NFL Players Resorting to Payday Loan Stores in Lockout

We wrote that Dez Bryant is the new face of the National Football League (NFL). In heavy debt after leveraging his first-year salary to pay for the kind of amenities that those who are nigga rich purchase, Bryant owes creditors more than $800,000.

NFL player are using payday loans while being locked out

Payday loan stores, liquor stores, check cashing stores are the primary businesses found in predominately Black areas (in predominately Hispanic areas, family-owned restaurants are found in abundance). Some have argued that these type of businesses prey upon the colored community. Because of poor decisions continually made by Black people, income inequality exists in America.

Even for those, like Dez Bryant - who once had to pay a $54,000 bill that the entire Dallas Cowboy's football team racked up at a steak house as part of rookie hazing - who earn millions and ultimately spend millions more then they make.

Sports Illustrated did a study two years ago that showed:

In a less public way, other athletes from the nation's three biggest and most profitable leagues—the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball—are suffering from a financial pandemic. Although salaries have risen steadily during the last three decades, reports from a host of sources (athletes, players' associations, agents and financial advisers) indicate that:

• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

If the majority of NFL and NBA players didn't have athletic gifts that enabled them to receive contracts that most people could only dream about, one is hard pressed to imagine vocations that their labor and employment could produce such incredible salaries. The NFL is 69 percent Black. The NBA is 80 percent Black.

Here are the average salaries by both teams and by position in the NFL. Could these players not have saved some money for the future, since it was well known that a lockout was almost certain to occur?

Worse, most of these athletes fail to even make a living in their chosen vocation. They go bankrupt upon retirement, or if they are like Dez Bryant, go bankrupt while being employed as a professional athlete. 

Currently the NFL is on lockout and news that many of the players - 1/3 of NFL players live paycheck to paycheck - are having to go to Payday loan (loaded with high interest rates) stores to survive is a sad commentary on the heroes so many people worship in America:

Last month, we reported that players without strong credit ratings or significant collateral could get through the lockout via loans with interest rates as high as 22 percent.

Yahoo! Sports’ ThePostGame.com reiterates and expands on the concept with a recent item explaining that the interest rates will range from 18 to 24 percent, with rates as high as 36 percent upon default.

“There are a lot of people out there pitching these things,” an unnamed attorney told ThePostGame.com. “It’s almost predatory lending.  It’s people going to guys who they know are already in debt, or don’t have the ability to pay their bills during the year and [lending them money] at such obscene terms, that you say, ‘Hey, no one would ever sign something like this.’  But a lot of players are.”

They are because they need the money to get through the lockout.

“I know at least 16 different teams that have had players go out and have to set these [high risk loans] up,” an unnamed financial advisor told ThePostGame.com.  “Guys on the Dolphins, Saints, 49ers, Panthers, Chargers, Bears, Vikings.”

The financial advisors end up cashing in via the various transactions that the loans will spawn, including fees for setting up the loans, fees for the sales of disability insurance that ensures repayment in the event of injury, and other financial transactions related to and arising from the players’ need for money.

“Sounds like total B.S.,” Cardinals kicker and NFLPA representative Jay Feely told ThePostGame.com. “I think it’s predatory and unjust.  I don’t think they should be charging those interest rates and I would encourage every player [considering high-risk loans] to look elsewhere.  I think if you went to your bank, or outside lending agencies, you’re not going to pay that kind of interest.  That’s absurd.”

The problem is that plenty of players don’t have the collateral or the credit history to justify a conventional loan.  And, as we pointed out last month, the players who have been sufficiently responsible to accumulate collateral and/or strong credit ratings likely have saved enough money to carry them through the lockout.

Credit is a problem for rich Black athlete and normal Black people. What do you think would happen if the NFL check credit scores, like other employers do in the real-world? The E.E.O.C. would probably sue the NFL, as the Obama Administration is threatening to do to employers that check credit scores because Blacks disproportionately have lower ratings.

We call sports -- both college and professional -- the Opiate of America for a reason.

One of the top players in the NFL whined about being a $10 million slave. You have other players whining about downsizing their lives in the lockout. 

Yet you have a lot of players resorting to payday loans stores where they receive loans with massive interest rates to survive. Without sports, what jobs are a lot of these players qualified to do? Comment on sports as an analyst on FOX, CBS or ESPN?

It really is all a joke when you start to think about it.

Moral of the story: Don't spend more than you make. But if you do that, what's the fun of being nigga rich? Right Mr. Bryant?