Brett Banter

If you have followed sports for more than five minutes at any time in your life, you are bound to have heard that athletes are grossly overpaid. Well, duh. The sun also rises. However, Forbes.com had a nice piece this morning (which we found on Yahoo) on the evolution of those salaries in the past 20 years.

The number are up, but the surprise is in how they are up. In 1991, boxers dominated the charts of highest paid athletes. That is not the case any more as pugilism has fallen off the sports radar in a big way. In addition, there were more female athletes in the top 20 in 1991 than there are today. NBA stars are very high on the list, which is odd because people keep saying the NBA is not popular. There are no NFL players in the top ten --not even Ben Roethlisberger and his amazing mullet.

But here is the real interesting part, yes salaries are up from 1991, but down from last year. According to the article,"this year’s 50 highest-paid athletes earned $1.4 billion combined, or $28 million on average. That’s down 11% from a year ago." So, maybe even sports is not recession proof? Well, the article theorizes that the NFL lockout, Tiger Woods (No.1 on the list) fall from grace and other small maladies are the culprit.

Evolution is tough.