New Study: NFL players die 7 years earlier than MLB players

The MLB contracts are amazing, they go for a long period of time and there is so much guaranteed money. I mean Bobby Bonilla is still getting paid and he has not played in like 10 years. MLB players are not just paid better than the NFL players they live longer now too.

National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) are some of the most elite athletes in the world. The money is not the only major difference in the two sports, a new study of thousands of former pro athletes has found, that former NFL players had a higher overall death rate than MLB veterans and were felled by cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative illnesses at strikingly higher rates than their MLB peers. On average, the NFL died 7 years earlier than MLB players, the research found, per ScienceMag.com.

The death rate from heart disease was 2.4 times higher for NFL players than that of former MLB players; for brain disease, it was three times as high. All of the men tracked for the study played at least five seasons in NFL or MLB between 1959 and 1988. Their causes of death in the period of 1979 to 2013 were gleaned from preexisting databases and, in some cases, state agency death certificates.

The 517 former NFL players who died during that 35-year period did so at an average age of 59.6 years; the baseball players at 66.7 years. By far the largest cause of death for the football players was heart disease: It was listed as a cause of death for 498 of the 517 NFL players surveyed. By contrast, brain disease contributed to just 39 of those deaths. Among the former MLB players, there were 431 deaths, with heart disease listed as a cause in 225 of them and neurodegenerative disease in 16.

This is what the NFLPA needs to bring up when talking about contracts in the NFL. That is crazy, not even 60 years of age to live? Come on, they need to get more guaranteed money in those contracts. This is something that should be addressed by the league.