Consider former NBA guard Allen Iverson, or ex-NFL receiver Raghib “Rocket” Ismail — whose case, by no coincidence, leads off that SI story — both of whom never filed for bankruptcy despite squandering their pro fortunes.
“Bankruptcy is only one measure of a person’s status,” Carlson admitted to me. “It’s what we could get data on. There are many other ways in which a person could be in financial trouble. You might think of our number as maybe a lower bound for the number of guys who are actually in trouble.”
And yet what Carlson called a “narrow” academic paper was promising a definitive analysis of a larger, albeit related, problem. Due to the academic marketplace — “Publish or perish” is an idiom for a reason — working papers tend to be hungry and ambitious. The goal is to make it into a journal and contribute knowledge to the world. But it can be tough to find the kind of dramatic angle that makes for an eye-catching study.
Measuring financial health just through bankruptcy would be the equivalent of, say, assessing the mental health of a population by just tracking suicide rates, ignoring any other indicators of psychological stress. Pain isn’t exclusively about disaster.
You often hear data people say that sample size matters. It’s not just size, though; it’s also the quality of the sample itself. Yes, the authors tell us about 2,016 players who were drafted by NFL teams between 1996 and 2003. But thanks to the relative inaccessibility of data on undrafted players, they also left out every player who didn’t begin his career by shaking hands with an NFL executive on a televised stage. In 2013, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, 638 undrafted players were on active rosters for at least one game — a staggering 31.4 percent of the entire NFL. And that does not even include the drafted or undrafted players who never make it to an active roster, toiling instead on the practice squad or injured reserve.