My 78 percent number from 2009 is limited in its own ways, admittedly. I did not conduct the study myself, and, as I told Carlson, I wish I had access to all its component parts. But the statistic was vetted by multiple NFL and NFL Players Association sources who asked not to be quoted or only be quoted anonymously. Several of them shared with me that the stat had been presented at confidential meetings they attended. It was the last, best estimate anyone in this industry had seen; in the six years since SI published the article, neither the PR-obsessed NFL nor the Players Association has disputed the number’s validity in public.
What the NFL did instead was eventually market its own study, published months after my SI article in 2009, with findings that were more pessimistic than the NBER working paper’s but more optimistic than the ones in my article. The league supplied University of Michigan researchers with an even more rarified sample of players: pension-eligible retirees, meaning those who had played a minimum of three years. The average career length among those interviewed was 7.3 seasons, far longer than the NFL average.4 “We had no way to include players with shorter careers,” one of the Michigan authors, David Weir, wrote to me in 2012, “and I would certainly agree that they would be an interesting group to know more about.” That same year, I received an email from an NFL PR person with the following results for me to chew on: “45% (age 50+) and 48% (age 30-49) of retired players said that they have at some point ‘experienced significant losses in business or financial investments.’”
None of this was a direct comparison to the number cited in my article, not even close. But said PR person nevertheless included his own note, colored in bright red font: “a far cry from 78 percent.”
The NFL has already convinced thousands of men to devote themselves to the pursuit of a lifestyle that is unsustainable at best and fictional at worst. Some of the enablers of this dream include, but are not limited to: the league’s financial literacy programs, which have historically failed to instill basic principles; the NFL Players Association’s certification program for financial advisers, which supposedly vetted a number of moneymen who reportedly allowed players to lose more than $300 million in recent years; and the players themselves, who are pressured to exaggerate the opulence of their existence.
Even academics are susceptible. “I don’t think there’s really a problem with either of our numbers,” Carlson told me. “They’re really measuring different things.”
That last sentence isn’t a great headline, no. But it’s 100 percent true.
Article Appeared @http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/theres-a-difference-between-broke-and-bankrupt-for-ex-nfl-players/