As an avid sports fan and former high school athlete, I wanted to visualize something related to sports. When I was younger, people would always ask me what I wanted to be when I was older and I would say an athlete. What I failed to realize what how much time and effort was needed to do that. I liked playing multiple sports, so I chose to do that rather than focusing all my effort and attention on one sport. Once I got to high school, I still loved playing sports but realized that I was not going to make it professional in either the NFL or the MLB. I had to understand that I was going to have to do something different than what I planned to do, but that is ok because change is good and you must be able to adapt.
When I first started thinking about what topic I wanted to look into, my mind immediately went to sports. What I now had to do was decide what direction in sports I would go. I decided to narrow my choices to professional golfer Justin Thomas and how he has performed throughout his career at major tournaments, and the chances of making it professional in sports, focusing primarily on football. Every young athlete dreams of one day making it to the pros, but many of those dreams are crushed early on while others are crushed so close to the finish line.
Justin Thomas has been one of my favorite golfers for a few years, and I have followed to see how he does at every tournament. Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to investigate data about how he has performed in tournaments, focusing on how he has performed at the four majors: The Masters, The PGA Championship, The U.S. Open, and The Open. Justin Thomas is also one of the most humble golfers on tour, so he is a great role model for golfers and anyone looking for a role model.
I play golf frequently. Before starting work a couple of weeks ago, I played golf five to six times per week. While I may not have always played the best, I still had a good time because it is a sport that I like playing. Golf is interesting, and Justin Thomas puts it perfectly in his tweet from May 23rd, 2021, “Golf is insane. It’s just hitting me. The golf ball has no recollection of how old you are, and players can compete at any age. You just have to work and be willing to sacrifice things others are not. One day it is great; the next, it is awful. What a sport I decided to play.” I could not agree with this more. The other day, I was playing a round of golf and hit one shot perfectly, and the next shot I hit was awful. I had the same swing both times – or at least I thought I did. To play golf, you must be strong mentally as your will is tested after every shot, whether good or bad. You cannot think of your previous shot because there is nothing you can do about it now. You must focus on the next shot and only the next shot. While I could have decided to do this project on Justin Thomas, I feel that there was more data when it comes to making it professionally in sports and I could do more with the data than I could have with only Justin Thomas.
Back to the chances of making it professional in sports in America. I started by looking at four sports: Baseball, Men’s Basketball, Women’s Basketball, Ice Hockey, and Football. Before digging up the data, I had an idea of what the number would look like. I was right to an extent. I knew that Baseball would produce the highest number of professional athletes because there are many more spots for them on a team. While the MLB only has 30 teams, each has a minor league system that could have four, five, or even six teams in their system. The average baseball Roster is 25 players. Let’s say there are only four teams in a team’s system. That is 100 players, meaning about 3000 players in professional baseball. The NBA has 30 teams, and rosters consist of 12-13 players. That means that 360 players are playing Professional Basketball in the NBA, or an 88% decrease from how many professional baseball players there are. The WNBA has 12 teams, each having 12 players for a total of 144 players in the league. This means there is a 60% decrease in WNBA Players compared to NBA Players and a whopping 95.2% decrease compared to MLB Players. The NHL has 32 teams, with a roster of 23 players for a total of 736 players, which is a 75.5% decrease from the MLB and a 51.1% increase compared to the number of NBA Players.
The NFL has 32 teams, with each roster allowed to have 53 players on the active roster. There could be players on the practice squad, but they are not counted in this study as they are only on the practice squad in case of injury. In sports such as baseball, basketball, and hockey, there is no practice squad, you either play or you do not, there is no in-between. There are 1,696 players in the NFL. This means that there is a 43.5% decrease in how many NFL Players there are to MLB Players and a 79% increase compared to NBA players. This also means a 57% increase of NFL players compared to NHL Players and a 91.6% increase of NFL Players compared to WNBA Players. The two visuals below show the data on how many players are in each league and on each team.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WLczB/1/Number of active players on each sports team
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ElAK9/1/Number of active players in the four major sports leagues: MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL
An article by Alexander Hawke on LeagueSide shows that 2,585,654 High School athletes play Football, Men’s Basketball, Women’s Basketball, Ice Hockey, and Baseball. The number of athletes that will play in college drops to 143,187 people, for a 94.5% decrease in the number of high school athletes to college athletes. The number of people drafted to these five professional sports leagues is 4,637. This means that 96.8% of college athletes fail to make it professionally. Comparing the total number of high school athletes at 2,585,654 people to a number of players drafted by the league at 4,637 people means that .0017% of high school athletes will make it professionally.
The number of High School baseball players is 482,629, with 33,301 playing in college and 2,863 getting drafted by the MLB. When looking at the data, you must divide each number by 4 to get the totals for each year. Once dividing the numbers by 4, you get 120,657 high school players per year, with 8,325 playing in college and 715 getting drafted. The Number of High School players participating in Men’s Basketball is 541,054, with 18,395 playing in college and 220 drafted. Once again, we must divide by four, leaving us with 135,263 high school men’s basketball players, with 4,598 playing in college and 55 getting drafted. There are 433,344 people participating in high school women’s basketball, with 16,467 playing in college and 148 getting drafted to the WNBA. After dividing those numbers by 4, you have 108,336 Women’s basketball players per year, with 4,116 playing in college and 37 getting drafted to the WNBA. Men’s Ice Hockey has 35393 high school players, with 3964 playing in college and 270 getting drafted to the NHL. Once you divide these numbers by 4, you have 8,848 high school players per year, with 991 playing in college and 67 getting drafted to the NHL.
1,093,234 people are participating in High School Football, with 71,060 playing in college and 1136 getting drafted. After dividing the numbers by 4, you are left with 273,308 players playing in high school, 17,765 in college, and 284 getting drafted to the NFL. You may think that there are not that many draft picks in the NFL Draft, and you are correct. However, the supplemental draft still allows more players to be drafted into the NFL.
Focusing solely on the chances of making it to the NFL, I dug a bit deeper with my research by looking into which states had produced the most NFL Players as of the start of the 2021 season. The state that produced the most players was Florida, but it did not have the best ratio.
That designation belongs to Louisiana, which has 68 players in the NFL. Louisiana has 4,657,757 people, which means that 1 out of every 68,496 people in Louisiana makes it to the NFL. Florida has a population of 21,538,187 people. This means that with 192 players in the NFL, 1 out of 112,178 will play in the NFL. Let’s look at the other eight areas that make up the top 10 states with the most NFL players per capita. The order excluding Louisiana and Florida is Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, District of Columbia, South Carolina, Utah, Delaware, and Maryland. According to highschoolfootballamerica.com, there are 331,449,281 people in the United States. With 1,725 players in the NFL, this means that one out of every 192,145 people will make the NFL.
Digging even deeper, I decided to look at what states had the most players drafted in the 2021 NFL Draft. In the visual below, you can see that Florida and Texas had the most players drafted by a wide margin with eight states only having one player drafted.
I then took it a step further by looking at what cities produce the most NFL players, and I found that cities located in the right half of the United States produced the most NFL Players. Now you might think, how does the United States’ right half have so many more players? However, you fail to realize that even though they may not be as big as some of the states on the left side of the United States, there are more people in the right half of the United States. Therefore, it is no surprise that the right half produced more players than the left half of the United States.
As you can see from the visual above, the states that produced the most players were Florida and Texas, with Florida having six of the top cities producing NFL Talent. Out of the 14 High School Cities with the most NFL Players, Florida accounts for six, Ohio for 2, and the rest are spread out across different states. In the data in this study, 78 out of 180 players were from Florida, meaning that 43% of players from this study are from Florida. It is crazy to think that in a study involving the entire United States, Florida accounts for 43% of the data. 2% of the country accounts for over 40% of the data. Florida is warm year round, meaning that players can train throughout the entire year where in a place like New York, Winter brings freezing temperatures and snow, hindering your ability to improve your skills. Because of this, people located in the northern half of the United States are losing the opportunity to get better. While there are still going to be players drafted from the northeastern region, that number will remain much smaller than the number from the southeastern region.
I also decided to look at data from Statista on how the number of youth football participants has changed from 2006 to 2018. I had assumed that the data would show a decrease in participation as years went on. While I was proven right, I did not realize how much of a decrease there was. I created a visual in DataWrapper to look at the numbers. As you can see below,
In 2006 there were 8.4 million participants in youth and high school football. Fast forward to 2018, and that number drops to 5.16 million. Every year saw a decrease in participation except from 2009 to 2010 and 2011 to 2012, and 2014 to 2015. To be honest, I am not sure why those three years saw an increase. I believe the first reason is that it is a dangerous sport, and parents do not want their kids to get hurt. The second reason, in my opinion, is because soccer has become very popular and is played in the same season as football, limiting kids’ options to do both. An article from Forbes says, “But the numbers, looking back over a decade, make clear that youth participation in football is trending downward, and if those who love the sport want those numbers to turn around, they are going to have to look at themselves, their sport, and what they can do to change.” Currently, perhaps the biggest reason for a decline in participation is the Covid pandemic that shut down high school sports for over a year, thus limiting opportunities for people to participate. With fewer people participating, one would think you would now have a better opportunity to make it to the NFL, but that is simply not the case.
While people may dream of playing in the NFL, they fail to realize that once you get to the NFL, there is a lot that you have to do to stay there. There are many factors that contribute to how long you stay in the NFL and while some of the factors may be out of your hands, you must always continue to outwork everyone and prove that you belong. If you do that, you will give your team a reason to keep you instead of letting you go. You must also realize that there is a better chance of you not staying in the NFL for more than 3 years if you are lucky enough to make it so you should focus on getting a college education as well that way you can still provide for your family if your NFL career doesn’t last long. College players aren’t allowed to enter the NFL Draft until after their Junior year, but many tend to stay all four years, that way they can graduate from college. A Tweet from Scott Carter explains it best and can be seen below.
While it seems like you would have a better opportunity to make it professionally with fewer participants, you must realize that hundreds of thousands of players are still looking to do the same thing. Statistically, you may have a better chance of making it. However, the players that are not playing anymore would not have made it to the NFL regardless, whether that be because they are not talented enough or because they do not have the will to put in the effort it takes to be successful.
The main takeaway is that while the odds of making it to the NFL are very slim, where you are located can have a major impact on determining your success. Many of the top college teams are located in the south so they get a lot of recognition from the NFL. Because of this, we constantly see players getting drafted from college teams in the south.
In short, If you want to give yourself the best chance to get drafted, live in a state in the southeastern half of the United States, get your name out there by sending film of you playing to colleges, and by outworking everyone else because hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. While there are opportunities to make it to the NFL, you are the main factor as you can only control what you can control; you cannot worry about what anyone else is doing.