Big boys get no love from Sponsors (NFL edition)

If you’re a young football player hoping to one day play in the NFL and have fame, wealth, girls and lots of lucrative sponsorship deals, your best hope is to be at a position where your ideal playing weight is below 250 pounds. That is the conclusion after analyzing the data from Forbes’ list of The World’s 100 Highest-Paid Athletes in 2012.

The highest salaries in the NFL may go to defensive linemen Haloi Ngata (Baltimore Ravens) and Ndamukong Suh (Detroit Lions), who are both above 250 pounds, but the big boys find it harder to secure sponsorship deals.

To attract top endorsement dollar, you have to be smaller. Eli Manning, 218 pounds of quarterback for the New York Giants, makes $8 mill. a year or 30.1% of his total income from endorsements. At the other end of the spectrum is Charles Johnson, 285 pounds of defensive end for the Carolina Panthers, who only makes $100,000 a year (0.3% of his total income) from endorsements.

To explain, let’s look at the highest paid player pound-for-pound in the NFL. This classification tells us how much money each player is able to generate in salary per pound of body weight. Larry Fitzgerald, WR for the Arizona Cardinals, is the best paid with each pound of body weight generating $161,927 of salary in 2012.

	Name	Salary/P
1.	Larry Fitzgerald	161,927
2.	Peyton Manning	140,870
3.	Darelle Revis	136,364
4.	Charles Johnson	120,351
5.	Sam Bradford	119,643
6.	Ndamukong Suh	115,635
7.	Mario Williams	112,671
8.	Haloi Ngata	109,118
9.	Mark Sanchez	103,111
10.	Tom Brady	102,667

Because of their huge pay checks both Suh & Ngata are in the Top 10 of salary per pound of body weight. But they don't receive similar endorsements. Nobody over 250 pounds feature in the Top 10 of endorsement dollars per pound of body weight.

It gets worse: nobody over 250 pounds are able to make seven figures from sponsorship deals. Even though Ndamukong Suh is the player with the best endorsement deals ($500,000 per year) he is forced to settle for fame and wealth (according to this GQ profile of Ndamukon Suh the only girl in his life is his sister, who is also his manager).