Since the Pac-12 couldn’t contribute much to the college basketball season other than investigations, allegations, suspicions and eliminations, it was nice that it offered something potentially worthwhile off the court: The conference’s task force’s 50 pages of recommendations for advancing and enhancing — read: cleaning up — the college game.
There are some good ideas in that mix if they can be made real, real effective in their implementation, but there are misjudgments and complications, too.
The more comprehensive proposals include strengthening enforcement of NCAA rules, regulating recruitment, identifying and disclosing contracts between shoe-and-apparel companies and coaches/schools, educational programs for future college athletes and getting rid of the current one-and-done deal that has fogged the college landscape since its inception 12 years ago.
That last one absolutely needs to be addressed, but not the way it was proposed in the report.
The NBA rule that draft-eligible players either must be one year removed from high school or 19 years old may have been well intentioned, but so was the building of the Maginot Line.
It may have delayed temporarily the arrival of an army of kids to the NBA that, as the colleges see it, should have been busying themselves for civics and geography and driver’s-ed classes and senior proms. But what it actualized was a kind of end-around, a route through Belgium or Kentucky or UCLA or Kansas to the intended destination — the pros. It transformed modern college basketball into a holding place where players could while away their time and for one season be used to help certain coaches and programs win, only for the cost of whatever had to be paid to those players to land them.
That system was seen to make the term student-athlete even more of a mockery, considering some of those so-called students never went to class, not once touching a single Pee Chee folder, instead spending their powers of concentration, most of their time and energy, in gyms and weight rooms and local college hangouts.
Everybody knew it.
The apologist might say that one year of such hypocrisy is better than covering up and cloaking three or four years of it.
And the apologist would be right.
Under the new proposal, the NBA would have to change its rule and follow the pattern in some measure to the model used by Major League Baseball, allowing a kid out of high school to be drafted but requiring him to remain in college for three years if he selects that route.
That alteration causes a thinking person to argue with himself or herself over its reasonableness and justness.
Is some college hypocrisy worse than taking away or delaying an individual’s right to work?
Such a provision as proposed serves college basketball from an institutional standpoint because it makes a prisoner of an athlete who may not yet be considered ready for the NBA the offseason after he comes out of high school, but who emerges quickly over the next year or two — say a Donovan Mitchell, who made himself available after his sophomore year of college. Under the proposal, he would be stuck to finish out his three-year term, even after he’s judged to be desirable enough to draft.
His only alternative would be a developmental or international league, which might or might not be attractive to him. College coaches and programs thereby get their athlete and can make their money off that athlete, whether or not he actually wants to be a student for that extended period.
Yeah, life is full of tough choices.
But shouldn’t an individual in America be permitted to make his services available to an employer who is willing to pay that individual good money because the employer — and the potential employee — think the investment, the endeavor, is worthwhile?
Granted, there are some age restrictions on hiring certain people for certain professions under certain conditions at certain times, but aren’t those professions and restrictions typically attached to general safety concerns?
Nobody’s going to get hurt or put in peril by the drafting of a 20-year-old who wants out of college because, say, the Milwaukee Bucks are eager to draft him as a power forward. Nobody or nothing other than the Bucks’ salary cap if the kid turns out to be a bust.
That’s the conundrum here.
Freedom for the player versus stability for colleges that pay him — at least legally — nothing more than a scholarship and the cost of attendance, while the individual himself cannot even get financial benefits for his own likeness.
Some executives on the NBA side might like restricting access to young prospects for a longer period so they have more time to study them and limit their own risk. But that crapshoot element is a good thing, at least competitively speaking, making the scouting-and-drafting process more of a wildcard, adding more mystery, more intrigue, more opportunity.
The 50-page report, proposals that were approved by Pac-12 presidents and forwarded to the national level, offered that the changes would “preserve the essential attributes of the collegiate model” but also “provide a measure of flexibility that could safeguard against cheating and reduce perceptions of unfairness.”
Maybe some of them would, some wouldn’t. Cheaters likely always are going to cheat.
But wedged between the dreaded three words — one and done — and the favored American way is the right thing to do: Deal with the chaos — and sometimes the abuses — that freedom of choice brings and let the players decide for themselves if/when they should be in college and if/when they should reach for their dream profession.
Gordon Monson hosts “The Big Show” weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.
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