Watching Villanova cut down the nets as confetti fell on the Wildcats for the second time in three years reinforced what I have believed for several.
As infected as college basketball is with pay-for-play recruits, one-and-dones and a seemingly never-ending FBI investigation that continues to get deeper and deeper, the state of college basketball is still OK. It’s just not great or as great as it could be. But I believe I have an idea that would cut all the infectious tissue out and restore the allure of the college game.
It begins with the one-and-done rule: get rid of it. It’s been well documented that the one-and-done system helps the player but is a detriment to both the collegiate and professional game. College rosters at blue blood schools like Duke and Kentucky turn over year after year, while NBA squads draft highly talented players that haven’t been coached up enough to become valuable rotation players out of the gate.
The list is long of one-and-done players who take a few years in the Association to start morphing into key pieces on winning squads. The list is equally long for blue bloods being downed in the NCAA Tournament by teams who lack the top-end talent but have experienced upperclassmen.
Look at four of the last five national champions. Connecticut, Villanova (twice) and North Carolina are schools that stay out of the one-and-done market and focus rather on developing players for several years. While nobody would deny UNC is a blue blood who has had some high-ranked recruits, they have been few and far between and even the highest-rated recruits, i.e. Harrison Barnes, stay for longer than a year.
The only champion in the past five years that didn’t follow that mold was Duke in 2015 with one-and-dones Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow lifting the Blue Devils to a title. But if you think back to that team they were led by a senior in Quinn Cook, and freshman Grayson Allen, who came off the bench to spark Duke, ended up staying in college for four years.
But I don’t think simply forcing players to stay two years instead of one would solve the issue in one fell swoop. The change needs to be multi-faceted.
Let’s begin with those top recruits who are the ones most likely to leave school after just one season. Allow them to enter the NBA Draft out of high school but don’t let them play in the NBA that first year after being drafted. Instead, force them to play at least one season in the NBA G-League, formerly known as the Developmental League.
The NBA has long been trying to drum up interest in its version of the minors. What better way to do it than to send the most high-profile prep players in the nation? Fans would want to know how their team’s lottery pick is doing and would be much more inclined to tune in. But there has to be a line drawn.
In the old system when high school players could declare for the draft, any player could do it. Rather than letting teenagers ruin their future with false hope, the NBA should establish an advisory board that would only permit players who have consensus first-round grades declare for the draft.
In this system NBA teams would be able to ensure their prospects receive the very best coaching and could be schooled in their system from day one. In turn these players would be far more apt to make an early impact than they would essentially being a rental player in college.
This would also help college basketball a ton. The players who don’t declare for the draft out of high school would then be forced to stay in school for at minimum two seasons. But this is where the advisory board would come in again. Allow only college players with consensus draftable grades to declare after two seasons, and if they don’t receive consensus grades, send them back to college. After their third collegiate season, they should be allowed to declare at will just like in football.
Obviously there are a lot of moving parts at play here in this proposal, but the reward would be far greater for both college basketball and the NBA.
