Emmanuel Mudiay’s decision reveals fault line among NCAA amateurism reformers

You have to feel for Larry Brown. A year after narrowly missing out on the NCAA Tournament, Brown’s SMU Mustangs were supposed to be shoe-ins in 2015, riding on the back of star recruit Emmanuel Mudiay.

Players like Mudiay aren’t supposed to go to SMU. He was a five-star prospect coming out of high school, an athletic 6’5 point guard who ranked as the second-best player in the country. He turned down offers from Kansas and Kentucky, among many others, to stay in Dallas to play for Brown. But now, Mudiay won’t be staying in Dallas, and he’ll be going a lot farther away than Lawrence or Lexington, all so he can escape the binds of amateurism.

This is a groundbreaking decision. Mudiay is the best US-born player to opt to skip college since the NBA first implemented the one-and-done rule in 2006, and his year playing professionally — almost certainly in Europe — will be a fascinating test case.

He’ll have the opportunity to earn a salary, sign with a shoe company and get representation, the latter of which is apparently already in the works.

The contrast in perspectives surrounding Mudiay’s decision will be as fascinating as his season in Europe. On one hand, there are a lot of high-level NCAA and university employees who will be happy with this decision. Mudiay has made it clear that his decision to attend SMU was based on basketball, not academics, and purists will see this as a win for the idea that athletes should only play sports as a hobby, knowing there is enough school loyalty from fans to still make millions off those unpaid players.

But on the other side of the debate is Brown, a coach who almost certainly would’ve paid money out of his own pocket to keep Mudiay in Dallas, just as many other coaches would have done. The longer the NCAA’s current amateurism rules are in place, the more we’re going to see players making the difficult decision to forgo the glitz and glamour of college basketball for money in Europe.

That bears the question: Is that what we want college basketball to be?

Mudiay’s decision shows the rift among NCAA reformers. There are those who admit the NCAA is commercialized and want it scaled back, and there are those who think the commercialism is okay, as long as the athletes are allowed to get a piece of the pie. For example, the latter would say, what’s wrong with Mudiay signing a contract with Adidas and also playing basketball? What is inherently better about making it so tough for Mudiay to get by that he needs to play in Europe to do so?

College sports will eventually change, and when they do we will be left with one of these two realities. Considering that it’s rather unlikely universities will just give up a multi-billion dollar industry, that means we’re probably going to end up seeing athletes getting paid in some way. But before that happens, there’s still a long ways to go for the nation to accept Mudiay’s move at face value, not through NCAA-tinted glasses.

Mudiay made his decision for arguably the most capitalistic — and by proxy, most American — of reasons: in pursuit of money. And curiously, to do that, he had to go all the way to Europe.

Is that what we want the system to be? That’s the crux of the amateur discussion in college sports.