I find that to be pretty shocking. I read once that the NBA has the best "how to handle sudden wealth" curriculum in professional sports, specifically developed to counteract this problem.
I guess there's no fix for "stupid" after all.
Interesting that the NBA is that proactive on the issue. My impression of the league just inched up, from zero to about 0.3 on a scale of 1-10. Good for them.
My suggestion, again, would be to build something into the standard player contract. Take half the signing bonus and 25% of salary off the top to fund an annuity. (Make up your own percentages; use whatever numbers seem to work to you.) The withholding could be stopped once the annuity was funded up to a level adequate to provide a reasonable middle class income. This need not be extravagant; $50,000/a year would do. The point is to keep the guys off the street.
Big time sports has become incredibly exploitative. It grabs ghetto kids with every socioeconomic/educational/cultural/attitudinal deficit in the book, punches their ticket in a completely fraudulent college experience, and markets the heck out of them when they reach the pros. Yes, the kids are just as irresponsible on their end of the bargain, but they're kids who are too often from bad backgrounds, who lack the basic grounding and mentoring that most of us take for granted, and who may be none too bright to begin with. The teams, the league, and the union should perhaps be much more prescriptive, in recognition of the shaky material with which they're working.