If Super Bowl hype has inspired teenage athletes to dream of gridiron stardom, here’s a jolt of reality: Only about 1 in 4,233 high-school football athletes make it to the NFL. The likelihood of a career is even tinier for high school NBA dreamers: 1 in 11,771.

But if athletes can nurture their inner nerd, the odds are much better that they will succeed in the field they chose and may even earn more money in the long run.

Consider engineering, suggests the Palo Alto career advice firm Paysa, which compiled the statistics. Presuming students complete the prerequisites, they’ll find it much easier to get into engineering school (63 out of 100 applicants), to graduate (six out of 10) and to find a job in their field: an astonishing 97 out of 100.

“Over half a million jobs in technology continue to go unfilled across all sectors of the economy,” Paysa CEO Chris Bolte said in a statement, “making it a way better bet to pursue an engineering, computer science or other tech degree that can promise the same or even better earning potential over the long haul.”

Granted, this isn’t an either-or choice, and unlike the Powerball lottery, job searches are not strictly a matter of chance. A hardworking, gifted athlete can beat the odds and break into the pros; he may not have the classes, or affinity, to program computers.

Paysa calculates that the average lifetime earning potential of a Major League Baseball player at $2.9 million. For the average NFL player, it’s $3 million and for pro hoops players it’s $12 million. Average pro athlete careers range from 3.5 years to 5.6 years.

In contrast, with a much longer career and not-so-shabby pay, an engineer’s lifetime earnings potential exceeds $5 million. That’s from working 40 years at an average of $125,418 annually, not including raises. If that engineer works at Google, lifetime earnings could reach $10.7 million. A similar career at Facebook could bring in $13.5 million, surpassing even average pro basketball players.

Of course, Paysa’s analysis ignores a lot of things on all sides of its equations: the risks and costs of traumatic brain injury or multiple Tommy John surgeries and whether Facebook will still be around in 10, not to mention 40, years.

And it’s setting up an extreme choice by disregarding the career earnings from more prosaic jobs like teacher, grocery clerk or dog groomer.

Of course, would-have-been athletes choosing engineering won’t be mugging for the cameras, prancing in the end zone or winning multimillion-dollar contracts to pitch new cars. But they might be dancing their way to the bank.