One day prior to the NBA draft, Miles Bridges spoke to reporters for about 20 minutes in Midtown Manhattan. The three letters that upended college basketball this season — with Bridges smack dab in the middle of it — never came up. And why would they?
The NBA, teams and media alike, have little reason to care about the FBI’s investigation of college basketball, Christian Dawkins or $470.05 worth of benefits that were given to Bridges, according to documents obtained by Yahoo. Ditto for any of the other benefits those same documents show were given to any other player who soon will be drafted and sign a contract for millions of dollars.
For everyone outside the NCAA, paying athletes when they provide millions of dollars in revenue is the norm.
But college basketball isn’t about to engineer change of its own — at least when it comes to paying players. The NCAA’s Commission on College Basketball, chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, instead asked for more modest reforms to a recruiting process that has turned the notion of amateurism into a running joke. It may be the NBA that upends recruiting, in its own way.
According to ESPN, the league sent teams a memo Friday that, while not mentioning the one-and-done rule by name, said eligibility rules for the draft could change as soon as 2021. In other words, high schoolers may soon be allowed to forgo college and jump straight to the NBA.
“I probably would’ve gone out of high school,” Michael Porter Jr. said. “I think I was ready out of high school to make that jump.”
Porter, whose back injury tripped up his lone season at Missouri, hurting his draft stock in the process, was the most direct of everyone asked the question. But most said they would have at least explored the option, had it been available to them.
Bridges stayed for a second year at Michigan State in lieu of becoming a possible lottery pick in the 2017 draft. He thinks he still would have gone to college if the one-and-done rule hadn’t existed, knowing his talent was raw two years ago. Ask if that sentiment is the norm, though, and he gives an honest assessment.
“Nah, a lot of players would come straight out of high school,” Bridges said. “Definitely, they would come out of high school.”
That refrain is echoed by Wendell Carter, Kevin Knox and Porter, three more former five-star prospects, all of whom went one-and-done and two of whom — Carter and Knox — were named in those documents as having received impermissible benefits.
Programs like Duke and Kentucky that have come to rely on one-and-dones would face a system that has come to favor them being tossed away if that comes to fruition. Some players would still rather go to school — player development, the allure of playing for a big-time program and maybe even an education being factors — but it’s clear college basketball’s talent would diminish.
“I don’t think [Kentucky] would change at all,” Knox said. “A lot of guys just love to get coached by a great coach and then [John] Calipari, Kenny Payne is just one of the best assistants, so, and just the powerhouse of the Kentucky — ESPN all the time, 24,000 every night [at Rupp Arena] — I don’t think it’d change. I think a lot of kids wanna go there just for Cal and the coaching staff.”
The effects on the recruiting world are tougher to pin down. There are domino effects that nobody will see coming until they happen, if the NBA does indeed enact reform.
“It would definitely change the recruiting a lot,” said Carter, whose mother compared the NCAA to slavery and the prison system. “… The format of college basketball would definitely change.”
As to how though, Carter’s guess is as good as yours.
