I wasn’t expecting a second dedicated post on the topic of the Rice commission’s report, but this is such a galactically stupid threat, I can’t help but share.
Freshman ineligibility? Seriously? Exactly who is that supposed to benefit? Oh, right. It’s just a misguided attempt on the NCAA’s part to create leverage with the NBA. Tough shit for the players, though.
These people really don’t deserve to run college sports.
Get The Picture 
I absolutely think someone should end the one-&-done rule. Let there be a zero-&-done rule, in basketball and all other college sports. Let college-age athletes who are good enuf sign pro contracts right out of high school, in any sport, the way baseball players do.
LikeLike
I agree with you … the problem is the leagues and their unions have no desire to change their CBAs
LikeLike
So you’re okay with Rice’s strategy here? Change CBA ends by freshman ineligibility means?
LikeLike
No, I didn’t say that and didn’t mean to imply that. I think that’s a terrible strategy.
My only point was that there’s no way the professional leagues are going to reopen their CBAs to address this. All of them have labor peace at this point, and the owners aren’t foolish enough to die on this hill for the institution of college sports.
LikeLike
100% correct.
LikeLike
It has nothing to do with the league’s desire…Silver wants to address this now versus waiting until CBA negotiations open. However, the NBA Player’s Association has always had a strange fascination with no restrictions to entry for younger players. All it has done is taken roster spots away from better players because teams have to use a spot for player development instead of a better player that could play a bench role on the team. It also has helped the draft and stash of international players.
One and Done, per se, isn’t the problem for college hoops…it’s that there is no rule like football or baseball where players would have to stay for three years. The quality of the product is awful compared to what it was 20-25 years ago when players typically played through their junior seasons.
LikeLike
The NBA has a negotiated policy with their union. That likely won’t change. However, if colleges really are about the ‘student’ part, then simply penalize the schools that have kids leave early. Make the scholarships for 4 or 5 years and if a kid leaves, you can’t replace it till the time frame is up, even if the kid leaves early. I am sure there are some tweaks that might need to be made, but something like this would dampen the one and done issue.
LikeLike
How does a college force a kid to not go pro?
I guess you are saying that there ought to be an incentive for a college basketball team to not accept an 18 year old LeBron James because, heavens, he may go pro after a year and we would have a hole in our roster for 3 years because we recruited players who were too good.
LikeLike
You seem to be belittling the suggestion without actually saying why it wouldn’t accomplish the stated goal.
LikeLike
If the goal is for Kentucky to have a team with 5 one or two and done players and 8 walk-ons, then it will accomplish that goal. If the goal is to keep kids such as LeBron, who was an excellent high school student at a good college prep school, from entering college to play basketball for some period, then it would accomplish that goal.
I do not know why those should be goals of the NCAA.
If the goal is to make the NFL and NBA change their rules as to how many years after high school a kid has to wait before entering the leagues, I do not see how reducing scholarship opportunities (which the empty scholarship spots creates) for teenagers incentivizes he leagues change its rules.
LikeLike
Every year, literal thousands of kids attend a semester or two of college and then drop out for any number of reasons. Many, many students show up to universities and don’t do the work and get kicked out or placed on academic probation. It has happened as long as there have been colleges, and yet, the institution of college education and higher learning has not been damaged. Someone is really going to have to explain to me why it’s the worst thing in the world for a kid to get a semester of education (in order to stay eligible for the spring semester) and then play his only season of college ball and then leave for millions of dollars. Lord knows his non-athletic counterparts are doing more or less the same thing, but they’re leaving for the community college back in their home town, not a job that will bestow generational money on their families.
Frankly, the percentage of “one-and-done” players is incredibly small. Focusing on that issue as the problem in college basketball tells me that the people in charge don’t even know what’s wrong with their sport.
LikeLike
Have you seen the members of Rice’s commission? Almost zero real world experience with the issues being addressed.
LikeLike
Just looked it up. I’m sure the guy from some hedge fund capital group has a lot of insight into college sports. Eye roll.
LikeLike
+1
LikeLike
Make them actually get accepted into school
LikeLiked by 1 person
… we gonna start doing that in football, too? Careful.
LikeLike
This is actually a lot easier to do with basketball that it is with football. The kids that are smart enough actually to go to college can. Those that are not can go play professionally in Europe, Asia, or Australia like the guys that don’t make it in the NBA. They could create an 18-21 age group for AAU basketball to function as a de-facto development league for those averse to going overseas. Or, and this is crazy-talk here, the NBA could expand G-League so they can oversee the development of their future players.
LikeLike
And what exactly will that change on the college level?
LikeLike
My comment was an extension of ApalachDawg’s suggestion that the players have to actually be accepted to the schools. I took that as having to be accepted through the normal admissions process. This would shut-out ~80% of current players in the Power conferences in my estimation.
We all know that the “problem” they are trying to fix with one-and-dones is that they are only profiting off of the kids for one year and they find that to be unacceptable. If this was about the “student” component of the “student-athlete”, they would make sure that the “student” wasn’t some functionally illiterate halfwit that “ain’t come to play school”.
LikeLike
There are far more colleges that right athletes be admitted through regular admission process than there are colleges that do not. Those colleges that fit your proposal are in Division II and Division III. Not much activity on the D-III boards. Also, the Ivies are dedicated to athletics as you desire. Not much Brown versus Columbia preseason talk around here.
There has always been, since the 19th century, at least, colleges trying to get talented players on the field or court even if they were not regular students. Georgia Tech was doing that since 1892. General Leonard Wood scored the first Tech TD in the first Georgia v. Georgia Tech game. He never was a Tech student. He happened to have been stationed at Fort McPherson and Tech suited him up.
I also take issues with the “80% would never had been admitted” number.
What is your source on that?
LikeLike
we both know he doesnt have a source for his made up number.
LikeLike
Woosh!!!! Please tell me how DIII schools are Power Conference schools.
When someone says “in my estimation”, that means they made a scientific wild-ass guess. Schools in the Power Conferences generally require an SAT score that correlates to the top 20% in intelligence (see note below). If you only include the top 20%, you have a defacto exclusion of 80%.
Though, after looking up an SAT percentile chart, I’d change that estimation to ~70% exclusion. Power Conference schools tend to be some of our most selective Universities.
LikeLike
Agree Apalach. Enforce admissions equally for all applicants, athletes included. Should be a blind process, imo.
LikeLike
These people really don’t deserve to run college sports
Or colleges in general. The institution of higher learning is broken, imv. Admins at Fresno fight for free speech for a leftist professor and their counterparts fight against free speech at Berkeley for right wingers. Problem is, no one holds the admins responsible. For anything. The actions or inaction of leadership at Michigan State, Baylor and Penn State are recent examples if athletics running the show on campus. Administrations think they are rock stars when really they’re more carnival barker than anything. “Step right up and watch me take your money!
LikeLike
Elites protecting elites just as it always has been and always will be. Doesn’t mean we can’t rake them over the coals for doing so.
LikeLike
She also thought that torturing people was a good strategy. She isnt a good person.
LikeLike
Yeah, that’s how it happened.
LikeLike
How out of touch with how the sports world works is that group thinks that an NBA team will wait 4 years to draft LeBron James if James had to play on a college freshman team for a year.
LikeLike
I’m amused by the sentiment expressed by the commission on this, which I’d sum up as “the free market is wrong and must change to accommodate our nebulous and outdated ideas about college.” I think that’s a broader issue in higher education these days, and part of the reason it’s so broken.
LikeLike
In our country, the professional sports model is just dumb. We are acting like socialists at worst and communists at best.
Since when did our free and open market economy stop short when it comes to sports?
Why are restricting people at whatever an age of making a living?
Let them go pro in junior high or in 5th grade.
These pro leagues / teams should set up “farm systems / IMG type academies” as a feeder system to their teams(whether it is baseball, football, soccer, basketball, hockey, etc).
This whole discussion just seems fundamentally unAmericano.
As long as CBS and ESPN have billion dollar contracts with NCAA and college conferences- we will continue to get grandstanding and wringing of hands but nothing will happen or change other than these town crier commissions being convened when the stink (ie – from the fBI investigation) gets to shitty to avoid.
This is why the service academies and the Ivey league got out of all this shady shit.
Let the athletes go pro, make college athletes be college students first, and do away with the NCAA.
Sincerely frustrated in Apalach
LikeLike