martin wrote:I've made no such argument as you have described above.

yes, you did.

martin wrote:how about let us start on the other side of things. The NBA pays its rookies on average around $1.5M per over 3 years, essentially a $4.5M total investment because 3 years are guaranteed. Is it smart for them to want to wait on drafting athletes for as long as they can?

Essentially, why coach the talent and suss out the good players when the NCAA is doing it for you for free. It makes sense, and I think you know I'm not misreading you here.

But again, says nothing about how this process is improving the product. If an 18 year old is deemed unready for the NBA, they go to college. Great. But if an 18 year old is deemed ready for the NBA and enters the draft, history shows that by and large that assessment holds true. So, no benefit for the NBA product (where would it be without its straight from high school players?) and surely no benefit for the player who has to wait a year (and risk injury, etc) to cash in.

I’ve taken the time to repost the argument of yours which I was referring to, why don’t you extend me the courtesy of doing the same?

So again you think players would benefit playing with a bunch of scrubs in the middle of Idaho? What about the ones who never make it? Because the way you open it there will only be so many spots in the NBA draft so what happens to the rest of these guys? Imagine some poor kid who forgoes college for a "developmental league" is unable to make to the pros so he returns home with not one single college credit to his name, not much income, and almost no serious earning potential. Wow you really do care about the kids!

What is the difference between playing in a minor league with "Scrubs in Idaho" and playing on a college team against "scrubs in Idaho"? The problem is you are injecting absurdum into my argument in order to make your point.

If the NBA had a minor league, you would have to imagine that the players playing would be players that already display the type of talent that may develop into major league quality, just like every other pro sport does in their minor league. What is so hard to grasp about this? Minor leagues have better competition not worse!

***

Now let's touch upon the other point you made about income, earning potential, and my "love for the kids": Going to college, playing ball and dropping out does not make for increased "earning potential". Going to school and taking dum-dum courses in order to stay eligible and graduating with a degree in basketball history does not make for good earning potential. Who are you kidding?

Since you are questioning my love for the kids Bitty, then I guess you would support the tightening of academic standards for college athletics, right? So no moving heaven and earth to get kids into schools they never would even know about otherwise? No giving them retard courses for the sole purpose of maintaining eligibility and tutoring them to the point where they aren't even doing the work?

Well then, if yo do support the tightening the standards in concert with your love for the children, say goodbye to college basketball and college football.

I think you are quite naive about college sports if you think academics and love for the kids really has any role in it.

oohah

RemBee76 wrote:

martin wrote:So, we should force the NBA to create a minor league system? Let's go broader, every business in America should have a minor league system.

It’s called internships and apprenticeships.

Now, something tells me that if a business had the potential to make millions off of those interns, they'd be paid. Because that’s how it works everywhere else in America, save the NCA of A.

EXACTLY, Rem.

and we can also look at entry level positions where a business sees potential in someone who could grow. at least, they're getting paid. how about they offer the players the option of getting paid the money they would spend for them in a year + the rights to any merchandise with their name (and no the school cannot sell their jersey without the name).

if you wanted to earn a phd in psychology and instead of paying you i offered you a degree in basketball skill development how would you feel?

this speaks to a larger point that has not been well articulated thus far...

how we define EDUCATION...

post-secondary or college education had originally been for those of privilege allowing for the pursuit of liberal arts degrees, which for those who then became "successes" would go on to earn high level professional degrees in law, medicine, other sciences, etc. which are generally associated with earning high income...

both of which also involve intense scrutinized education regarding nothing other than focus on the profession itself.

not terribly long ago, the introduction of business as a degree was introduced, but it is the graduate level of business that also requires years of professional experience to be even granted entry into an MBA program.

other masters and doctorates in fields like psychology, social work require internships as part of their programs.

so this leads to the lingering question, that is haunting many young people, and even graduates of the past 10 years or so, who paid ridiculously high (and ever increasing) fees to attend universities for educations that actually haven't necessarily correlated to the kind of expectations they had of themselves with these degrees. this is rather anecdotal, but i can't begin to tell you the number of people i meet on a constant basis in this country who fit this description. whether they are recent graduates struggling to find work that they can earn enough to pay their loans, or folks 5-10 years out of school approaching or in their 30s who are not at all where they expected they would be...

the reality is our education system has been failing young people for decades since we moved away from a manufacturing based economy to service, but perhaps more importantly, yet related, how the economy has actually been poor for most people since the 1970s. Wages for men has been stagnant with inflation since then, yet people continued to delude themselves and live off of increasing debt and credit...which folks in derivatives, etc. made a killing of off...increasing the disparity between the wealthiest and the least well off.

in short, I would contend that THE VALUE OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION HAS BEEN VASTLY OVERVALUED ESPECIALLY WHEN YOUR SKILL AND INTEREST DOES NOT NECESSARILY LIE IN WHAT IS TAUGHT AT THE UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL.

these are potential pro-basketball players whose window to play and earn as an adult is short. 18-35.

We also have conditioned ourselves into thinking we HAVE to go to college immediately after high school which has all kinds of negative consequences for current students interested in learning, those more focused on partying their way through school, and in the end all of us. For a student interested in learning, no matter the age, the level of education they receive will surely be lowered by having students in a school that are not as focused on academics. For those who party they may find themselves having wasted their time, and maybe their own money, which you probably don't think as much about at 18 years old (I didn't) when you are taking loans you won't even think about for years. For the rest of us, this can mean various things, but one is that we are not maximizing the efficiency of output that colleges could create, yet bizarrely the costs keep rising.

For potential pro basketball players, there is no specific need to go to college immediately, nor any kind of real evidence that indicates that 1 or 2 years of college has any kind of effect on their play, yet they are also supposed to be full time students, while traveling often, and doing far more than the average student, yet held to the same standards as regular students who do nothing other than have a radio show for an extra-curricular activity.

if they were really to get the same education, then they could just play for the school, and then go to the school at any point in the future when they are not also focused on learning how to become a professional basketball player.

i wouldn't count on this any time soon though.

oohah

oohah wrote:Hey Bitty and Martin. I'm watching Lebron and Garnett right now. Boy they really should have gone to college! Imagine, they could have been good basketball players!

oohah

Have you heard Garnett talk lol

djsunyc wrote:i think sports should be banned and everyone become mormon. that way, i can have 3-4 wives.

SupremeCommander is letting us all down, dude doesn't even have 1 wife yet.

oohah wrote:Ike, that is an interesting post. If you read above I illustrated how college education has replaced the apprenticeship system that worked well for a long time at both the blue collar and white collar levels. Previously employers paid to develop you. Now you pay for a college education in the hope that an employer will give you a job and it will all work out. Often it does not. All the risk is on you.

oohah

Will this work in today's society???

If we lived in a country where no one could go to college then I could understand apprenticeships working on a substantial basis. But in today's society where an education is more accessible to the masses then why would I pay to develop an unskilled worker when I can pay for a skilled worker that can bring my business to another level and I can focus my time on building the business. This in turn will help me build my business faster which in turn will help me provide more jobs(in theory of course).

The reason why the value of an education has decreased is simply because of the accessibility of colleges to everyone. With that comes increased competition. You now have to be able to stand out in terms of skills and or effort if you want to separate yourselves. You now have to work harder and invest more in yourself in order to achieve. If you aren't willing to do that then no your education is worth squat. The question is how can we prevent this quick uptick in college costs that we have experienced recently. I think paying the players would not be one of the answers

Bippity10 wrote:So that US Senator was an idiot when he said it.

No doubt, he probably is. Although it is worth noting that unlike yourself the congressman who made that statement was referring specifically to the age limit issue, not the NCAA in general. And really, I was only pointing to something that was at one time legal in this country but patently exploitative to address martin’s point (its legal, so it’s OK) while in no way making a direct comparison.

I appreciate your efforts in defending the NCAA system and the clarification on how much schools invest in their athletes. But 40, 50, or $60,000 is still awfully paltry next to the millions at stake in the age limit issue, whether we are talking about the millions in merchandising, the millions extra a school can make in ticket sales and tv contracts, or the roughly $3 million starting salary these players would be making in the first year of the finite period they have to make money using their god-given basketball abilities. And let’s just be real a moment, and face the reality that the education most top athletes avail themselves of in a fancy pants schools like OSU or KU really isn’t better in quality than a community college. So the value of that investment itself can be questioned. You can study hard at Communications 101, but it’s still Communications 101. They aren’t at the level where they will be studying under the country’s top neuroscientist or, say, studying architectural history at the elbow of Vincent Scully. Maybe we can agree that indentured servitude is a better parallel than slavery. I can get behind that.

More to the point, a full 24 hours later no one has attempted to address a pretty simple challenge: offer an argument that the age limit improves the NBA product, and that therefore increasing it yet another year will pay dividends. I’m all ears; I’ll even get you started:

If I were to make this argument I would compare the first year NBA performances of players out of high school with those of players coming in with 1-4 years of experience in the NCAA. I would also look at the percentage of high school players still in the league vs. NCAA players, while also comparing their overall career thus far. It would also be helpful to provide some indication of why we should think that 3-4 high school kids entering the league with no NBA experience has a proportionally higher impact on the overall level of play in the league than the 60 college kids entering (or trying to enter) the league with no NBA experience.

Problem is, Buzz did much of that for you already in yesterday’s times and came up with the opposite conclusion. I suspect the problem may be that if you started to try to make your argument you found that you didn’t have one. History has shown that draft scouts' conclusions on talented high schoolers have been a heck of a lot more accurate than those of College players.

The money issues, in my mind, only come up because in order to justify the clearly unfair practice, Stern and the players union and whomever else will say they are doing this for the good of the kids and the league. But there is no evidence to support either contention. The best that can be argued is “you don’t like it, go to Europe”. But we are assuming this is an option available to each of these kids or that Jennings’ experience might not cool both high school players and European clubs on the idea.

Is this the biggest issue facing the NBA today? No. But I think if the NBA is going to increase the age limit they have a responsibility to justify it with something other than BS, easily disputed arguments, as really, it’s pretty f’ing un-American to get paid practically nothing for providing a very big something. The argument that these top High Schoolers need college to be better NBA players holds water about as well as a flour sifter.

I mean cripes, Jordan Hill was in one of the nation’s top programs for three years and he still looks raw as all get out on the basketball court and sounds like a total idiot off of it. Where is the value in that?

Bippity10 wrote: To me an education is worth more than any pidling salary that they will get and pisse away on beer. It's up to them to see this value and take advantage of it. If they choose not to, that's on them, not the school.

Generally agree, although there may be some educational value in giving these guys access to that salary early on rather than exposing them to all the trappings of the cash and fame (ie. their college life) without teaching any of the responsibilities that go along with it.

And I would, in no way, absolve the school of the responsibility of trying to instill that education considering the well documented value the school is receiving from what they do on the basketball court. But there is another thread going on this subject, so I'll leave this at that.

Rembee,

The money for NBA players is not made off those rookie contracts but the subsequent extensions. I would see the value in your argument if the NBA's CBA was constructed in a way in which rookies received immediate bonuses and make the bulk of their money of their initial contracts but that just isn't the case. So if these guys are truly good enough to compete successfully at the NBA level they will make their money 10 times over for the middle of their careers. That's the money to protect not this rookie contract money and if a player has a little patience and develops to their full potential that means more money not less. I realize that plenty of college ball players get the NBA and are unable to hack it but if we are talking about the truly talented of the bunch who can be impact players developing will only increase their money not lessen it.

Interesting fact did know that since Darryl Dawkins draft in 75 there wasn't another high school drafted until KG. And you know what there was some pretty great basketball played during without the drafting of high school players. Many would argue that the NBA was at the height of it's popularity from the late 70s to mid 90s. We go from that period to recent history the last draft before the NBA instituted the age limit, it consisted of 9 high school players. Monta Ellis, Andrew Bynum, Louis Williams, Adray Blatche, Rickey Sanchez, Martell Webster, Gerald Green, Amir Johnson and C. J. Miles. Monta Ellis and Andrew Bynum have have had success. The rest of these names are perpetual back-ups or barely in the league (if in the league at all).

Like I said David Stern's responsibility in all of this is to protect the NBA product and revenue nothing else. Developing high schoolers is bad for business and bad for the NBA game. Fans are tired of the crap that passes for an NBA game and if fans aren't happy that means poor ticket sells, poor merchandise profits, and for teams in small markets this could be a death sentence to their franchises. Now all bad things in the NBA shouldn't be blamed on the straight of high school crowd but they make for easy targets and they are most easily addressed.

kam77 wrote:Antoine Walker went to Kentucky for two years. LBJ skipped College. At some point, responsibility falls to the person.

Really well said, Kam. So you no longer stand by your position that the second year of college should be a requirement?