“[One and done] makes a travesty,” said [the head of the NCAA], “of the whole notion of student as an athlete.” One might call that poetic justice since for nearly a century colleges have been making a travesty of the notion of athlete as student.
Why does anyone give a shit whether great athletes (“most basketball and football players who wind up in the pros had little or no interest in going to college in the first place”) go to college for a year — or, as is horrifyingly proposed lately, two?
[C]ollege basketball doesn’t depend on the existence of the pros, but the pros could not exist without the colleges. Not only does the NBA pay not a dime in player development, it has always benefitted enormously from the fact that its best players were already household names by the time they were drafted. It costs the NBA nothing to wait another year or two to get the players and works much to their advantage if they’re even more famous when they put on an NBA uniform.
And American universities? Why would they want to go from one and done to two and through?
With so many players leaving school so soon to go to the pros, the appeal of the game has eroded. Regular-season college basketball TV ratings and attendance have been slipping now for several years.
A marriage made in heaven:
… Note that one never hears about the NCAA and NBA getting together to make pronouncements on this subject; that would seem too much like collusion. One might call their relationship, as Dana Carvey’s Church Lady used to say, conveeenient. After all, there’s no need for conspiracy when both parties are in agreement.
Allen Barra, The Atlantic.