the workaround I had in mind worked!
So here's what we'll have in the next release, I have it pretty much ready, just have to edit a few things in it. Financials and coaches are both fixed, and we have full history now as well. The only bad news is that history is a bit screwy, as we don't have history from 2006, and players pages will NOT update for 2005 and earlier.
ie. Barry Bonds player page will update with 2006 and beyond stats and info if you click on the 2007-2008-2009-whatever San Francisco Giants team pages, but you won't get updated stats from past 2005 if you click on the 2005 Giants. This is because to do all of this, I re-imported another historical league, and had to delete all of the players who were on the older player cards to replace them with our current ones. Unfortunately OOTP does not link the two players (who are the same name) together on these screens.
That was really confusing, but you guys will get a better idea of what I mean tomorrow. Either way though, you still have history now and besides this one glitch it works perfectly.