The Guardian: Injury pay cuts and limited leverage: five brutal truths about NFL
UC study cited regarding NFL contracts and how players actions, on and off the field
An obvious injury on the football field, such as we saw with Buffalo Bills' safety Damar Hamlin, can sideline a player for a game, weeks, or indefinitely. How this affects their health is of primary concern, but financial setbacks come into play as well, according to an in-depth article on NFL contacts in "The Guardian."
The article outlines how NFL contacts are tailored to the individual player and risk assessment; and it’s not only what they do on the field that can have financial caveats. Riding a motorcycle, for example, might be forbidden in the contact and any injuries from an accident might be cause for breach of contract.
Behaviors can impact player finances as well, says UC political scientist David Niven, an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs cited in the article.
What Niven found is that after the national anthem kneeling protests against racial inequality, “a far greater percentage of protesters [than non-protesters] received a salary cut, that protesters’ overall salaries grew at a notably slower rate, and that protesters were vastly more likely to be sent to another team.”
Featured image at top courtesy of Unsplash.
Impact Lives Here
The University of Cincinnati is leading public urban universities into a new era of innovation and impact. Our faculty, staff and students are saving lives, changing outcomes and bending the future in our city's direction. Next Lives Here.
Related Stories
UC professor leads film students to the future
April 6, 2026
As a kid, at the age of 10, Marty Schiff’s dad gave him a Kodak Brownie movie camera, and that led to a lifetime of creating stories on film. He spent his summers with that camera, making eight-millimeter movies, with a camera that taught him how to thread a projector, change the film in a closet, and tell stories with the medium he loved. “I always wanted to go to Hollywood,” Schiff says. So later he did, with $200 in his pocket, and began a career that has spanned acting, directing, producing—pretty much everything with the exception of costumes (“I’m not really good with a sewing machine,” he says).
High Court offers protections for therapy speech
April 5, 2026
Jennifer Bard, a professor in the Donald P. Klekamp College of Law and the UC Department of Internal Medicine, spoke with journalists about the US Supreme Court ruling granting first amendment protections for speech offered during therapy sessions.
Scientists discover how snakes stand upright without limbs
April 3, 2026
Smithsonian magazine highlights a study co-authored by UC Professor Bruce Jayne, an expert in snake locomotion, about how snakes stand upright without arms or legs.