Eliminating the one-and-done won’t fix college basketball’s problems

The Condoleezza Rice-led Commission on College Basketball presented its suggestions to clean up the sport on Wednesday morning. The suggestions, in essence, protect the idea of the “purity of college sports”, calling for NCAA involvement in grassroots (or “AAU”) basketball and lifetime bans for coaches caught cheating.

The Rice commission is also pushing hard for an end to the one-and-done rule. That was the least surprising suggestion of all.

The one-and-done rule has long been central to the culture war between college basketball and the NBA. College hoops traditionalists view one-and-done players as the ones who accept bribe money from schools and don’t go to class. Get rid of the one-and-done rule and end college basketball’s corruption mess, they seem to think.

That’s wrong for a variety of reasons.

Brian Bowen’s name will always be tied to the FBI investigation. Louisville allegedly worked with Adidas to pay Bowen $100,000 for his commitment.

Bowen was ranked as the No. 16 player in his high school class. Peers like Deandre Ayton, Mohamed Bamba, and Michael Porter Jr. were considered projected first-round draft picks before entering college. Bowen was not.

Kansas allegedly made a similar arrangement to secure the commitment of Silvio De Sousa, a big man who joined the Jayhawks at mid-season this past year. De Sousa was ranked No. 32 in his class by 247 Sports. He’s also not considered a one-and-done.

What does that mean?

Even in a hypothetical world where the very best high schoolers enter the NBA Draft, there will still be fierce competition for players who opt to play college basketball over turning pro.

Those players — like De Sousa and Bowen — are already immensely valuable to college basketball programs because they tend to spend more than one year on campus. Already, you don’t need to be Jayson Tatum or Ben Simmons or Andrew Wiggins to be bribed by a college coach. That will remain the case even when the one-and-done rule is wiped out.

In the high school class of 2016, 13 of the top-15 recruits in ESPN’s rankings entered the draft after one year of college ball. Assume those are the players that are now entering the league out of high school. That just means the recruits ranked lower than that become the commodity for colleges.

The Rice commission doubled down on the idea of amateurism in college sports. As long as that’s the model, a black market will remain. There’s simply too much money flowing through the sport from TV revenue and apparel contracts for it to cease.

The biggest problem in college sports in the outdated concept of amateurism. Rice’s commission wasn’t trying to protect student-athletes with its suggestions. It was trying to ensure big colleges can still cash huge checks while saving some face in the public relations game.

The NCAA needs to admit it’s not the 1940s anymore. It needs to let players profit off their own likeness, adopting something like the Olympic model. It needs to let athletes work with agents so they know what they’re getting themselves into. It needs to go beyond simply providing scholarships, because athletes are giving these universities so much more.

College basketball officials might regret pushing to eliminate the one-and-done once it happens. TV ratings are everything and there’s a sizable chunk of the basketball viewing public who tune into college hoops strictly to see the NBA’s next stars.

If those players are all in the G League now, that’s a lot of potential viewers who no longer care about college basketball. Of course, the NCAA won’t notice that until it impacts their bottom line.

The NBA created the one-and-done rule for its own benefit. It wanted more information on players before they turned pro. It wanted to keep NBA general managers out of high school gyms. For as much as college basketball purists hate the one-and-done, it has served a purpose in the NBA.

Without the one-and-done rule, perhaps a top recruit like Cliff Alexander or Harry Giles or Skal Labissiere gets taken in the top-five. Instead, Alexander went undrafted and Giles and Labissiere were late first-round picks after underwhelming college careers.

Any change to the one-and-done rule has be collectively bargained between NBA owners and the players’ association. All the while, Rice’s commission is making vague threats about making freshmen ineligible and essentially reducing scholarships for programs that sign players who leave early.

It’s not the NBA’s job to fix college basketball. Eliminating the one-and-done rule won’t save college hoops either way. As long as amateurism exists, so will black markets. The suggestions of the Rice report might sound good in theory, but they aren’t changing anything.