Time for NCAA to end one and done...

And two and I'm through...

Time for College Sports to grow up

     The time has arrived. All bad things must come to an end. I fully recognize that everyone has a Constitutional right to make a living. I don't think the NCAA has the right to say to a freshman you can't sign with the NBA. What the NCAA can do is put some type of sanction on schools that recruit one and done kids. Everyone knows discussions of this nature are about Kentucky. But a lot of schools have freshman leaving school every single year. 


     I recognize there are times when a college player may have to leave college because of a higher need to support his family. Here's what the NCAA  should do - when a freshman plays one year, has not completed his classroom work, the school that signs those players lose two scholarships the next season. If the school has freshmen that leave in successive seasons they lose four scholarships. If a college has a player that leaves after year two the school will lose a scholarship for each departure. 


     It is a pretty simple problem to correct. The NCAA and its member institutions are either in the business of education and playing sports, or they are in the business of playing sports and then educating.  Apparently, the NCAA just can't bring itself to acknowledge that they should have more in common with Socrates than Josh Selby and John Wall. The real villians are University Presidents who allow this to happen. 


     These men aren't really educators as much as they are accountants. They are not in the business of cum laude when an athlete graduates than they are in thank laude when a five star prospect signs his letter of intent. It must be hard in to balance the building of a Mecca to sports as well as highly regarded educational institution. I suspect that most of us would rather a dozen All-Americans than Rhodes Scholars. There is plenty of blame to go around if any of this is troubling to you. I bet most of this caused no lost sleep or bouts of conscious. We'd rather have a running back who could run over  State U. than a running back who might run State University one day. 


     Schools like Kentucky are not running sports programs. They are merely buying players under the cover of education. All of us should be pretty ashamed of our support for such a system. So what would be wrong with awarding a program for graduating players. Let's say that a college basketball team graduates one hundred percent of their players. Give them an extra grant in aid next season. Give them extra on campus visits, or have a special recruiting period for those schools. No dead period if you  graduate all your players. Let's assume a school graduates all their players for a four year period. Give them even more scholarships or some type of reward. 


     There are ways to put the education back into college sports if anyone really cares. My gut feeling is that people want to talk about education but really are interested only in the revenue generated. No doubt that revenue might help the Universities overall education status. It still stinks because schools are using non-scholars. It isn't unlike Plantation owners used slaves to make their own lives better.