One & Done & It’s Still Fun

College Hoops: becoming deflated?

This week: time for another season of men’s college basketball. Sure, there have been some games played here an there before now, and yes the season doesn’t really begin until next year when conference play gets going, but the former greatest game in America begins making its primetime TV debut this week, with matchups between Michigan State and Kansas and Memphis v. Gonzaga airing tonight and other great match ups (UNC v. OSU) waiting later in the week, and plenty more great basketball before the close of 2009.

And yet, we can hear a moral minority out there say: so what? College basketball is no longer what it was.

Last week ended badly for this writer as high schooler Harrison Barnes announced he would play for the University of North Carolina next year (it ended great for Chapel Hill’ers). In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s the next Kobe or at least basketball’s latest Messiah. Barnes takes the place of John Wall, last spring’s divine avatar of roundball. He is gracing Kentucky University’s roster this season, taking them from NIT also ran to preseason #4 in the nation.

“Who cares?” say the conscientious few. Gone are the days when Magic sparred with Bird, or Jordan faced Ewing years before they would memorably clash in the NBA. That’s a college basketball of the distant past, before the NBA began a policy of systematically colonializing the sport, harvesting basketball’s brightest before ripe, importing them to a homogeneous professional marketplace, where they digest blandly in the estimation of the consuming public, leaving behind a college ecology of oddly shaped, irregularly speckled talent, competing in what amounts to some kind of lackluster minor league. The Barneses and Walls of 2010 (and the Roses, Durants, Odens and Anthony’s of previous seasons) are an emblem of the college game’s decline they say. Is it true?

Before 2006, the best talents in the basketball avoided college all together. Kobe, LeBron, Garnett never enrolled; they graduated from high school and into an NBA franchise. In a few years (or immediately) they were “stars” and multimillionaires. Every year a few (a small few) made this leap from high school to professional, leaving the majority of players to suit up in a place of higher education.

One & Done, or Money in the Bank

Then, in 2006, the NBA unveiled what has come to be known as the “one & done” rule: NBA players must be at least 19 years old and year out of high school. As a result of this rule, basketball prodigies must spend a year — no more; not when NBA millions await — behind a college jersey. NCAA officials cheer: they say the rule causes high schoolers to hit the books in order to achieve the minimum SAT score to enroll in a university, spurring a lifelong love of learning:

[NCAA President Miles Brand] thinks the great benefit [of the one & done rule] is “hundreds, maybe even thousands, of young men each year who are now taking their high school studies more seriously rather than thinking, ‘I can blow off high school and go right into the NBA.’ … That’s going to put them in good stead for their lives.” Read more.

And what does the NBA get? Well, I couldn’t find a quote from NBA Commissioner David Stern to illustrate it, but the biz gets a year of free, 24-7 media hype for next years’ crop of rookies, a built in fan base of earnest college alumni for this or that NBA franchise, and more tickets, more merchandise, more revenue…

Few buy the NCAA’s story. Kids are probably marginally better of having spent a semester taking crip courses, and another flunking out before winging for the pros, but only marginally. A lot of us (literally) buy the NBA’s story (otherwise the League would be even more boring). But here’s what one coach thinks the NCAA actually gets (from ESPN Magazine, Nov. 16, 2009):

Paul Hewitt hates the one-and-done rule. For years, the Georgia Tech coach has argued that high school players should be able to go right to the NBA. But once a player hits the quad, Hewitt thinks he should have to stay two years, to give the program some stability. Still the man is a realist. “Unless I can convince [UNC coach] Roy Williams to stop recruiting,” he says. “I’ve got to keep going after the best players out there.”

He’s not the only one. As Michael Wilbon argues here, the one & done rule isn’t college ball’s only problem, but it’s a big one that would be solved, to the betterment of the game and its would be “student-athletes,” by adopting a rule similar to the one described by Coach Hewitt. Football has certainly figured this out, with its rule requiring a 3-year stint in college propelling the undergraduate game as well as the pro into the forefront of American sport.

So what to do about this season of college hoops? Should we care? Or give into that small, but nagging coterie of naysayers?

I offer my own vote of confidence, for what its worth, if for only one reason: the games season ending tournament, sport’s penultimate event (second only to the world cup), a.k.a. “march madness.” It is still intact, still thrilling, and still largely immune from the the one & done phenomena.

Still sports' 2nd Greatest Spectacle

Last years’ championship team, UNC, featured a stellar roster of juniors and seniors rocking the Heels’ predictable run & gun style to a level of perfection they failed to achieve in two previous seasons of good-but-not-greatness. The winning Kansas team of 2008 was similarly comprised of upperclassmen, defeating one & done’er Derrick Rose & Memphis with a buzzer beater from junior Mario Chalmers’ hands. Florida’s 2007 title team featured a band of junior brothers, back to repeat of their 2006 Championship (instead of cashing in for the pros). You have to go back to an anomalous Syracuse in 2003 for the only instance of a team riding a ephemeral frosh to the right to the ultimate ladder & pair of scissors. Meanwhile, the number of one & done’s drafted in the NBA has increased every year.

So, grin & bear it this season. Ignore the hype, and root for the likes of Cal, Purdue, WVU, Texas, Missou, MSU, and UConn (okay, not UConn) come tourney time. They (have teh most experienced starting line-ups). Savor the unforeseen ways in which Kentucky and its mercenary band of erstwhile coeds will stumble (they’ve got the most highly touted freshman class in the land). If history is a guide, one & done or none, it will be the team with experienced savy players — bumps, bruises, warts & all — playing fundamentals of the game at a very high level, that will cut down the nets in one of sports’ greatest spectacles, the NCAA men’s basketball championship, in what remains one of sports’ best games, college hoops.

Let the madness begin!