How NFL Players Can Avoid Going Broke During the Lockout

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University ? Scholarship in Action 

The pending lockout of NFL players is expected by some to be a matter of history repeating itself. Team owners, hungry to earn an even larger profit from their business ventures, are going to keep the players off the field until they get what they want. Some might naively believe that the NFL Players Association has the bulk of the negotiating power in this battle of egos. After all, they represent our favorite athletes and the famous guys that we all want to see on Sundays, right? Sorry, that's just not the case.

The truth is that the players are going to take a financial beating unlike any other. Team owners can go years without income, so although they stand to lose money when the league shuts down, they are not sitting around wondering how they will pay their car notes. Players, on the other hand, are notoriously under-educated and horrifically bad at managing their money (some of us have been misled into believing that athletic success is a replacement for academic achievement). If history tells us anything about how the lockout is going to go, I expect players will give in after about three weeks.

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