NFL player career legnth

[Ed-S: Bumped from boards]

Which team/conference should a high school recruit choose given the a desire to reach the NFL. Here are the tables that I abstracted from databaseFootball.com.  They are only through 2010 so they would not include this years rookies.  Starred teams have moved conferences recently.  ( I gave up trying to star all the past and future moves the Big East is making.)  This was a bit of a project with lots of cut and paste into a set of spread sheets.  It would appear that one might want to play college football in the BIG 10 if you want to maximize the likelihood that you will play in the NFL although it will still be a long shot that you will play very long even if drafted.

As you look at the databaseFootball.com tables it's obvious just how short the careers of NFL players really are.  By the eyeball it is about 4 years on average over the history of the NFL but here is the official NFL line from NFL Communications:

"One fan on the conference call said she has read many times that the average career length of an NFL player is about three years, adding it seemed so many played much longer than that. She asked Commissioner Goodell about his knowledge of NFL career length.

“There is a little bit of a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding on that.  Frequently, it is said that the average career is about 3.5 years.  In fact, if a player makes an opening day roster, his career is very close to six years,” Commissioner Goodell said. “If you are a first-round draft choice, the average career is close to nine years.  That 3.5-year average is really a misrepresentation.  What it adds is a lot of players who don’t make an NFL roster and it brings down the average.”

According to a recent NFL Management Council analysis of players who entered the NFL between 1993 and 2002, the average career length for a player who is on his club’s opening-day roster as a rookie is 6.0 years.

That 6.0 average is 88 percent higher than NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith’s recent claim.

“The fundamental principle of our business model necessarily includes that every player only plays for an average of 3.2 years,” Smith said in a March 31 forum with MBA students at the University of Virginia .

Following are the facts from the career-length analysis (using regular-season and postseason rosters):

• The average career length for a player who makes a club’s opening-day roster (active/inactive roster or injured reserve) in his rookie season is 6.0 years.
• The average career length for a player with at least three pension-credited seasons* is 7.1 years (*a player receives a pension credit for each season in which he spends at least three games on an active/inactive roster and/or injured reserve).
• The average career length for a first-round draft pick is 9.3 years.
• The average career length for a player who is selected for or plays in at least one Pro Bowl is 11.7 years.  Of the 318 players who began careers between 1993 and 2002 and made the Pro Bowl at least once, 113 of those players – 36 percent – were on a club’s roster in 2010."

As usual there is a disagreement between management and labor on the facts.  Charts? Charts....

PS for laughs I looked up the MAC teams too.  Temple got most of their player into the NFL while they were in the Big East.