![]() ![]() To be sure, when people in college athletics clamor for the end of one-and-done, what they really want is for it to be replaced by a baseball-like rule that would allow players to enter the draft straight out of high school, but then force them to stay in college two years if they go that route. The rule may not have been fair to those teenagers, but there is no arguing that college hoops benefited greatly from the short time they spent on campus. You know who did, though? Greg Oden, Derrick Rose, John Wall, Anthony Davis, Deandre Ayton, Zion Williamson, Cade Cunningham, and many others who wouldn’t have come to college otherwise. Neither did LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady and Dwight Howard. Kevin Garnett never played college basketball. They forget that before one-and-done, there was none-and-done. People who’ve complained that one-and-done was “hurting college basketball” have likewise been off the mark. Rice made this suggestion despite the fact that a) the NCAA doesn’t have the authority to make the change and b) the rule had nothing to do with the transgressions that led to those arrests. I lost count of how many times I heard someone write or say, “The NCAA needs to get rid of one-and-done.” That includes Condoleezza Rice, who made eliminating it a centerpiece of the reforms her commission recommended in the wake of the FBI investigation that led to the arrests of four assistant coaches in 2017. That’s another thing people have missed: One-and-done is an NBA rule, not an NCAA rule. Normally, college basketball trips over itself trying to imitate whatever the NBA is doing, but this is one instance where the league was painfully behind the times. John Calipari has signed 52 consensus five-star recruits at Kentucky with as many as five more on the way in the 2023 class.īut what happens if the NBA starts drafting high school kids again in 2024? Thinking ahead here: If one-and-done ends, those destinations will also become less palatable at the same time colleges can finally compete financially for talent. But the sport was already increasingly losing guys to the NBA G League’s Ignite program, Overtime Elite, international leagues, and other professional landing spots. Will college basketball “lose” some players that would otherwise have been on campus? Probably. Getting rid of it will bring the NBA back to the future. Even when the one-and-done rule was new, it felt like a relic of the past. ![]() Thanks to the new name, image and likeness rules, players can make extra money off the court, in some cases well into six figures annually. Thanks to the new transfer rules, players who are unhappy in their current situations can suit up for another school the following season. Scuttling it would be a welcome change now that we have entered the freedom of movement era in college basketball. Besides spurring an insufferable debate, the one-and-done rule was grossly unfair to those few elite prospects who had a legitimate chance to turn pro at the age of 18. According to Shams, the new rule could go into effect as soon as 2024. So yeah, I was relieved when our Shams Charania reported on Monday that the NBA and its players’ association are likely to knock the draft minimum age back to 18 as part of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement due to be completed later this year. That’s not nothing, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not much. And you can count on one hand (really, two or three fingers) the number of schools that still make one-year players a centerpiece of their recruiting. ![]() That’s nearly 4,000 players across the sport, meaning around 1,000 freshmen, maybe a dozen of whom are good enough to consider entering the NBA Draft out of high school. There are more than 350 Division I schools in college basketball, and each roster holds about 11 scholarship players. Rarely have so many words been devoted to something that impacts so few. ![]()
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