Friday morning I looked for anything substantive happening on the College Basketball page of ESPN and discovered an article that had me grinning ear-to-ear.
You see, it appears that Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delany, speaking at the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics and the IA Athletic Directors Association meetings in Dallas, delivered what appeared to be an impassioned speech about reform that might bring an end to the “One-and-Done” which has been a pox on college basketball for quite some time now.
Delany’s ideas are simple:
He favors a plan like MLB where a kid can go pro right out of High School, but if he goes to college, then he stays for three (3) years.
He flatly is against any salary for college kids saying “… it would work better if more kids had a chance to go directly into the professional ranks. … But don’t come here and say, ‘We want to be paid $25,000 or $50,000.’ Go to the D-League and get it …”
He believes that the NBA/NFL ought to set up more complete Developmental Leagues for these kids instead of having the NBA/NFL using colleges as D-Leagues and when the kid leaves, the college gets no recompense for the resources expended in training that kid for a year.
He rhetorically asks: “Why is it our job to be minor leagues for professional sports?”
The most interesting aspect about this speech was that he went further and noted that any restructuring plan in college sports must be in place by spring to create better balance educationally, including increasing the value of athletic scholarships. He said the major conferences need the “legislative autonomy” to push through some major changes.
I think it is a breath of fresh air and could be the beginning of outreach to the new NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver.
I could not be happier. College basketball already has a great example of how a kid can graduate in three (3) years in Jay Williams of Duke. The point is that college athletes are supposed to be bartering their talents in exchange for an education they might otherwise not have been availed to. At that conference, Purdue asserted that the cost of a full scholarship is $250K. That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially when so many players have gone undrafted in the past few years. Having that education to fall back on is surely favorable.
Let’s just hope this is not just words at a conference, but that it will instigate some serious action by this spring as Mr. Delany indicated.
