Time to end one and done in college basketball. Derrick Rose had about as much interest in attending college as my cat does in eating Puppy Chow. Sure, I believe Rose cheated to get into college. So, why even bother? Let him go into the NBA without having to do a year at college. The Rose/Mayo fiascoes don’t help college basketball one bit.
The NCAA doesn’t really care if the players go to college or not. There will always be more guys who want to play in college.
The NBA’s reasoning is that the NCAA is an essentially free feeder system complete with pre-marketing of individual players. It pays off for the NBA to have the players go through this system while costing them nothing, and it pays off even MORE if they go to high profile schools like Memphis and get a lot of coverage in the NCAA tournament.
So for everyone involved (except Memphis fans), the system worked. Everyone got paid.
I agree. It was always a stupid idea, and I think it’s especially funny that the league either decided to institute the rule right after LeBron James turned pro, or that they held off on putting the rule in place until after LeBron was already in the league.
In fact the endless stream of college sport scandals makes me think the NCAA should probably just scrap its entire arcane rule system and just have the colleges pay the athletes a small but fair salary.
I agree. Usually, people who argue against paying college athletes seem to assume that they would have to be paid NBA-type money, but I don’t think that’s the case. If important athletes in relevant programs can get, I don’t know, ten to fifty grand a year depending, on top of a free education, a lot of them might decide to actually go to college.
And even none of them do, it’s still righteous. I don’t know how it is with every different sport, but football players at the big programs spend an ungodly number of hours improving their football skills so as to increase (ultimately) the marketability of their university and the revenue generated directly from the football program. For all intents and purposes they’re employees of the institution. So give 'em a salary.
Right. And maybe not every athlete has to get paid, since only a small portion of them are at major programs and/or are looking to go pro. The rest, presumably, are not at such a high risk for this kind of thing. Maybe you can take a salary OR some other benefit like a full scholarship.
That’s what it comes down to for me. The players on the basketball and football teams are humongous traveling advertisements for their schools, and they make the universities and the NCAA gobs of money. In return, they get an education - and for most of them that’s very valuable, although guys like Rose and Mayo were obviously just buying a ticket to get into the NBA lottery - and can get thrown out of school if somebody offers them a gift or buys them luch and picks up the tab. It’s created a climate where this sort of stuff is mandatory and happens under the table. If it’s made official, hopefully they can get rid of the worst scum.
We all know that bigtime college sports have become a charade, and I sympathize with the idea of paying USC football players or Kentucky basketball players a small stipend.
Problem is, that would never fly. If male stars in popular sports get paid, how long until Title IX advocates insist that the girls’ lacrosse, softball and field hockey teams are entitled to an equal amount of money?
The other problem with paying athletes is that at most schools, the athletics program is a big money hole already. Sure, they’ll talk about how much money the football team brings in to the university, but it’s nowhere near the cost of that new stadium they put in. If the top schools (where sports really are profitable) start paying their athletes, then there’s going to be a lot of pressure for everyone to do so.
and take a pay cut, that’ll never fly.
Yeah, damn those women and their fake sports. Seriously, I’d say you extend the offer only to scholarship athletes or perhaps only to players on the revenue sports teams.
I think the one and done thing is just pushing totally non-qualified players into schools where they masquerade as students taking resources away from people who actually are students. Let them go straight to the pros. Baseball lets guys skip college entirely and notice how college baseball produces far fewer scandals than football and basketball.
I am not in favor of paying athletes. They already get free tuition, books, clothes, travel and they get preferential housing. If that isn’t enough then tough. Paying them would serve only to exacerbate the notion that these people are the most cherished students on campus even though academically they are usually the worst performing students. If you get rid of the requirement to play in college before going pro then you take away the “need” to pay the players. If you don’t want to give it away to State U you can just jump to the pros.
Paying the players wouldn’t have prevented this particular scandal, unless Memphis also scrapped its entrance requirements for athletes.
Baseball has a proper development system with the minor leagues. Football doesn’t have that at all and basketball only has the NBDL, or whatever it’s called.
Why do players like Derrick Rose not go the D-League route? I’m sure the money isn’t much, but it’s better than the nothing you get in college, and I have to think a player develops more playing a full schedule against professional competition than in college. And, he never would have had to worry once about his SAT scores.
The biggest star at the biggest program, let’s say Tim Tebow, for instance, should, imho, not get any of the money that he generates for the University of Florida; nor should any other player in a revenue generating sport (of which I count 3, football, men’s/women’s b-ball) be paid (outside of a small stipend or meal money). Where else are the athletic departments supposed to generate the money required to give scholarships in non revenue sports? Just because someone is on scholarship does not mean that goods or services they receive magically become free. And travel expenses for the non revenue sports need to generated somewhere as well.
Derrick Rose would never have played in the d-League. Whatever team owned his rights would have immediately put him on the NBA squad. the d-league is like minor league baseball-- it’s for pro players that aren’t quite good enough for the big show.
The NBDL has the same eligibility rules as the NBA, so it was not an option. And in any case playing there doesn’t make much sense for a talented 18-year-old: you’re going up against better and more experienced players and being paid a low salary. It’s not chump change, but I think it compares unfavorably to college, where you play for a year, or more, with the hope of being a first-round draft pick and getting guaranteed millions of dollars for at least three years. I agree that a more developed minor league system would be a good idea for the NBA, but moneywise, it would take a long time for that option to compare with trying to get into the NBA immediately, or else going overseas, where there are no eligibility restrictions and you can make more money than you could in the NBDL.
It’s true that paying NCAA players would not have prevented this, so I should not suggest that it might have. But I still think the one-year rule is stupid. Let the athletes do what they want.
Do you mean to say, that the NBDL won’t take 18-year-olds, out of high school? That seems . . . stupid. I feel like baseball has found a better solution here. In baseball, you can be drafted and play professionally out of high school, or you can go to college. But if you go to college, then you aren’t eligible to be drafted for three subsequent years. So if you choose to go to college, you have to be at least semi-serious about getting an education, because you’re committing to three years with no alternative except maybe the independent minor leagues.
Looks like I was wrong and the minimum age is only 18. But for a player who thinks he can be a star, the D-League route still makes no sense. Why play for peanuts for at least one year and then hope for a callup when you can live the college life and shoot for millions?
In the long run the NBA may be shooting for something like this. But the D-League is pretty new and they are still building it up.
I kind of like what Brandon Jennings did last year. He decided against college and played for Lottomatica Roma for a year. It was only one year, he got to see the world, while playing against top quality competition. The 76ers clearly remembered him well enough to draft him 17th overall so he wasn’t forgotten…
Jeremy Tyler is doing them same thing this year so I guess we will see if it works out for him. Like everything else, I suppose it boils down to the team and coaches that surround him en Europe.
I hope more American players opt for this route while on their way to the NBA. Forcing someone into college is never a great idea.
I’d much rather players play in Europe than fake their way into college. There are no rules about a concert pianist having to go to college for a year before they can play with the Chicago Symphony.