Madness, Exposed

John Calipari has a magnificent head of hair, there is no doubting that. It was maybe a little surprising, though, to see Kentucky’s players, during the trophy ceremony after having won the national championship, paw at their coach’s impressive coiffure with such unbridled glee. One would expect a little more gravitas from the men who by all accounts had just upended college basketball as we know it. But, then again, they’re mostly freshmen, and thus easily amused.
There is talk around the proverbial sports water-cooler that Kentucky’s success spells the end of old-school college basketball, that their coronation will summon a shift to the Calipari model of teams stocked with one-and-done NBA-superstars-to-be. Certainly Calipari isn’t the only coach to recruit the most talented high school players, but no coach has been more aggressive in putting together teams full of players who will spend only the required year in college before moving on to pro ball. And if his team’s dominating performance in this tournament is any indication, other schools may very well be forced to adopt similar strategies or be swatted away like so many Kansas layups.
If this happens, and there is every reason to expect that it will, only a handful of schools will be able to adopt the strategy effectively. Places like Duke and North Carolina already give the rock to their talented freshmen, but does anyone think that Lehigh or Ohio will be able to follow Calipari’s model? The long-term effects could be dismal for college basketball parity—the college game’s most endearing quality and the reason March Madness is so darn fun.
All of this, and the fact that the NBA is set to reconsider the requirement that players must attend one year of college before entering the draft, warrants a frank assessment of how the one-year-of-college rule experiment has worked since its implementation in 2006.
The rule, on its surface, seems benevolent enough. The NBA wants to protect teams from drafting untested high schoolers who will flame out and waste money and draft picks. The NCAA wants kids to go to college and receive the benefits of higher education. Fundamentally, though, the rule constrains the options of promising high school basketball players—they are more-or-less forced to go to college (often for only a year), where they will make big bucks for the school, be coddled academically, and not learn much of anything while they wait around to drop-out and cash-in. They likely develop as players: get bigger, stronger, more polished. They sometimes get hurt and lose out on the payday of a lifetime.
There is no doubting that the requirement smacks of paternalism. These kids can’t be trusted to make the right decision and go to school, so we’re forcing them to do what is best for themselves (and, coincidentally, for the bottom line of the NBA and NCAA).
Not all sports are like this. The NHL and MLB let high school graduates enter their respective drafts. One could argue that those two leagues have more extensive minor league systems than the NBA, but the NBA does have the Developmental League. The fact that the D-League is rarely used to develop future NBA stars is not something that necessarily has to remain true.
The other difference between baseball/hockey and basketball is the race of the majority of players. The NBA is sometimes unfairly criticized as racist simply because its teams’ owners are mostly white and its players mostly black. But the truth of the matter remains: professional sports trust groups of young, mostly white players to decide when to forego college and start their careers, and don’t give a group of young, mostly black players the same option.
The case could be made that while the rule is paternalistic, it is justified, even required. The moral argument in favor of the rule would mirror the common ethical concerns with a legal market in human organs. The poorest members of our global society, so the argument goes, would be more-or-less coerced into “donating” (really, selling) their organs to rich people in the developed world by the relatively huge financial benefit the “donor” stands to gain. It is justified, then, to prohibit an open market in organs so as to (at least attempt to) prevent the poor would-be organ donor from having to part with parts of his body.
The parallel argument is that high school players from low-income families will be indirectly coerced into risking their futures on a big NBA payday even when the best thing for them would be to go to college. If the players were actually going to college and getting an education, this might be compelling (although it is not as strong as the organ donor argument, which is itself not universally accepted). What happens in reality, though, is that these kids go to college without ever possessing the intention of finishing. They simply tack a year of unpaid work onto the front of their basketball careers, and risk having those careers short-circuited by an awkward landing or a blown-out knee. They are forced to take on real financial risk, and don’t reap the supposed benefit (and reason why the NCAA justifies not paying athletes): getting an education.
The NBA doesn’t have to let high school players enter the draft. The NCAA certainly has no real incentive to encourage it (they’ll make as much money, if not more, from a March Madness where the Final Four is made up of top seeds). But if both organizations care about the peoples’ lives they are controlling, they will get rid of the rule and let high school graduates enter the draft, if and when they choose. If Coach Calipari can trust them to tousle that magnificent, Mitt-like mane, the NBA can at least trust them to decide whether or not to go to college.