On Saturday, the Raiders signed kicker Dave Rayner. On Sunday, he got on the field for all of one play, the opening kickoff. On Tuesday, he was waived.
For that effort, Rayner walked away with more than a lot of Americans make in a full year.
Jerry McDonald of the Oakland Tribune mentioned that Rayner would probably make $40,000 for that one kickoff, and by my back-of-the-envelope calculation it’s actually a little more than that: Rayner’s pre-tax paycheck should be $40,294.12, which is one-seventeenth of $685,000, the league minimum salary for a player with 4-6 credited seasons.
Rayner would actually be eligible for even more than that -- 25 percent of a full year’s salary as termination pay -- but players can only collect that once in their careers, and I’m assuming he collected that in 2008, when he played two games for the Bengals.
In any event, Rayner was only with the Raiders for a couple days, and since their offense played so ineptly that he never attempted a field goal or extra point, his one kickoff (which went five yards into the end zone and was returned to the 23-yard line) was all the work he did. Nice work if you can get it.