Why Not Deregulate D1?
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First, let any player, college, or high school, jump to professional basketball at any age without any restrictions at all. They can jump anytime. Even during a season.
Second, let any professional player with any of his five potential years of college eligibility remaining, return to D1 any time and play for any team without any restrictions.
Third, let any college player jump to any other college team anytime during the season even up to before the NCAA Finals.
Fourth, let any coach move any time to any team, even for just the last game of a season.
Turn player and coach movement from something we are trying to constrain into something liberalized and encouraged in order to create the best basketball teams with the best coaches.
The ShoeCos already appear to be stacking certain teams with talent. Let take it and run with it instead of resisting it.
Let’s even let coaches and teams make trades dying the season.
Let’s prepare the players for professional basketball life, and let’s let players riding the bench at one school, jump to other schools.
We are already at the point that I am cheering not for the players, because there is so much turnover. I am cheering for the team.
Full D1 deregulation, full freedom for players and coaches.
I would even like to let the schools and ShoeCos and NBA franchises be allowed to make deals to pay players whatever the ShoeCos, schools and NBA franchises want to pay the players. No limits on money. Every deal is an agreement between the player and which ever schools, franchises and shoecos he can get interested in him.
The only thing guarantied the players is tuition and books, room and board and five years of eligibility.
Deregulation would make every second of the season suspenseful. At any moment, a team could lose a star. A coach could jump. Stars, rotation backups, and practice players might shift at any moment. Complexity would ramp up dramatically. Every moment of the season would become potentially strategic.
And no I’m not kidding about this.
I really think unrestrained market dynamics would catapult the game out of its current status of being an abused step child of the NBA and the inadequately policed joke of the NCAA.
Finally, reduce the NCAA to three employees. One brokers National TV deals. Another uses KenPom stats to seed a tournament with a seeding program in seconds. Another works on rules and liaison with conference supervisors of officials. No more investigations. No more verifications of transcripts. Any kid can come to college anytime, if the college can figure out a way to keep him eligible. The player has to maintain a D average in four courses per semester to stay eligible. No need to waste resources on preventing morons from playing, when ways are always found to let morons play.
One more thing: let schools hold auctions among private oligarchs in which the high bidder gets the schools open and above board commitment to politic in state government on behalf of the winning private oligarch in the bidding. The Chancellor, AD and HC actually openly campaign for the private oligarch’s political economic agenda.
Let the goose that lays the golden eggs start laying platinum ones.
Let’s really take college basketball to the next level. Let’s make it so profitable to players that few can afford to jump and even those that do can be attracted back from the NBA unless they do really well.
D1 could be expanded from 340 some schools to as many colleges as there are that want to play the game in the deregulated format.
Several great teams would emerge every season.
More talent would be available for college basketball every season.
Maybe even extend the period of eligibility from 5 years to 12 years to enable players to pursue graduate degrees.
Rock Chalk!!!
“Change, change, it will do you good!!!” –Sheryl Crow
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@jaybate 1.0 – At first I was amused, then as I read more I thought why not? It’s all about getting that first round money anyways. A Scholarship used to mean a free college education, however I guess an education doesn’t really mean anything anymore. So why not turn College Basketball into a minor leagues for the NBA.
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@jaybate 1.0 brilliant.
Btw, anyone know where Naadir transferred to?
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One thing I think the NCAA should do today is to allow players who feel they have a better opportunity elsewhere to transfer to a different D1 school without sitting out a year.
A basketball career generally has a limited window of opportunity and NCAA policy is too restrictive. AW3 should be able to play wherever he thinks is best for him beginning this fall. He is losing potential earning power by having to sit for a year.
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@jaybate 1.0 - I think the fans should have the final say. How many years they stay, what position they play, how many minutes, etc. They could do it like the " Instant Save " thing on The Voice. ( Yes, I watch The Voice. Also American Idol, X-Factor, American’s Got Talent and Last Comic Standing) Everybody vote during time outs who they want to see on the floor when play resumes.
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@Lulufulu85 I read that AWIII is getting attention from Nebraska.
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I like some of it, but can you imagine a wads of cash laden youngster flopping in the pros coming back to college and rubbing elbows with teammates who will never play in any league, not even in the Djibouti pro league? This creates a haves and have nots on one team and dissension would be rife. Plus those kids wouldn’t go to too many classes. So it might not work.
But it might, but it sure would be confusing for us fans, and a team going down the tubes would not like it as they would lose even more players.
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I’m for any changes that bring freedoms to the average Joe, or in this case, the talented college athlete.
We always like to think America is the “land of the free” and where individuals are empowered to better themselves, including financially. Then why do big corps (NBA) and institutions (NCAA) have the right to limit opportunities for young people who are talented?
How many kids have to lose their opportunity to use their talent and hard work because they made one mistake along the way?
All these regulations create a tiny tiny tunnel athletes have to crawl through to make success and if they ever take the wrong passage (ever so brief) it ends their chances to reach their dreams.
Opening up the game… especially on the college level… not only will bring back a higher level of ball played in college, it will “trickle up” to the NBA and help it play a higher level of ball, too, because it will create the most opportunity for players, which increases competition and keeping good players in the mix for an opportunity.
Imagine both D1 and the NBA having better play beyond just the top teams? It is possible… we just have to create a structure that keeps good players around longer, with more opportunities to find success. Many will come through (eventually) and those that do will be the reason a higher brand of ball will be played.
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When confronted by assault on our game from all sides, we ought first define our universal principles. Our duty is to choose them widely, define them well, and then act in accordance with them in the face of the challenges great and small.
The universal principle (IMHO): In college basketball, administrators, coaches, players, and fans have certain inalienable rights endowed by their creator; these are life, liberty and the pursuit of getting better.
Thus whatever set of institutions and regulations can accomplish this best is what we should agree upon and so constitute and then apply all available resources toward accomplishing.
Getting better involves maximizing (or at least satisficing) the opportunity to compete with and against those chancellors, ADs, coaches and players most likely to enable the individual and the basketball player coach, AD and chancellor to get better.
Under our current institutions, we appear to be being subordinated by the NBA, which we have no representation in. That is a kind of tyranny.
And our NCAA, which was constituted by prior generations to organize and promote amateur sports in general has apparently ceased to act toward basketball in ways that enable all individuals involved to pursue their inalienable right of life, liberty and getting better.
We have gotten to this point by adhering to a late 19th Century ideology of amateurism (notice the -ism attached to amateur for it is a dead give away of an ideology, not a universal principle) that over time has begun to obstruct the inalienable right to pursue getting better. It has permitted the NBA to exploit our outdated ideology of amateurism. And it has let the NCAA turn its original reputed function of acting as a guardian of the integrity of amateurism and of the amateur game of basketball into becoming a broker of the game to media, while reputedly underfunding its function of regulatory oversight, and so creating a context where free pursuit of getting better can only really freely occur among a precious few. not the many. It is not a sign of either liberty, or fairness.
Thus, it is valid, fitting and beneficial to all to reconstitute the D1 game across the board according to the universal principle as stated above (or whatever other better one can be agreed upon), so as to maximize the freedom and opportunity for all to pursue getting betting and to use all the fantastic sums of money being attracted into the game for the purpose of enabling that pursuit of getting better first and foremost, not as money to fatten up a relative few that appear unable to act widely in service of the inalienable rights.
We should not reconstitute D1 as just a minor league of the NBA, or other professional league, for THAT is what D1 has already become, and is what we should be trying to move beyond.
What we should seek is to raise D1 beyond being just a minor league for the NBA subsidized by government and tax-reducing donors, and manipulated indirectly by the NBA. D1 must be free at last.
We should in fact view the D1 basketball programs as basketball institutes that are the sporting equivalent of policy generating institutes in business and government.
There should be undergraduate teams and graduate teams. Maybe even faculty/career teams. Careers in political and enterprise institutes can just as easily be ends in themselves, rather than stepping stones, but they can of course be stepping stones too. The same should be true of epistemic institutes of basketball.
Just as a professional in government may choose to work in government, or in a policy institute generating policy for government and parties, so a basketball player, coach, or AD, should be able to choose whether to work in professional leagues, or in epistemic leagues developing players and basketball knowledge for the game. Just as a business man should be able to choose whether to work in business, or in institutes of business and economics, while being a paid professional in either, basketball players, coaches and ADs should be able to choose between working in professional leagues, or in epistemic leagues, as a paid professional in either.
We do not expect politicians, or executives, that leave government, or business, to work in 501.C3 epistemic institutes to become amateurs. And we do not prevent them from working in professional capacities in government and business and then deny them and society the benefits of them returning to such epistemic institutes in their fields of expertise. It is patently absurd that we let an archaic ideology of amateurism prevent professional basketball players from coming back to epistemic basketball.
“…life, liberty and the pursuit of getting better…” Degree of service to these inalienable rights is proper criterion for judging those individuals and organizations involved with running D1.
Reinstituting the game according to truly universal principles is long overdue.
Let’s get on with it.
Reason is sweet.
And time is still of the essence.
If we don’t, the NCAA might eventually cut a deal with Occulist Rift and turn D1 into a virtual reality game with no bio-players, coaches, or ADs at all. It may take quite awhile, but judging from their genuflective reshapings of the game for radio, TV, and internet in the past, the awesome power of the virtual, and its deep learning technology, seem likely to rush them to embrace it. It would make setting betting spreads so much less risky.
If we don’t get on with it, the NBA might cannabalize the D1 game and then clear it from its wake.
The business of the game appears to be rapidly reducing to being a stimulant for the global economic expansion of the petro apparel industry; i.e., of using the endorsement power of sport in media to migrate as many folks around the globe from cotton, linen, and silk to rayon and polyester, and whatever else future chemists can think of to make out of oil, as we migrate off burning the stuff. Wearing the shizz, especially when it is chemically engineered to wear out quickly, and when styles are changed monthly, and when we are talking global market demand, is a near essential way (but hardly the only way) to absorb the rising surplus of oil, as hybrids and electrics and fuel cells leave the suck-squeeze-bang-blowers behind.
If nerdy Elon Musk can build a better electric than all the internal combustion cars on his second try, one can only infer that internal combustion technology has long been obsolete and only been kept in dominant market share by producer oligopoly constraints imposed by a regime of car and oil companies trying desperately to work off sunk costs and plan for how to control the migration to yet another oligopoly they control.
Petro threads and petro food. Its the only way other than 24/7 war to sustainably soak up the crude oversupplies we are awash in. And though the governments beholden to big cars and bigger oil and biggest of all private central bank owners, are doing their best to burn as much oil as they can in wars by fusing up as many hot spots as possible, war just is a lot riskier way to soak up the oversupply.
D1 should not be a minor league.
D1 should be an independent player at the table.
Heck, if D1 played its reinstitution cards correctly, with the enormous advantages it holds in subsidies, it could one day take over the NBA.
D1 is 340 some teams that could expand to twice or three times that many at the stroke of a keyboard typed agreement.
D1 is frankly the center point in the strategic game being played, not the NBA.
D1 just needs to do a better job in the major TV markets of New York, Boston, and so on. But that is another story.
Rock Chalk!
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I like your ideas, @jaybate 1.0
Just a couple of tweaks.
First, transfers would be allowed only during two periods of the year - at the end of each semester. That way players could move if there were issues during the fall in basketball, or at the end of each spring. Similarly, in football, you could transfer at the end of spring football, or at the end of the fall season. You could not transfer and be eligible for bowl participation in the same season (to prevent seniors from leaving a non-bowl eligible team at the end of the season and playing in a bowl for a different team). Same with baseball, softball, etc.
I absolutely agree with not forcing players to sit out. It’s unfair, particularly when coaches can jump from school to school but players can’t.
@wissoxfan83 I understand your concern, but there are already haves and have nots. You think the guys on KU’s team this year weren’t aware that there was a significant difference between a guy like Andrew White and Andrew Wiggins? There are already haves and have nots based on talent. There are some guys that know they will be playing pro and others that know they will be working as accountants. That won’t change, regardless. The more likely scenario if players return to college is that they didn’t make it as a pro after a year or two, meaning they didn’t hit it big and would likely be returning to play and pursue a degree, making them more likely to be focused as a student.
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@justanotherfan Yeah, but the haves in JB’s scenario would be loaded with cash because they went to the league and decided to come back.
@jaybate since Lebron James didn’t play college ball, could he conceivably suit up for KU for a season or two just for kicks? I might be in favor of that!
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@wissoxfan83 think LBJ could pass his classes?
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@jaybate 1.0 – A fine and very deep post. I have to admit I had do some rereading to fully understand and appreciate the point you were making.
I say if college sports should go down this road, then lets just do away with scholarships and sign players to contracts. I mean at this point it’s not about education anyways. (As I’ve been told) If the players want an education let them pay for it.
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@wrwlumpy Cool. He could give them a big boost on the perimeter. They did good last season in the Big 10
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@wissoxfan83
We already have an incredible asymmetry among haves and have nots, do we not?
So: what is wrong with kids with money mixing with kids that do not have it? Public universities have always been a place where the haves and have nots rub up against each other. It did not bother me that Brady Morningstar’s pop was affluent and Tyrel’s dad was just a high school coach. Poor college players have always rubbed up against rich alums. Heck, I can remember on my high school football team the star’s dad was bucks up and the kid drove a Shelby Mustang, when most of us didn’t even have cars. I blocked just as hard for the rich kid as I did his poor back up. I wish things were more equitable. I’ve been down and up myself. But this recent gaping maw of disparity is the reality of life in USA now. The biggest upward reconcentration of wealth since the age of the robber barons is already 15 years as status quo. It is the hideous fact of how life is. America has an inheritance aristocracy.
Did it bother you that Andrew Wiggins was about to have millions and was the son of a father that made some buck in the NBA, while playing with Jamari Traylor, who had once lived in abandoned cars and will have to have some luck to make it in European ball.
Dissension? It seems to me that there would already be a lot of dissension about wealth disparities, if there were ever going to be. I mean Bill Self probably makes around $5-10 M bucks per year with salary and shoe contracts and camps and investment fund yields. And he is coaching players that are often from abject poverty. He reputedly lives in a 24,000 sf house and the players live in those cracker boxes at Jayhawker Towers and probably think they are a big step over where they came from. Even the assistants are dressed out to the nines making to much to take regular jobs instead.
Confusion about turnover? I was never confused by turnover last season. I was confused by why they played so poorly so much of the time. It has never confused me when a professional sports team made a three sided trade at deadline involving a bunch of players. Actually, I have always been kind of excited by trades. The often promise new hope.
Coaching changes? Which is worse? Having them change, or worrying about them changing all the time, which is what everyone does now?
The bottom line for me is D1 left the kind of college model I was fond of. So: I have tried this new model, even the deluxe OAD version that we at KU are lucky enough to try to participate in, and it leaves me cold. I don’t believe there is any going back. And I find standing still to be a prescription for further hollowing out and death of D1.
I feel right now a bit like Thomas Jefferson and other founders of the country must have felt after trying to get the Crown of Great Britain and the British Parliament to make some very small changes for a couple of decades so that the Commonwealth could go on, only to learn that neither the British Monarchy, nor the British Parliament wanted to bring us into their game.
I feel that neither the NBA, nor the NCAA, after a long time trying to make things work with both of them, have basically said, we’ve got a pretty good deal, and its just too bad about the rest of you colonials. We could make this more sensible and more equitable, but we’re not, because WE DON’T HAVE TO.
It was around this time that Benjamin Franklin, long an advocate of staying in the Commonwealth more or less said to the Virginians and others,well, I guess you were right all along about these Brits. Let’s strike out on our own he told his colleagues; that is the time we all maybe be approaching in basketball.
Hamilton tossed in somewhere along the way that we’ve got the center point right here in North America that everyone needs to control maritime trade in the New World. And if we play our cards right, we will shortly control Pacific trade too. Let’s get on with it.
I’m not sure who the influential founders of our time in basketball would be, but maybe its time for them to think about some of the above.
Once upon a time, TJeff got on with Writing the Declaration of Independence.
And things changed.
They really changed.
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@jaybate 1.0
“If we don’t get on with it, the NBA might cannabalize the D1 game and then clear it from its wake.”
That wouldn’t be hard to do…
Two small changes:
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Allow players directly from HS.
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Expand a year-round D-league and start pouring marketing resources into it. First… ditch the name “developmental league” and find a better branding. With seasons of 80+ games, players would make more $$$… and with added teams it would mean fishing out a lot more players directly from HS. This would immediately make players ineligible for D1.
Maybe the best thing is to start having the NCAA and the NBA become competitors. Suddenly… you’d see the NCAA completely loosen their rules (especially on eligibility) and would offer better financial incentives to players beyond the very basics.
There is a reason why the NCAA playoffs and the NBA playoffs don’t happen at the same time.
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This seems the bare minimum of change needed. Thanks for saying it well.
