July 23, 2008
Brandon Jennings Isn’t Curt Flood - - Exactly
Back in May 2004, I wrote that the NCAA was a necessary evil. I said then that it provided an organizing body to put on championships for dozens of non-revenue sports that could not do so on their own and that it put on the single best large-scale athletic event of all, March Madness. Having said that, the tacit part of the phrase, “necessary evil” is that the evil is tolerable because the goodness is so great.
At the moment, a recent high school graduate is about to stir the pot that creates the luscious stew that is college basketball. Brandon Jennings is one of those phenoms who would not go to college even for a day were it not for the NBA labor rule that he cannot enter that league until one year after his high school class graduates. He has no interest in all of the broadening experiences that make up “collegiate life”; he is a basketball player - - and by all accounts, a pretty damned good one.
He was going to “do his time” and spend a year at Arizona. Then there was some kind of an irregularity on his SAT tests that made the overseers of the testing wonder why the scores on two of the tests were so different. Those scores are very important to Jennings because without a certain score – pulled out of thin air by the NCAA mavens –, he could not play basketball while he pretended to be a student at Arizona. Please recall; he is not interested in college; he is a basketball player.
At this point, the story gets murky. Maybe Jennings decided that he just didn’t need any more of the NCAA arbitrariness on things like test scores; maybe someone whispered in his ear that he could skip college and go play pro ball overseas and not put up with all this nonsense; maybe this; maybe that; maybe the Presidents on Mount Rushmore will smile more next year. Whatever. The bottom line is that Brandon Jennings will go and play basketball in Italy next year for a team based in Rome.
Good for him.
The deal is described as a “three-year multi-million dollar deal” with a buyout that would allow him to become NBA draft material next summer. Supposedly, the Italian club will also assure that Jennings’ 13-year old brother is accepted in an English-speaking school and that the brother will get a slot on a club team in Rome for younger players.
Some folks have said that this is a horrible thing for Jennings and for basketball. Interestingly, many of those folks already told us that they don’t like the NBA labor provision that sets up the “one-and-done year” in the first place but those folks don’t seem to recognize the hypocrisy of their opposition to both things at the same time. If Brandon Jennings has “the right to play in the NBA”, then why does he not have “the right to play in Italy” if he so chooses. To quote Alexander Graham Bell:
“When one door closes, another opens but we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has opened for us.”
Brandon Jennings saw that newly opened door. Perhaps a less-than-loveable shoe company representative brought it to his attention; perhaps he found it himself by taking the chicken-bleep that he faced with the NCAA and college basketball and found a way to make chicken salad. Remember, he is only an 18-year-old kid who isn’t interested in education as much as basketball now. So, of course the folks who are in charge of the academic institutions that sponsor basketball teams will have something more profound to say on the matter. Actually, that’s not the case…
Lute Olsen is the “jilted” coach at Arizona. His response is that he will no longer recruit players who will leave for the NBA when they are 19. Sounds good, but somehow I don’t think that will really be the case. Olsen also said that the NCAA needs to institute a rule something like the baseball rule where once a kid enters college he has to stay for a minimum of two or three years. I guess the NCAA could do that if they stopped with the idea of granting “scholarships” to get kids to go to institutions and made it a formal contractual agreement between the “student” and the school. But then, how would they maintain the pretense of the “student-athlete”? More importantly, how would the schools avoid paying the “apprentice basketball players” in anything other than cash money? Aye, there’s the rub…
[Aside: Lute Olsen also needs to look at other aspects of the way baseball and other sports handle their dealings with young players; a 16-year old from the Dominican Republic just got an MLB signing bonus north of $4M. Brandon Jennings might have liked that deal when he was 16… Tennis players and golf phenoms can compete with professionals before they are 19 so long as their skills allow them to be competitive. ]
Let me be clear about this next point. In 99% of the cases in college basketball, the outstanding player who is a “one-and-done player” toils his year in college and postpones making himself wealthy because in that year his efforts are devoted to making his college coach wealthy. That may not be the “way it ought to be” or the “way Dr. Myles Brand would have you believe that it is”. It is merely the way of the world.
When the Knicks drafted the 19-year old kid from Italy in this draft, some fans objected because they thought the Knicks should have taken someone else. I didn’t hear anyone moan and groan because this 19-year old Italian kid was not going to play a year of NCAA basketball. I fact, he had been a pro for the last three years and had already earned lots of money and endorsements along the way. If he doesn’t care about education, why try to cram “knowledge and wisdom” down his throat? Doing that reminds me of the old adage:
“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It doesn’t work and it annoys the pig.”
I do not think that it is good for baseball, basketball, or football to have high school kids go directly into those pro leagues; in the long run, it will damage the games. But the NCAA administration of basketball in particular has become such a one-sided deal in favor of the coaches and the schools - - and ESPN and CBS too of course - - that Brandon Jennings is probably doing everyone a great service here. He is likely to make the folks who run college basketball look at the game and find a way to make it run with just a tad more honesty and integrity. Most importantly, Brandon Jennings is showing clearly that he would rather play basketball and be compensated in dollars or euros than in “the right to go to classes he doesn’t want to go to in the first place.” There is a quid pro quo in play here and Jennings has said that he doesn’t like the “currency” that the NCAA is offering up.
Good for him.
The next move belongs to the NCAA and the people who run college basketball. They have been to college so they should have a really good solution to this problem that they will be announcing shortly. I’ll be waiting to hear what they have to say. So far from Dr Myles Brand and his idealists who ponder the greatness of all those “scholar-athletes”, all we have heard is … crickets …
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…
