A bottle of Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon: $3,495. Nineteen Shots Rémy Martin Louis XIII Cognac: $4,525. Rib eye steaks, seafood platters, bottles of Voss water: $1,014.
entire bill: $17,748. More than $20,000 with tips.
For many guests, that seems like an unusual amount to spend on a meal, even for a large group. For athletes in the National Football League, it’s a decades-old ritual known as the rookie dinner — an exorbitant meal meant to fund new players for their teammates.
In this particular case, the bill was billed for a 2014 meal at a Del Frisco’s Steakhouse Lane Johnson, a first-round draft pick and offensive tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles, who then posted the bill on Twitter.
Paying those five-figure bills has become standard practice across the NFL, “like putting on your pads before practice,” said Channing Crowder, a former Miami Dolphins linebacker. “It’s part of the game.”
In 2019, D’Andre Walker, a fifth-round draft pick and linebacker for the Tennessee Titans, posted a dinner bill totaling more than $10,000 from Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse in Nashville. That same year, Deebo Samuel, a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, invited his teammates to a $3,700 rookie dinner at Shanahan’s, a Denver steakhouse. The possible record-holder is a 2010 dinner at a Pappas Bros. Steakhouse where Dez Bryant, then a freshman for the Dallas Cowboys, was billed for $55,000.
These dinners are accepted as a cultural norm by players, fans, coaches and the league itself. (NFL officials declined to comment on this story.)
So when Torrey Smith, a two-time Super Bowl champion with the Baltimore Ravens and Philadelphia Eagles, went to twitter in June to share his disdain for rookie dinners, it was a rare instance for an NFL athlete to speak out against a longstanding custom.
“Guys come into the league with no financial education and real problems, but people think 50,000 dinners is cool! NO!” he wrote, sparking debates over whether the tradition is just team bonding or a form of bullying that can have damaging financial consequences.
“This dinner sets a precedent for a lifestyle that the majority of players can’t afford and shouldn’t be living anyway,” Mr. Smith said in a recent interview. He decided to speak out after watching a video from football podcast The Pivot, in which New York Jets freshman Garrett Wilson opens up about the cost of rookie dinners for the first time became.
“A lot of non-players said, ‘What’s the big deal? You’re rich,’” said Mr. Smith. But, he added, that kind of overspending can be a slippery slope, especially in a sport where a player’s success isn’t always guaranteed.
The NFL is the highest-grossing professional sports league in the United States, with estimated 2021 revenues of $11 billion. Yet its players — who enter the league in their early 20s and become six- or seven-figure earners overnight — earn less than many professionals 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 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that more than 15 percent of NFL players had filed for bankruptcy within 12 years of retiring from the profession.
Teams in other pro sports have initiation rituals and some even host rookie dinners, but those in the NFL tend to get the most attention online given the size of the teams and the resulting dinner bill.
“It’s in the worst league to have a dinner like that,” said Will Leitch, editor at New York Magazine and founder of sports website Deadspin.
For many teams, those meals have turned into shows of excess. They are often held at high-end steakhouses before the start of the season. Experienced players deliberately order the most expensive items more than once: lobster, steak, premium cognac.
Rookie dinners are usually broken up by position on the field. If there are multiple rookies in one position, they split the bill. And how much each rookie owes correlates directly to that player’s draft order, so the team’s first-round picks — who earn more and have longer contracts — are likely to pay the most.
Dinner advocates are quick to define them outside the realm of bullying or harassment. Ryan Clark, who co-hosts The Pivot podcast with Mr. Crowder and retired running back Fred Taylor, views mealtimes as a bonding experience, likening tradition to the promise of fraternity. “I did it, and you will do it,” he said, “and because you did it, you will get another freshman to do it.”
Mr Crowder said the players who are going broke are those who are buying three or four houses or have children with multiple partners and are paying child or spousal support. “A rookie dinner doesn’t put anyone in the poorhouse.”
At Mr. Crowder’s rookie dinner in 2005, a player ordered two bottles of Louis XIII: one for the table and one to take away. He said he paid nearly $30,000, about 5 percent of the $588,000 paycheck he received for part of the season.
“If I have to shell out $30,000 for dinner for my OGs, Vonnie Holliday, Kevin Carter and all the guys I grew up with,” he said, it’s worth it. “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
Mr. Clark, who played for the Pittsburgh Steelers when they won the Super Bowl in 2009, said veterans usually look out for younger players at these dinners. When he joined the New York Giants as an undrafted player in 2002, the veterans offered to split the bill with him. And the public sees only the highest dinner tabs on social media, when they’re usually far fewer, added Mr. Taylor, a first-round pick in the 1998 draft. (James McGhee, the owner of Houston restaurant Juliet, which has several hosted a rookie dinner said the bills typically range from $5,000 to about $25,000.)
Mr. Leitch, the magazine’s editor, said rookie dinners had been around since at least the 1970s, when first-year players received sizable bonuses and were sometimes guaranteed to earn more than experienced players. The dinners were seen as a way to circulate that money around the team.
But in 2011, the league introduced a rookie pay scale that capped first-year salaries. Today, many newcomers earn less than experienced players, but the dinners continue.
“It speaks to a general football culture that treats young players as immediately expendable,” said Leitch. “There’s always someone else coming along, someone’s always going to want your job, so you have to put up with it and go along with it and do what you’re told or you’ll be out of here in a second.”
Greg Hopkins, director of Changing the Community, a nonprofit in Rochester, NY that trains young athletes to play professionally, said people come into the program with almost no understanding of finance. He teaches them the basics, like opening a bank account or cashing a check.
“For freshmen coming in, you shouldn’t even think about spending that kind of money, especially if you haven’t drafted that high,” he said of rookie dinners because you have no idea how long your career is going to last.
Anquan Boldin, a former teammate of Mr. Smith, said that as someone who entered the NFL with little money while supporting family members, he always viewed rookie dinners as wasteful. Instead, he taught Mr. Smith and other newbies how to save.
“Unlike guys who go out and spend $50,000 to $75,000 on dinner, I just felt like boys would rather go out and help their mom,” he said.
If rookie dinners don’t go away, maybe they’ll become more tame. Daren Bates, a free agent who most recently played for the Atlanta Falcons, said veterans plan meals in smaller groups so dinner bills are less expensive. As a player for the Tennessee Titans, he said he saw team coaches force a group of veterans to give back $13,000 to a freshman after a rookie dinner. And collegiate athletes, who can now secure name, image and likeness deals, are entering the NFL more financially savvy, Mr. Leitch said.
The league is unlikely to step in to put an end to rookie dinners, Mr. Leitch added. “The only real priorities of the NFL, as we saw pretty clearly in the age of Roger Goodell, are maximizing revenue and minimizing public controversy.”
And to the public, rookie dinners “are not the biggest fish to fry,” said Gina Wright, the host of the She Talks Football channel on YouTube.
Football has deeper problems, she said, like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disorder in players who have suffered repeated hits to the head, and the lack of black quarterbacks and owners.
“There are many things in sport that we might disagree with,” she said. “If you literally didn’t have to participate in or support any sport because you didn’t agree with something, you probably wouldn’t be a sports fan at all, let’s be honest.”