Average NFL player salary

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us deeply, that as professional football players have grown exponentially richer over the past two decades, the North Atlantic right whale has taken this as a personal insult and begun swimming toward extinction with what can only be described as spite. We have somehow managed to create a statistical universe in which the prosperity of men paid to collide with each other correlates almost perfectly with the declining will to exist of one of Earth's largest animals. The whales, one suspects, were not consulted about this arrangement.

The real culprit here is almost certainly the broader economic machinery grinding along behind both datasets. The NFL salary explosion tracks with broader wealth concentration and cable television revenue growth from roughly 2005 onward, while right whale populations have been hammered by the exact same decades of increased ocean shipping traffic, fishing gear entanglement, and climate-driven changes to their food sources—phenomena that accelerated right alongside globalization and the financialization of American sports. A single container ship the size of six football fields can process more whale-threatening cargo in a single voyage than existed in 1990, and those ships have tripled in number while NFL contracts have quintupled in value, both symptoms of the same feverish economic period. We have created a world where neither whales nor football players have much say in their circumstances, though one group gets paid considerably better for it.

What this correlation really demonstrates is that humanity's talent for finding patterns is matched only by its talent for missing the actual mechanisms driving them. We noticed that two completely unrelated things moved in tandem and felt briefly clever, when what we've actually stumbled upon is a reminder that most of history's major trends are being pulled by the same handful of economic and environmental forces, indifferent to whether they're making quarterbacks wealthy or making whales vanish. The correlation is real. The meaning is entirely up to us.