Had he chosen football instead of art he might be looking back thankfully that the decision lead him down the path to becoming an NFL star, or sports announcer, or whatever.
The likelihood of football leading directly to a career path (rather than through connections obtained while playing) is far lower than the similar probability for art, though - there are hundreds of thousands of jobs that directly use art skills, whereas the number of football jobs is far lower (even if we include high school coaching in the equation).
In that sense, doing art is really the "safe" option, at least compared to playing football. It only feels less safe because in high school playing football is a lot more respected than doing art.