In any professional sports league's amateur draft is a permanent obstacle to clearing college sports of exploitation. The only thing that unofficial relationship does is bind the labor of players to the colleges who profit.

>I wonder if college coaches who propose that inclusion are
>feeling pressure from the pros-- that the NBA wouldn't
>eliminate one-and-done without some sort of restrictions in
>place in a vain and laughable attempt to "protect" the
>chickenshit NBA GMs who instituted one-and-done in the first
>place because they were shitty at their jobs. Of course, the
>league gets younger and younger, and the GMs are still mostly
>shitty at their jobs, so it hasn't worked and was doomed to
>not work from the start... but their chickenshittiness
>remains.

Shit. I kind of forgot that was pretty much why that round of restrictions were adopted. The funny thing is that, if they were bold, the NBA could fashion a full minor league system like baseball's that could:

a)shake loose the weirdly informal-yet-inviolable relationship they have with the NCAA

b)hedge against the development problems that come freighted with teenage talent

c)profit off ticket sales/merch while players develop

d)ensure that players were maximally productive while on NBA rosters

It's like they were too scared to just accept the risk of drafting 18 year olds *and* too scared for a big, blunt solution to that problem.

>Whether it's scared NBA GMs, scared NCAA execs, or greedy NCAA
>coaches, there's still no real and right reason to eliminate
>the players' option to leave at their discretion.

So, there's always going to be an ebb and a flow in the amount of talent in the NCAA. And those ups-and-downs obviously have something to do with the draft rules. But I've always kind of figured that a lot of the enterprise of big money NCAA sports is actually supported by sentimentality. That people care about Ol' Miss because of the laundry and not because of the aggregate talent in x, y, or z college sports. And that means that NCAA basketball maybe doesn't need to be protected as zealously as it is. Does that make sense? I'm perfectly open to be told I'm wrong here.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad