Dinner at the NFL: A bottle of Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon: $3,495. Nighteen cognac shots Remy Martin Louis XIII: $4525. Entrecote fillets, trays of seafood, bottles of Voss water: 1014 dollars.
Total: $17,748. With tip, over $20,000.
To many diners, that might seem an extravagant amount to spend on a mealeven for a large group. For National Football League (NFL) athletes, it’s a decades-old ritual known as the Rookie Dinner.: an exorbitant meal that is expected to new players pay their teammates.
In this particular case, the person in charge of paying the 2014 lunch bill at Del Frisco Steakhouse was Lane Johnson, a player selected in the first round of the draft and offensive tackle of the Philadelphia Eagles, who posted the account on Twitter.
pay these Five-figure accounts have become standard practice throughout the NFL., “like putting on your shoulder pads before practice,” said Channing Crowder, who played linebacker for the Miami Dolphins. “It’s part of the game”.
In 2019, D’Andre Walker, a fifth-round draft pick and linebacker for the Tennessee Titans, published the account of a dinner that exceeded $ 10,000 at Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse, in Nashville, Tennessee. That same year, Deebo Samuela receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, the paid for a rookie dinner for his teammates with a $3,700 bill at Shanahan’s, a steakhouse in Denver. The dinner that may hold the record for the most expensive was held in 2010 at a Pappas Bros. Steakhousewhere Dez Bryant, then a freshman with the Dallas Cowboys, paid a $55,000 bill.
These dinners are accepted as a cultural norm among players, fans, coaches and the league itself (NFL representatives declined to comment for this article.)
so when Torrey Smith, who has won two Superbowls with the Baltimore Ravens and Philadelphia Eaglesshared his disdain for Twitter rookie dinners in Junethis was a rare instance where an NFL athlete protests against an ingrained custom.
“People come to the league without financial knowledge and with real problemsbut there are those who believe that $50,000 dinners are great! NO!”Smith wrote, sparking debates about whether the tradition is just to establish a team bond or a type of hazing that can have detrimental financial consequences.
“This scene set the precedent for a lifestyle most players can’t afford and they shouldn’t have anyway,” Smith said in a recent interview. Smith decided to speak out after seeing a video on “The Pivot” football podcast in which New York Jets freshman Garret Wilson is called the cost of rookie dinners.
“A lot of people who weren’t gamers said, ‘What?Why all the fuss? They are rich’Smith commented. However, Smith added that this kind of overspending can be a slippery slopeespecially in a sport in which players are not always guaranteed success.
The NFL is the professional sports league with the highest revenue in the United States, with an estimated $11 billion in 2021. However, its players – who enter the league in their early 20s and they get six or seven figure salaries overnight— earn less than many professional male athletes in other sports. They have no guaranteed contracts and the average length of their careers is just under three years. according to the NFL Players Association. A 2015 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that more than 15 percent of NFL players had filed for bankruptcy in the first twelve years after leaving the profession.
The teams in other professional sports have initiation rituals and some even hold rookie dinners, but NFL ones tend to get the most attention onlinedue to the size of the teams and therefore the dinner bill.
“It is the worst possible league to have a dinner like thisopined Will Leitch, a contributing editor at New York magazine who founded the Deadspin sports website.
Those who defend dinners immediately claim that they should not be considered akin to hazing or stalking. Ryan Clark, who co-hosts “The Pivot” podcast with Crowder and retired running back Fred Taylor, believes meals are a bonding experience and compared the tradition to swearing allegiance to a fraternity. “I did it and you’re going to have to do it and because you did it, you’re going to have another rookie do it,” he said.
Crowder said that the players who remain bankrupt are those who buy three or four houses or have children with several partners and pay pensions to their children and their spouses. “A rookie dinner will not lead anyone to live poorly.”
At Crowder’s rookie dinner in 2005, a player ordered two bottles of Louis XIII: one for the table and one to take away. Crowder mentioned that he paid close to $30,000, give or take. five percent of the $588,000 check he had received for part of the season.
“If I have to spend $30,000 on a dinner for my friendsVonnie Holliday, Kevin Carter and all the guys I hung out with growing up,” he said it was worth it. “It wasn’t that bad”.
Clark, who was playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers when they won the Superbowl in 2009, said veterans often babysit the youngsters during these dinners. When he came to the New York Giants in 2002 as an undrafted player, veterans they offered to split the bill with him. And the public sees only the highest dinner social media accounts, though are usually much smaller added Taylor, who was selected in the first round of the 1998 draft (James McGhee, the owner of the Juliet’s restaurant in Houston, which has been the site of several rookie dinnerscommented that the accounts usually range from $5,000 to about $25,000).
Leitch, the magazine publisher, commented that rookie dinners have been held since at least the 1970s, when first-year players received hefty bonuses and were sometimes guaranteed to earn more than veteran players. The dinners were considered a mechanism to recirculate that money between the team.
However, in 2011, the league adopted a salary scale for rookies, which places caps on first-year salaries. Nowadays, many rookies earn less than veteransbut the dinners continue.
“It is evidence of a general football culture that treats young players as imminently disposableLeitch opined. “There will always be someone else, someone will always want your job, so you have to get by and go with the flow of what they tell you to do or you’ll be out in a second.”
Greg Hopkins, the director of Changing the Community, a nonprofit organization in Rochester, New York, that trains young athletes to play professional football, mentioned that people come into the program with almost no idea of finances. He teaches them the basics, like opening a bank account or cashing a check.
“The rookies who come in, especially if they weren’t drafted in the early rounds, they shouldn’t think about spending that kind of money”, he thought of the rookie dinners, because you have no idea how long your career will last.
Anquan Boldin, who was Smith’s partner, commented that being someone who entered the NFL without much money while also supporting family membershas always considered A waste of rookie dinners. Instead, he taught Smith and other rookies how to save.
“For those who go out and spend 50,000 or 70,000 dollars at a dinner, I think it would be useful more go out to help his mom”, he opined.
If the rookie dinners aren’t going to end, perhaps they are becoming calmer. Daren Bates, a free agent whose most recent team is the Atlanta Falcons, said veterans plan meals in smaller groups so that dinner bills are less expensive. When he was a player for the Tennessee Titans, Bates mentioned that he saw how team coaches forced a group of veterans to return $13,000 to a first-year player after a veterans dinner. And college athletes, who can now sign deals in their name, image and likeness, are entering the NFL with better financial understandingLeitch commented.
It is likely that the league does not intervene to put a stop to rookie dinners, Leitch added. “The only true priorities in the NFL, as has become abundantly clear in the Roger Goodell era, are maximize revenue and minimize public controversy”.