Interesting to hear St Kilda coach Ross Lyon talk on Tuesday morning of a need for the Saints to overhaul their player development pathway in the wake of the latest scandal to envelop his club.

Zac Dawson, Rhys Stanley, Jack Steven and Paul Cahill have been effectively banished from the club for six weeks after their escapades in New Zealand last week where they broke curfew and over-indulged in alcohol and sleeping tablets.

The now-disgraced quartet will train with Sandringham, undertake community service and get ‘full-time' jobs until they are ready to return to the Saints, which will be sometime shortly before the start of the season.

Dawson, we are starting to hear, might have priors when it comes to this sort of behaviour and that might explain why the Hawks showed him the door at the end of 2008 even though, with the Trent Croad injury, they appeared a bit thin for depth in the key defensive positions.

But the words from Lyon on Tuesday morning would suggest that the Saints might be a bit behind their counterparts when it comes to keeping their players gainfully occupied when not at the football club.

"We'll really overhaul our development program, I think it's the bigger issue in AFL football - young men, first to third-year players that aren't studying full time or working - and it's leading to depression on lists and activities that we don't enjoy, obviously,"  Lyon said.

But at most other clubs, there are programs in place and have been for a considerable period. As footy became fully professional in the late 1990s, there were justifiable concerns that when not at the club, players were becoming adept at Playstation and were on first-name terms with the staff at every Blockbuster outlet within a 10km radius.

The smart clubs addressed this and, throughout the last decade, employed full-time player welfare and development staff to help the players find part-time work or to study. The AFLPA has also shown great leadership in this regard.

Yet Lyon's remarks on Tuesday would suggest that the Saints have missed the boat here. Twitter now provides an interesting peek into the lives of modern-day footballers and while Steven Baker (@StevenBaker10) is just one of 40 or so players on the St Kilda list, his tweets offer an illuminating insight into life at the Saints.

Baker may well work, study or have business interests outside of football, but you wouldn't know it from his tweets, which concentrate exclusively on training or his next meal or social engagement with his teammates.

Lyon was said to be at his wit's end when he found out about the players' indiscretions and who could blame him? He has once again been let down, only days after backing his players openly and praising the culture at the football club. But the buck clearly stops with him when it comes to football operational matters at St Kilda, so he is not entirely blameless when it comes to this latest fiasco.

It has been the summer of hell for the Saints as they seek to bounce back from a second consecutive Grand Final defeat. Last summer was complicated enough and they managed to make it through to the final Saturday in September (and the first Saturday in October) and there is too much talent at their disposal to discount them from playing deep into this season.

For now they sit alone in the second line of betting for the premiership. TAB Sportsbet has them at $7. But for how much longer?