Nobody is stepping up to fix college sports, so if LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony truly believe the NCAA is corrupt they are the ones who will have to change it.
The power to alter the American college basketball system with its exploited players and multimillion dollar coaches lies in the hands of the NBA’s biggest names. They can demand an end to the ridiculous one-and-done stipulation that requires a top prospect to wait one season after high school to enter the NBA Draft. They can build a clause into their union’s contract with the NBA that allows kids to come straight into the league the way James and Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett once did.
Don’t expect college presidents to clean up their athletic departments. Not with endowments booming and wealthy alums craving a basketball fix. Don’t believe the NCAA’s leadership welcomes reform. Not with $10bn coming from Turner and CBS for three weekends of a tournament each March. Don’t hope the coaches find a soul. Not when their $2m a year is tied to making sure that a teenager in extra long gym shorts hits his jump shot.
If Carmelo and LeBron don’t start a revolution then the same show will go on and everyone will say college basketball is dirty, the players still will get nothing, the coaches will get rich and the cycle of a broken system will keep spinning around and around.
Less than a year after the NCAA looked away while North Carolina won the men’s basketball championship despite academic fraud in the athletic department, the FBI has exposed the sordid process of kickbacks and bribes that deliver players to colleges. Several college assistants have been charged with bribery, fraud and corruption for money paid to youth coaches to help procure their players. Just last week Yahoo! Sports printed a list of top players who have taken money from agents hoping to represent them after college. ESPN reported that the FBI has a phone recording of Arizona coach Sean Miller arranging $100,000 payments to a player.
And while there are questions about the Miller report there are none about Louisville vacating their 2013 national championship after a woman said she had sex with basketball recruits for money.
After the FBI revealed their investigation last fall, the NCAA formed a commission to study the problems in college basketball. The commission is led by former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and is filled with former players, coaches and athletic directors. It sounds a lot like other commissions that have studied the various problems over the years without much change.
“The recent news of a federal investigation into fraud in college basketball made it very clear the NCAA needs to make substantive changes to the way we operate and do so quickly,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said when he announced the commission.
He went on to add that he believes “the vast majority of coaches follow the rules” and added that there are a few “bad actors” who have been aided by “a culture of silence in college basketball.”
Emmert is good at such pronouncements. A few years ago, when he was the president at the University of Washington he scoffed at the notion of college sports as out-of-control monster.
“Sports is obviously not the biggest priority, or even close to it,” he said when we talked in a room at the school’s 70,000-seat football stadium a few hundred feet from a football training facility bigger than many airport hangers. “But it’s important that the athletic department represents the university the way you want it to.”
Six years later, he left to run the NCAA, overseeing a dysfunctional amateur system where basketball players – many from low-income families – are not allowed to touch the millions that flow to the coaches and administrators. It is these players who often are scarred when money is slipped their way, as if the need to keep lights on in their mother’s house is some criminal act.
Among the meetings taken by Rice’s commission, the most significant might be the one they had last fall with NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Michele Roberts, the head of the players union. After that meeting, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Silver is determined to end the one-and-done rule, opening the door for top high school players to go straight to the NBA. The tradeoff is that those who enter college will be required to wait two years before turning pro.
This is where James and Anthony and the other NBA stars come in. Since it seems the NBA and the union will have to be the ones to change the way college basketball operates it is their voices who will have to be the loudest. If they want to end the one-and-done system they must push their union to alter the collective bargaining agreement. If they want college players to be paid they must demand the NCAA listens.
Currently, there are no easy solutions. Those, like former president Barack Obama, who believes the NBA should use the G-League to develop young players, haven’t spent much time around the G-League, which is more like a basketball bus station where coaches are lucky to keep the same roster for more than four days. Even worse are the overseas professional leagues which only allow two American players on each team and are notorious for breaking contracts and casting players into the cold without the dignity of a plane ticket home.
The only way college basketball is truly going to be saved is if the NBA’s biggest names take up its rotten culture as their cause. Never have athletes’ voices carried so much power. If James and Anthony and other NBA stars want to carry the college players’ fight, the NCAA has no choice but to listen.
A revolution awaits. James and Anthony have fired the first shots.
Now, do they have the desire to fight the rest of the war?
