Average NFL player salary

As NFL players have been paid increasingly astronomical sums to catch footballs and sustain concussions, Americans have spent correspondingly more money on frozen pizza, a correlation that suggests either that football wealth trickles down in the form of DiGiorno, or that the same economy that inflates athlete salaries also inflates the price of everything in the freezer aisle. The correlation spans eighteen years and achieves a coefficient of 0.978, which is tighter than most offensive lines and considerably more reliable.

The average NFL salary grew from about 1.4 million dollars in 2005 to over 3.5 million by 2022, driven by escalating television contracts—the league's media deals are now worth over 100 billion dollars combined. Frozen pizza retail sales grew from about 4.5 billion to over 7 billion during the same period, pushed by inflation, the convenience economy, and the pandemic-era discovery that frozen pizza technology had quietly become rather good. Both metrics are, at their core, inflation-adjusted measures of American consumer spending: one in the entertainment sector, the other in the grocery sector. The NFL's revenue growth is fueled by the same advertising dollars that also market frozen pizza during commercial breaks, creating a loop so tight it borders on poetic.

Eighteen years of football salaries and frozen pizza growing together is a reminder that in a consumer economy, everything rises together: the salaries, the grocery bills, and the vague feeling that you should probably eat something healthier. The quarterback earns more, the pizza costs more, and the correlation sits quietly between them, meaning nothing. First down.