial bullshit that "anyone can grow up to be an astronaut," his/her parent has flat-out failed them.

In any case, we need something to keep the loser kids busy for fear of them otherwise going batshit insane. Football is a good outlet for a violent release of anger. ...well, if you ignore the fact that the psychiatric literature has recently determined that physical release of anger doesn't help and can actually make things worse by reinforcing violent impulses.

Therefore, I say let them have their steroids if they're stupid enough to take them. That way when their balls shrivel up, their penises retreat back into their abdomens, their brains prematurely cease neural myelination, and to top it all off they go impotent, they'll stimulate the economy by buying bullshit products like “natural male enhancements” for their defunct sex drives and Post-It note pads for their metaphorically (and quite literally) immature brains. They'll enjoy being deltas.

Cheers.

edit: speaking of "let them have their steroids," if you're a jock, you might want to check out the ads on the right, since I just noticed that adsense seems to think this article is advertising steroids :P