[xhkkffbf]

The thing is that there are more prosport athletes hired each year than there are new professor slots in most disciplines. There are probably 3-5 new players on each NBA team each year which amounts to 75-150 people taken from the draft. Most academic disciplines have only a few dozen slots available each year.

[scott_s]

The reason I pick the NBA is because there are only 450 positions available (30 teams, 15 players per team). This is the least number of total positions in popular team sports in the US. The ratios will never be perfect, they just need to be relatively similar. The point is to use something which people already have an intuition for; everyone already has an intuition for how unlikely it is for any given high school or college basketball player to play in the NBA.