Fran Tarkenton says teachers must be more like NFL players, American education is broken

NFL Hall of Fame quarterback and entrepreneur Fran Tarkenton offered his opinion on how to fix education in America this week in an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal titled "What if the NFL Played by Teachers' Rules?"

The former star quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Giants, began by asking readers to imagine an alternate-reality version of the National Football League to create a comparison between NFL players and teachers and teacher unions.

"Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league," he wrote of this imagined NFL. "It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct."

Tarkenton added that in such an atmosphere, players would not be incentivized to work harder, "the on-field product would steadily decline" and "no matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get any better."

Tarkenton complained that this is how American public education is run and that those who give suggestions for reform are "demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation's children."

Multiple news outlets reported on Tarkenton's piece. Some commenters said Tarkenton was spot on while others say he didn't have enough knowledge of the system to comment on it or that his analogy is a bust because it compares players to teachers instead of students.

Rush Limbaugh loved it: "So you put the school system rules in charge of the National Football League, and people are gonna stop going. They'll stop buying tickets, they'll stop buying merchandise, they'll stop watching. Advertising sales would dry up because fewer people would be watching games on television. ESPN would not pay the NFL $1.9 billion to broadcast the games. That was Fran Tarkenton's point: There's no incentive."