Nausea and the Nearly 50% Transience Among D1 Players
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(Author here. DFW-RIP. Learning of the situation of near 50% transience among D1 college basketball players, where such players often have to sit out a year and so lose eligibility, and educational and social continuity, with the schools benefitting from this situation in many ways, so incensed me that after I posted it in another link started by @drgnslayr I decided to give it its own thread in hopes of calling attention to the 50% transience statistic cited by Bob Bowlsby in a recent story. It should be pointed out here that I do not yet know the exact definition of transience that Bowlsby’s 50% statistic referred to, it appeared to refer to players transferring from one D1 program to another, and so apparently excluded players jumping to the pros early. The post below begins as a brief expansion on some comments regarding the level of talent in jucos today, but quickly moves on to the meat of the transience issue. )
I am not reading anything in the thread above suggesting juco talent has NOT dropped off. But that is not really what triggers my further response here. But raising and addressing the juco issue enables a pathway into a much deeper and more disturbing issue that needs addressing.
So: let me briefly reiterate and expand ever so slightly on the juco issue and get on to the bigger kettle of fish needing deep fat frying.
To expand ever so slightly, the combination of dumb, er, intellectually challenged, OADs being able to skate through a year or two at a reputedly 4 year college and then jumping to the pros, plus the basketball academy player factories reputedly issuing designer transcripts to guys that stay an extra year, seems probable to have eaten deeply into high quality juco talent. Why go to a juco and work to get your grades up, or even to a juco that is retailing its grades to 4-year basketball programs, if you can stay at the high school academy basketball factory an extra year, get your designer diploma, then do one OAD year at a 4 year, and then go pro? The days of Bob McAdoo’s in jucos are apparently long gone.
And Bob “Gripe But Do Nothing” Bowlsby hinted at another factor eating into juco talent, and corroding D1, simultaneously.
Bowlsby said recently that something like 40-50% of D1 players transfer at least once in their D1 careers. Since I am used to watching KU with low transfer out and low transfer in numbers (maybe 1 or 2/year out of roster); this high transfer rate surprised me at first. But after thinking about it, it makes considerable sense that things would be this sorry way.
Given that god (and evolution) establishes IQ distributions among the population of players (even despite the biases of IQ testing), and so IQ is not yet something the NCAA, universities, or coaches can alter sharply inside the cranium of players (less biased IQ testing would be help some but not eliminate the variations we are all heirs to), the moment the NCAA (i.e., member universities and their bargaining agent they call the NCAA) started incentivizing the graduation of players, and penalizing those programs that don’t graduate their players, it should have been obvious (and likely was) to those paid to think about this sort of thing in advance that this high transfer rate would be one consequence. The rule that incentivized high graduation rates and penalized low graduation rates probably did not set any effective standards on transfer incentives and disincentives. And probably intentionally so, given that universities and the NCAA adopted the one-year rolling scholarship. Note: that one-year rolling scholarship should have been a red flag even to we unpaid board rats supporting our teams that this system was rigged to improve the athletic departments’ bottom lines, rather than expedite the education of young Americans playing the greatest game ever invented.
Hypothesis: there probably was never an actual intention to improve education of players. There was probably instead an actual intention to create a rationale for NOT having to educate them and for “normalizing” the tradition of “tramp athletes” pre-big-business-in-sports days into “transcient” athletes rationalized for the new economics of College Sports, Inc.
It was probably vaguely like emancipating slaves and calling them free, while enabling Jim Crow, and I am introducing this incendiary analogy precisely because of the apparent egregiousness of the situation, not literally to equate the two things. But however you respond to it, I digress.
Leaving aside for a moment whether or not one believes in amateurism, or professionalism, for the business of D1 college basketball, it is clear that the current model of 50% transience among long term college players, plus all the remaining 1ADs and 2ADs jumping early to the pros, has turned D1 college basketball into a labor pool market with a large complement of rent-a-players. UW’s Bo Ryan referred to John Calipari’s UK OADs as rent-a-players, but this moniker applies perhaps even more relevantly to the long term transients–the labor poolers–the employee leasing type players.
Taken in total, this three tiered employment model with transience at its base is strikingly similar to what one finds in much of contemporary American business, only without the salaried compensation. The players receive annual contracts for tuition, room, and board, and pocket monies (the pocket monies about to be increased), and apparently significant unreported income from player sale of merchandize given the university by PetroShoeCos, as partial consideration for coaches and players wearing that particular brand of shoes and promoting that particular brand of apparel among their ticket buying fans and television audiences. But beyond this player compensation, ranging from significant, but brief, to perhaps lavish and brief, to something appearing, as I already suggested, somewhat similar to what we find in the employee leasing supplied work place of today.
First, consider that outside of basketball, in what some call “the real world,” we have an annual, small wave of graduates with the right social pedigree and grades from elite schools (e.g., Ivy League and a few miscellaneous privates) that move with preference into jobs with HIGH, even SKY’S THE LIMIT, upward mobility. rather quickly, while most of the rest scramble for jobs yielding declining real income, high turnover tenure, and few, if any, long term benefits that will not be cherry picked away from them long before they reach retirement age. In addition, we have a sharply increasing labor underclass of structurally transcient, peonage employees brokered by employee leasing companies with reputed, and disturbingly frequent, deep backgrounds of ownership by organized crime.
Though the levels of short term compensation may be said to vary greatly between “the real world” and college basketball for some, for a short period of time that players are not too injured, or worn-and-torn, to play, the structure of the system just outlined above “in the real world” is significantly (not completely, but significantly) analogous to what appears to be the structure that college basketball is in and apparently still evolving toward.
College basketball has its 1ADs and 2ADs that are stacked at either traditionally elite programs, or at apparently newly designated stack programs that then become at least briefly elite. This small number of players emit from the colleges annually and jump to the “sky’s the limit” NBA very shortly.
Next, there is the average to high IQ four year player that is encouraged to stay by the university, because he can add experienced continuity to the team, plus graduate, and so contribute positively to the university’s graduation requirement, and because he is not a sure thing for the sky’s the limit NBA, and more likely bound for a foreign pro career of highly uncertain length and pay, after which a college degree could have some value.
Next, there is the college basketball player equivalent of the employee leasing employee. The disturbing and surprising thing is not that he exists, but that he appears to constitute nearly 50% of the college basketball labor force. He is picked up and used on an intentionally short term scholarship contract, as filler to buffer the uncertainties of numbers of 1ADs and 2ADs, and as insurance against injuries to the four year types. He can be dumb as a post, or simply hopelessly inadequately educated by our grade schools and high schools, but since he only has to matriculate a season, or two, before being forced out, or leaving for greener pastures, with the former most likely being the rule and the latter the exception, his educational short comings can be obscured by easy classes, tutors writing his papers, two-tiered grading systems in the classes he takes, rule bending and out right cheating on tests, and by the short term nature of his tenure. By transferring, he apparently ceases to count as a demerit against the university’s graduation rate. In short, approximately 50% of the college basketball players in D1 apparently do not have to be educated in the current and the evolving system may raise that percentage even higher.
The above appears a sorry state of affairs.
It appears possible, maybe even likely, that universities are educating even fewer players today than in the bad old days before universities responded to criticisms of their failure to educate their players by instituting the current pathetic system.
There are many simple, effective solutions to this problem of failure to educate players, just as there were simple effective solutions to the problem of universities and the NCAA failing to compensate players for revenues made by marketing their likenesses without compensation prior to the Ed OBannon et al case. But apparently the universities have to be sued into other centuries and have their university wide revenues threatened before they experience the impetus to do not only “the right thing,” but comply with the minimum standards of their reason for incorporation and state support as universities in the first place; i.e., to educate our children as they become adults.
This situation makes me sick to my stomach.
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“This situation makes me sick to my stomach.”
Funny… but I had that thought enter my head (as my gut started convulsing) halfway through your post.
Let’s face it… student/athletes are pawns in a big profit scheme, and that’s it. Most everyone is conditioned to not challenge the “all-mighty” corporations and organizations.
I do believe we are in a time in history when there are too many lawsuits in many areas. But in other areas, the big groups have had it too easy for way too long. Most people don’t have the stomach, heart, mind, body, or soul to put themselves in the middle of a lawsuit that may out-live them.
CONSPIRACY THEORY: Is it possible JFK was murdered by a corporation?
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Technically, it is highly likely, since all governments and their agencies are a category of corporation, and central banks, commercial banks, investment banks, accounting and law firms, universities and think tanks and foundations operate out of corporations, and most great fortunes operate out of holding company corporations, and probably all organized crime operates partly through corporations. I rather doubt a producer corporation ordered it though.
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Interesting you mention President Kennedy, as I just read a first book in 20 years on the subject.
I just read “They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK” by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell and David Wayne published by Skyhorse in 2013 and copyrighted 2014. New York Times best seller, as they say, too.
Anyway, former Navy UDT man, wrestling ham, Minnesota town mayor and Minnesota indie governor Jesse Ventura seemed an unlikely candidate to co-author perhaps the best book I have read so far summarizing the reasons that Oswald did not do it and that whomever ordered it done was apparently high enough in influence both to acquire some witting complicity, AND exploit some unwitting assistance, from elements in CIA, FBI, the Secret Service and local law enforcement in several cities sufficient to enable a couple trial attempts on Kennedy’s life before actually assassinating him in Dallas.
(Note: I recalled there had been other unsuccessful attempts on JFK’s life, but I did not recall those attempts had been tied together through similar techniques to assassination and some overlapping actors involved!)
Well, IMHO, Jesse and his co-authors nailed at least a part of it, Uncle Sam.
Until all the records are released by you, Uncle Sam, the book does what it’s carefully worded title suggests. It documents the government’s own House Select “Church” Committee’s conclusion that a conspiracy probably occurred; then it gives sufficient reasons to make one “believe” a conspiracy used Oswald as a patsy, not an assassin, and assassinated JFK with a team of assassins enabled by an orchestrated change in motorcade route, a blatantly improper reduction in security around the car, a false arrest of Oswald, an orchestrated assassination of Oswald (which the book goes conspicuously light on), who could not possibly have been convicted without some obvious travesty of a trial, and followed it up with an orchestrated but unconvincing cover up that continues to this day, all cemented by a continuing refusal to release nearly 50k documents related to JFK’s assassination.
The book succeeds partially by eliminating Oswald as a reasonable suspect, documenting his career as a CIA and military intelligence spy, plus Oswald’s role as an FBI informant, plus it refutes the plausibility of him making the killing shot, and then any of the shots, plus it shows how and when the motorcade route and secret service protection were altered to enable the shooting, and lays out the medical findings and the later misrepresentation of those findings. It even recalls how the motorcycle cop’s dicta belt with the gunshot recordings first made clear that shots were fired too quickly for the Mannlicher to have made, that the dicta belt analysis was inadequately impeached and that that inadequate impeachment was adequately impeached.
Just too many reasons (63) to find Oswald NOT guilty; that means someone else did it and the number of bullets evidenced by law enforcement officials findings and the directions of their impacts, plus multiple guns found (not just a Mannlicher), plus indications of multiple Oswalds, plus phony evidence all point to conspiracy by many. And witness interviews and witness deaths point to witness intimidation. And the book doesn’t even mention Dan Rather was on the bridge that day and hasn’t been given a polygraph on what he reported seeing that day.
But the who DID do it and why remains inconclusive in the book even though it feeds us the usual Dulles Brothers connection, which is kind of insulting because it does not explain that the Dulles brothers were just lawyers, like John McCloy, involved as agents to principals of private oligarchy in the grand British private oligarchic tradition of using law firms as agents in economic and political espionage up to and including pulling the strings of ones own and other’s state and private intelligence organizations. Lawyers are agents. Not principals.
And it is significant that Ventura, a figure with ties to military intelligence as a UDT man, and an improbable career in entertainment and politics (why is it mil int guys are so often the ones with these improbable careers, eh?), wrote a book that was nearly simultaneously countervailed by Bill O’Reilly’s essentially half-baked JFK assassination book. (Note: I had glanced at the O’Reilly book in a book store and saw it was so superficial and limited in scope that it wasn’t worth buying.) Near simultaneous publication of O’Reilly and Ventura assassination books is essentially setting the limits of discourse as a thought cancelling paradox in spinfluence. This lets the party line talking points of assassination (the Warren Commission) be reasserted after and accepted by the paradoxed public. This is one classic technique of propaganda, right?
The Spinfluence technique is the same as financing both Nader and Perot, or Occupy and the Tea Party, or Bernie Sanders and Don Trump. You finance the extremes, or at least ensure emphasis on coverage of both, then they cancel and allow the two centrists you finance at the center to maintain the status quo, and then you pick the one centrist most able to carry out your agenda, and reward both parties for playing along; this is real politik in a compromised representative system of government, as nearly as I can tell.
So: Jesse and his co authors wrote a worth while book, but it was perhaps part of a spinfluence script IMHO.
And so to make the most sense out of it, you have to read not just the Ventura book, but be wary of the spinfluence script it may be embedded in.
Worth a read, if only to free yourself of Oswald as lone gunman and to appreciate him as a mil int trained, CIA asset involved in a fake defector program also acting as an FBI informant. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, maybe even a Manchurian patsy with several dead ringers, but probably NOT the assassin of Jack.
Rock Chalk!
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I had an uncle who was high up in the state department back in the early 60s. He was totally questioned by most of the members in my family, including my father and his 4 brothers who all served in the military.
There are three things that pop out to me and the experiences I had listening to him talk back in the 60s.
First… it was a known fact that our government and state department KNEW in advance of the trip to Dallas that there would be a plot on the President’s life. Some people excuse the lack of proactive added protection because there were constant threats on the President’s life. But seriously? So if there are enough threats than it is okay to dismiss them all?
Second… everyone in the state department were ordered into silence. I don’t know this to be fact, but that was what I was told. Therefore, no other info bits were thrown our way.
Third… my uncle never acted the same after that. He was a different man. He became more serious and depressed. You could see the pressure on him. Granted… that was a common thing with many people back then. But it stuck on him. He never said it, but I believe he lost faith in our gov after Dallas.
I remember visiting Dallas and Dealey Plaza. It was a spooky moment in my life, back in the late 60s. I was nearing my teens and it felt very fresh from the murder. There were loads of people doing the same thing and almost everyone was crying… still.
I still feel like this event had more impact on Americans than anything else ever to occur. I feel like it impacted people more than 911, Pearl Harbor, etc.
