The LSAT and NFL Stardom

by Manhattan Prep Mar 4, 2011

What do you want to do with your J.D.?  That’s the $250,000 question for most of you. After all, there has to be an end game to all of this LSAT prep madness. The truth is, a legal education can take you many places that you may have thought previously unattainable.  See exhibit A: NFL stardom.

Unbeknownst to most National Football League fans around the country today, the most important players to the future of the NFL are not named Brady or Manning, and are not getting paid tens of millions of dollars to chase a ball around. The future of the NFL actually lies in the hands of several attorneys, mediators, and decision makers who – not unlike yourselves – were recently sweating through many an LSAT workout routine.

The NFL is in the midst of the most crucial labor disputes in the history of American sports.  The NFL Players Union and the NFL owner’s are intensely negotiating how they are going to split the 9 billion dollars in revenue that the league rakes in per year.

Armed with their representatives from every walk of legal life, both sides have been negotiating and mediating against a deadline that was set to expire at 11:59pm EST last night, March 3rd,  2011 which is when the current “Collective Bargaining Agreement” between the NFL Owner’s and the NFL Players Association expired.  Both sides have just yesterday evening agreed to extend the deadline 24 hours, but one thing remains a certainty: Without a new agreement in place, the league faces a work stoppage until a new contract can be signed by both sides.  Without an agreement, there will be no 2011 season, which means that their 9 billion dollar pie will go to waste.

While the sheer dollars at stake here are quite overwhelming, I find it more interesting to point out that one’s law school and NFL dreams need not be mutually exclusive.  With a little work on Logic Games and a quick read through our new Logical Reasoning Strategy Guide, you could be the person who saves the fate of our country’s most popular professional sports league. Sure the agreement will almost certainly be reached by the time you are finished with law school, but keep this in mind: the next Collective Bargaining Agreement will absolutely expire at some point in the future, and when that time comes, there will be a need for contract law experts to work out the kinks of yet another contentious labor dispute.

So get studying; careers in contract law span just about all industries in our society; music, sports, art. Perhaps your dreams of stardom aren’t dead after all!

Here are some interesting stories about the ongoing negotiations from across the web:

President Obama Addresses NFL Labor Dispute – The Huffington Post

Issues in NFL Labor Negotiations – The New York Times

NFL Labor Timeline – The St. Petersburg Times

Fan’s View of NFL Labor Talks: Woe is Them – USA Today