One-and-done good in form, not function

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Author: Joe Siegal

Considering the amount of talent in this season’s first-year class in Division-I basketball, this should be the sport’s most exciting season in recent memory. However, as fans of college hoops now have the brief opportunity to watch first-year phenoms like Kansas’ Andrew Wiggins, Duke’s Jabari Parker and Kentucky’s Julius Randle take to the collegiate court for just one season, it is once again being made clear that the phenomenon of the “one-and-done” player is ruining college basketball. The current system is an indicator of the purely self-serving relationship between the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and it is proving detrimental to the overall health of the sport.

As exciting as it might be to see this season’s level of first-year talent on display in the NCAA, one can’t help but wonder what the basketball landscape would look like if the NBA removed its rule that mandates one year of amateur play beyond high school before an athlete can enter The League.

Top-level college basketball has become a farce, a feeder system in which the best athletes only play one season and the entire media focuses on them, wondering where they will be drafted in June.

Before the NBA ruled that players could no longer make the jump from high school to the pros, some reasoned that the rule change would help both the NCAA and the NBA. However, only elite programs like Kentucky, Duke and Kansas profit mightily from the media’s infatuation with their soon-to-be NBA draft prospects. The media circus, in turn, helps college coaches lock-up next year’s blue chip recruits and contributes to inequality in the amateur ranks.

It’s harder to see how the NBA still profits from the “one-and-done” rule. In the cases of Wiggins, Parker and Randle, there are players who already have an NBA skill set or even all-star potential. Their year in college is just posturing for NBA scouts. If the rules were different, they would almost assuredly not be enrolled in universities right now, and instead would be cashing seven-figure NBA checks and being promoted to help the NBA’s image.

In an interview with ESPN before the season started, Wiggins referred to this season as his “last year in school,” making no pretensions about his immediate NBA goals.

If there is adequate high-school talent out there that could immediately translate to the NBA game, there is no reason to force players to attend college for one year and make a mockery of amateur sports.

Elite college athletes have very little riding on their college academic performance and making them go through the motions of pretending to be student-athletes for two semesters is an affront to the legitimacy of the college game.

Putting an end to the “one-and-done” requirement would benefit both college basketball and the NBA. Moreover, it would bring continuity back to the college game and build the NBA and its developmental system by making high school talent more readily available.

Joe Siegal is a junior American Studies major. He can be reached at siegal@oxy.edu or on Twitter @WklyJSiegal.


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