Who Are They?
Who are these men? So few of their names ring a bell. Their faces don’t shed any sense of familiarity.
Do the players who dominated the collegiate game yesteryear still exist? Have they found a new hobby? Where can I find them?
The answers to the last three questions, respectively: Yes, no and the NBA.
It’s no secret that the forbidden fruit has been tasted. Some take a small bite, forgoing their senior seasons. Others, like Lenny Cooke – who? I know. Check an NBDL roster – swallow the apple whole, core and all, by skipping higher learning altogether.
However, the fruit is only forbidden in failure. Nobody second guesses Dwyane Wade or LeBron. In the case of Wade, who left Marquette after his junior year, he gets more praise than criticism from commentators for staying in college as long as he did.
And embodied within that praise is the state of the college basketball fan – the one fan who will never discover how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, because it always declares early entry into the Candy Draft after the first, second or third swipes of the tongue. For this deprived and frustrated group, let’s imagine for a second a college basketball world with no early entries:
LeBron would be a sophomore at Louisville, Carmelo a junior at Syracuse and Dwyane Wade a rookie in the NBA with an NCAA championship ring weighting down his dunking hand.
Dicky V’s diaper dandies would no longer overlap with the All-American team.
Connecticut would still be a basketball school.
In short: Life would be grand. Now only if we could make these college athletes understand.
When Carmelo Anthony returned to Syracuse after winning the NCAA title, Orangemen fans greeted him with the chant of “One more year!” Anthony responded, “I thought you were supposed to stay in college for four years.”
And he was right. You are supposed to stay in college for four years – if your purpose for attending college is getting an education, that is. For many players, this is not the case. Nor should it be.
Ask a single mother whether she wants to wait three more years for her son to get an NBA salary and put food on her three other kids’ plates. Ask a father if he’d rather see his son play one more year of Russian Roulette with a bad knee or take guaranteed millions. Ask an All-American sophomore if he’d rather take Biology 10 next year or live comfortably in his first-ever house – not apartment or projects, but a house.
For them, the answers are easy, like those on the final exam of Jim Harrick Jr’s Coaching Principals and Strategies of Basketball class. You take the money; you get what’s rightfully yours. It’s the American way, and you don’t need an A in Economics 101 to figure it out.
Yes, the game of college basketball is deteriorating. But only at the expense of fans. For the scholarshiped men on the court, college basketball still serves one of two purposes: A road to professional basketball or a free ticket to a degree. For those who set their sights on the Association, it’s only logical to take the shortest road. After all, once their playing days are over, they can always come back and get their degree.
But what good does that do for the fans? They wouldn’t have any eligibility left.
