https://www.cbssports.com/college-b...nba-draft-but-can-the-ncaa-reverse-the-trend/
The sport's on track to have less talent than ever before but paying players could help solve the problem
by Matt Norlander
College basketball has a defection issue that, with each passing year, is growing more obvious and troublesome.
The sport isn't explicitly approaching a crisis, but if the NCAA doesn't seek a way to keep its underclassmen with fringe NBA talent from leaving college for good, a sport set back by a lack of star power will become all the more humdrum -- and thus less nationally relevant -- than it already struggles with.
Because no more Zions are coming down the pike.
When top-five prospect RJ Hampton announced Tuesday he would be dodging college in favor of playing professionally in New Zealand for a year, it caused predictable hand-wringing about what his decision meant for college basketball. In reality, Hampton's choice was much more an indictment of the G League, which in 2018 introduced six-figure salaries to, in part, entice high schoolers who sought to ignore college in favor of a professional track to the NBA. Hampton bypassing the G League was more damaging, and arguably more embarrassing, for that organization than it was for college hoops.
Really, college basketball's true immediate-and-long-term problem came into view Thursday morning when the list of players who opted to stay in the 2019 NBA Draftpool crystallized. A generous forecast of this year's draft allots 45 of the 60 picks to go to underclassmen from American universities. Yet nearly double that amount are keeping their names in and will never play for a school again.
These aren't all misguided souls. They have the right to make the decisions they feel are best for them for whatever reasons (money atop the list for most, surely) drive them to do so. They're players who have spent a year or two or even three in college and are just done with it. The unforgiving world can get aggressively real once you leave college behind for good, and a big batch of these men are about to discover that exciting but harsh reality. Many are going to look up six months from now and find themselves a universe away from the glamour of high-level D-I ball, caught in the schlep, staying in average hotels and playing in front of less than a thousand people in G League games almost nobody will care about.
Would this be the case if the NCAA enacted Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rulesthat allowed college players to make money off their own NIL? Probably not. If you told a college sophomore with almost no chance of being drafted that he could chase a two-way NBA deal, or return to college and potentially make $20,000 off his NIL because he was the BMOC, don't you think the latter option would entice just a few more players to head back to school? The players should already be afforded the opportunity to get this money anyway. Now that college basketball's collective crop of talent is becoming thinner by the year, maybe the NCAA will finally find a way to allow it to happen.
It might be why the NCAA has formally started the process of, at the very least, discussing the NIL issue and how it could be adopted for college athletes.
It used to be that a college team didn't need to worry about losing its second- or third-best players if those players projected beyond the top 30 or 40 in a given year's mock-draft consensus. That era is now gone. At this point, if a player is for sure considered a top-100 draft prospect (forget a first-round guy or even top 60), coaches should expect to lose said player to the allure of chasing the NBA dream, even if that dream is not immediately within grasp.
You don't need to be drafted in order to make it in the pros. That has long been a selling point of the NFL, and it's looking more viable by the year with the NBA. Every player agent of every prospect not projected to be selected in this year's draft can point to Fred VanVleet, undrafted out of Wichita State in 2016 and playing a pivotal role for the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 NBA Finals, as one example among plenty the NBA now has to offer.
The mass-exodus trend is growing to levels never before conceived. Over the past four draft cycles, this year included, the number of players who have declared early and subsequently kept their names in has risen with a quickness -- and bear in mind that these numbers have steadily grown from the previous decade, which were larger than the numbers of early entrants for the 40 years before that.
This is college basketball's new normal: In 2016, 117 underclassmen declared. In 2017, the number bumped to 137. Last year saw a jolt: 181 college players put their names into the draft. This year was a slight dip back to 175, but the number of players who remained in the pool grew ever larger in 2019, continuing a trend that shows no signs of reversing, not with agents now allowed at the table.
Here are the number of underclassmen who remained in the pool before the draft:
But purely getting drafted is not the goal for the prospects who know they're on the margins. The reasons for the boom are plenty, but the most unmissable are that making money has never been easier right out of the gate, that second-round picks are getting guaranteed deals at levels never before seen, and that two-way contracts have never been this enticing. But the number of roster spots aren't expanding to correlate with the number of players leaving school. Remember: a lot of really good seniors are going to get those roster spots too, be it in the G League or with premier teams overseas.
The sport's on track to have less talent than ever before but paying players could help solve the problem
by Matt Norlander
College basketball has a defection issue that, with each passing year, is growing more obvious and troublesome.
The sport isn't explicitly approaching a crisis, but if the NCAA doesn't seek a way to keep its underclassmen with fringe NBA talent from leaving college for good, a sport set back by a lack of star power will become all the more humdrum -- and thus less nationally relevant -- than it already struggles with.
Because no more Zions are coming down the pike.
When top-five prospect RJ Hampton announced Tuesday he would be dodging college in favor of playing professionally in New Zealand for a year, it caused predictable hand-wringing about what his decision meant for college basketball. In reality, Hampton's choice was much more an indictment of the G League, which in 2018 introduced six-figure salaries to, in part, entice high schoolers who sought to ignore college in favor of a professional track to the NBA. Hampton bypassing the G League was more damaging, and arguably more embarrassing, for that organization than it was for college hoops.
Really, college basketball's true immediate-and-long-term problem came into view Thursday morning when the list of players who opted to stay in the 2019 NBA Draftpool crystallized. A generous forecast of this year's draft allots 45 of the 60 picks to go to underclassmen from American universities. Yet nearly double that amount are keeping their names in and will never play for a school again.
These aren't all misguided souls. They have the right to make the decisions they feel are best for them for whatever reasons (money atop the list for most, surely) drive them to do so. They're players who have spent a year or two or even three in college and are just done with it. The unforgiving world can get aggressively real once you leave college behind for good, and a big batch of these men are about to discover that exciting but harsh reality. Many are going to look up six months from now and find themselves a universe away from the glamour of high-level D-I ball, caught in the schlep, staying in average hotels and playing in front of less than a thousand people in G League games almost nobody will care about.
Would this be the case if the NCAA enacted Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rulesthat allowed college players to make money off their own NIL? Probably not. If you told a college sophomore with almost no chance of being drafted that he could chase a two-way NBA deal, or return to college and potentially make $20,000 off his NIL because he was the BMOC, don't you think the latter option would entice just a few more players to head back to school? The players should already be afforded the opportunity to get this money anyway. Now that college basketball's collective crop of talent is becoming thinner by the year, maybe the NCAA will finally find a way to allow it to happen.
It might be why the NCAA has formally started the process of, at the very least, discussing the NIL issue and how it could be adopted for college athletes.
It used to be that a college team didn't need to worry about losing its second- or third-best players if those players projected beyond the top 30 or 40 in a given year's mock-draft consensus. That era is now gone. At this point, if a player is for sure considered a top-100 draft prospect (forget a first-round guy or even top 60), coaches should expect to lose said player to the allure of chasing the NBA dream, even if that dream is not immediately within grasp.
You don't need to be drafted in order to make it in the pros. That has long been a selling point of the NFL, and it's looking more viable by the year with the NBA. Every player agent of every prospect not projected to be selected in this year's draft can point to Fred VanVleet, undrafted out of Wichita State in 2016 and playing a pivotal role for the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 NBA Finals, as one example among plenty the NBA now has to offer.
The mass-exodus trend is growing to levels never before conceived. Over the past four draft cycles, this year included, the number of players who have declared early and subsequently kept their names in has risen with a quickness -- and bear in mind that these numbers have steadily grown from the previous decade, which were larger than the numbers of early entrants for the 40 years before that.
This is college basketball's new normal: In 2016, 117 underclassmen declared. In 2017, the number bumped to 137. Last year saw a jolt: 181 college players put their names into the draft. This year was a slight dip back to 175, but the number of players who remained in the pool grew ever larger in 2019, continuing a trend that shows no signs of reversing, not with agents now allowed at the table.
Here are the number of underclassmen who remained in the pool before the draft:
- 2016: 59
- 2017: 64
- 2018: 79
- 2019: 86
But purely getting drafted is not the goal for the prospects who know they're on the margins. The reasons for the boom are plenty, but the most unmissable are that making money has never been easier right out of the gate, that second-round picks are getting guaranteed deals at levels never before seen, and that two-way contracts have never been this enticing. But the number of roster spots aren't expanding to correlate with the number of players leaving school. Remember: a lot of really good seniors are going to get those roster spots too, be it in the G League or with premier teams overseas.
