Fumbling Away Life's Savings

In a different life than this one, we covered the financial services industry; it was slightly more interesting than it sounds, but not much. We once wrote a story about former Dolphins fullback Rob Konrad and how he was starting a financial advisory business for athletes, who often are handed large sums of money and have no idea what to do with it. Konrad talked about how a couple of his teammates thought of a Bentley as an "investment."

Therefore, we weren't surprised when word broke yesterday of hedge fund fraud that might have costs several NFL players upwards of $20 million. What's particularly galling about this is that the advisor who lost them all their cash was approved by NFL Players Association's Financial Advisors Program, which is supposed to look out for players in cases like this. (We talked about them in our original Konrad story too.)

The NFLPAFAP — fun with acronyms! — clearly failed the players here and, when you consider how few paychecks the average NFL player receives in his career, it's a costlier screwup than most might think. Hell, the players would have been better off with Bentleys.

NFL Rushed By Hedge Fun Fraud [Dealbreaker] On The Financial Gridiron [Registered Rep.]

(NOTE: To clarify, Rob Konrad has nothing to do with this ripoff at all. He's actually a respected financial manager. Wanted to make that clear, since we, for whatever reason, decided to include in this post a picture of him with a fish.)