Ideally, college basketball would have been organized so that teams did not add players from European professional leagues mid-season.
Your list, say, November 1, is your list. Is it too much to ask? After all, they have trade deadlines and signing windows in the NBA and NFL. How about this? If you enter the NBA draft, you will not be able to continue playing college baseball.
Of course, ideally, NCAA and college sports leaders — from conference commissioners to top athletic directors to celebrity coaches — would have recognized, at least by the late 2010s, that change was inevitable and begun planning for it.
Instead, they pouted, complained, and, in an enduring effort for control (especially money), hung on to losing arguments, fought losing fights, and let confusion engulf them.
That's how Baylor scored a big hit on Christmas Eve, when it announced it had signed James Nnaji, a 21-year-old, 7-foot center. You may remember him as the 31st pick in the 2023 NBA draft.
Detroit chose him that night. He was later traded to Charlotte and then to the New York Knicks. Nnaji has never seen minutes in the NBA (aside from summer league), but has been playing professional ball in Europe since 2020.
Somehow, Nnaji has four years of college eligibility left. Sure, why not? What is LeBron's status?
Nnaji is expected to join the Bears on the court next week in time for Big 12 play.
“Santa Claus is handing out midseason buyouts,” Connecticut coach Dan Hurley joked on social media.
“I just know they told us he can play, so I'm happy,” Baylor coach Scott Drew said.
Don't blame Drew. He didn't make the rules. Everything is perfectly legal. Drew has an obligation to his players, not to mention his school, to surround them with the best talent he can. So he did.
Additionally, Baylor isn't the only team bringing in professionals from Europe, even in the middle of the season. Oklahoma just signed a Russian center. Dayton, BYU and others, including Kansas State women's basketball, have done something similar.
It may be jarring, but the world is not ending. Nnaji, despite all the attention, has averaged just 3.4 points per game as a pro. Set up with thought and structure, granting eligibility to guys like him isn't even an entirely bad idea: College hockey is loaded with NHL draft picks.
But done this way?
“This s— is crazy!!!” Hurley wrote.
It certainly feels that way.
The blame falls on the “leadership” of college sports, which spent the last few decades trying to keep a lid on amateurism, an antiquated concept that was almost certainly doomed to fail in the face of legal challenges.
The first came back in 2009, when former UCLA men's basketball player Ed O'Bannon filed a lawsuit arguing that the NCAA was selling his name, image and likeness in a video game (which it was, as a judge ruled in 2014). The writing was on the wall. Public sentiment quickly turned against the NCAA.
However, instead of accepting the need for a new way of doing business, the NCAA simply became more entrenched. Instead of sharing the revenue from the video game, the game was cancelled.
College sports took a hard line and continued to invest millions in hapless legal defenses and, later, in Washington lobbyists who gladly cashed checks and sold the chimera that Congress would save them.
The NCAA, for example, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the Sherman Antitrust Act should not apply to college athletics because fans would be turned off if an athlete were ever compensated for anything, even cash prizes won through academic contests or legitimate sponsorship opportunities.
Apparently, Caitlin Clark's State Farm commercial wasn't a marketing boon for women's basketball, but rather an existential threat.
“That argument is circular and unconvincing,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in 2021, in a concurring opinion to a 9-0 decision against the NCAA. “…Nowhere else in the United States can companies get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate based on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate.”
With the courts almost universally against it, the NCAA turned to Congress for antitrust exemptions. Lobbyists were hired. Senators were courted. Some dog and pony show hearings were held.
No legislation was even close to being passed. It was a completely predictable waste of time and money.
O'Bannon just wanted a fair share, but being in opposition to the Sherman Antitrust Act (which has been around since 1890) has left the NCAA on the losing side of numerous eligibility fights, changing the way games are played.
In the simplest terms, the NCAA can't stop someone from making a living, which means they can rarely stop someone from playing for them and therefore making a living.
That reality opened the floodgates to immediate eligibility for all transfers, caused college seasons to no longer count, flooded rosters with 20-something grad students and, yes, even allowed a once-NBA-drafted and twice-traded European pro to join in January.
Instead of pursuing outdated legal strategies and transparent, one-sided legislation, the NCAA should have recognized players as employees and then negotiated with what would almost certainly be a weak union. If necessary, he could have asked Congress for limited, common-sense antitrust exceptions that could have had a bipartisan chance of passing.
Then maybe agreements would have been reached on, say, the transfer portal or post-draft eligibility or whatever else came up.
“To me, until we get to collective bargaining, there won't be a solution,” Drew said.
You are right, but that has also been obvious for years.
However, the old guard of college sports simply couldn't accept it. It was the old way, or no way.
So the lawyers and lobbyists were paid.
And college basketball got signings in the middle of the Euroleague season.
