At this point, the NCAA appears to be operating increasingly with situational ethics on an ad hoc basis.
It continues to modify its standings on what it can and cannot do about rules violations.
It occasionally suggests that it lacks sufficient resources to enforce its own rules.
It let the NBA tell it when its players would be allowed to leave college for the pros--after one year of D1 ball. The NCAA did nothing.
It appears prepared to let the NBA tell it that the players cannot go pro until after their second season. The NCAA appears prepared to do nothing again.
The OBannon Case kicked the NCAA in its balls for its role in player likenesses being marketed without compensation for the players. Now it reputedly settled out of court.
Put another way, it appears to have changed its stance on compensation for players likenesses be used in marketing.
It is reputedly changing its stance and enabling separate power conference standards.
It is reputedly considering changing levels and forms of compensation for players while in D1.
The NCAA is constantly reconciling to outside and internal forces. Nothing about its rules are sacred. They are just rules with legacies stretching back to one of western culture's less holy institutions--19th Century Amateurism.
There is no reason in the world why it cannot also arbitrarily establish new rules for accepting players back into D1. None. Zero. Zip.
Think, people.
Take. Blinders. Off.
If Big Shoe paying UL $45M bones and UMich $60M bones and players being apparently tacitly allowed to have grey area relationships with Big Agent and Big Shoe before, during and after their times in D1, and Big Gaming and Big Media and the NCAA reputedly tacitly tolerating games being fit in broadcast windows by asymmetric whistles, and wonky seeding reputedly aimed at attracting eye balls, enabling stacks and weeding out teams that won't maximize eyeballs, don't ruin the game, how in god's green, but increasingly solar global warming driven environment, can letting early jumps that wash out come back and play hurt the game?
And to argue that the NCAA will not, or will never, make such a change is to ignore all of the situational changes the NCAA has been making and will continue to make to reconcile with its bottom line need for player talent to keep its product capable of generating the revenues the NCAA, member institutions, Big Media, Big Shoe and Big Gaming require it to give.
This is a cash cow we are talking about here.
Cows have to give milk.
To give milk, they have to have raw materials--grass, feed and water.
Players are the most basic raw materials of D1 basketball.
Gotta have them.
We are not yet to the point of staffing rosters with cyborgs grown at an experimental barn at KSU, thank god.
It is about the money.
AND...
Its about human beings.
This is one time when it can be a win-win.
Getting more of these NBA wash out players to come back and play and finish school is a GOOD THING!!!!!
D1 depends on a player supply of adequate talent level for coaches to put out a product that generates sufficient ticket, media and gaming consumption to keep this integrated apparatus spitting out the huge amounts of cash required to keep it going.
Why keep driving coaches like Self and Few to young foreign players, when we have all the domestic washouts they need without going overseas?
Why force the outsourcing of American college basketball, when it is completely unnecessary, if we just change one little rule in the midst of all the rule changing this is going on?
Players that have jumped early, played professional basketball and washed out, or just want to take a break and come back and finish now that they have secured a nest egg, should absolutely be allowed to return to play at the college level on scholarship. They should be allowed to play and go to school with whatever remaining eligibility they have.
This solves sooooooooo many problems that it is scandalous not to have been adopted long ago. And it pushes more of the good players around all of D1.
Frankly, doing anything else is patently absurd.
Persons in the private sector can stop working and go back to school any damn time they please.
College sports are part of the university academic product. Players go to school to take academic curriculum and develop themselves athletically. Sports are a profession that one prepares for with college.
Let's get on with it.
Even suggesting not to make this change one ought to put on a straw hat and spats and talk with a late 19th Century Oxford, or Ivy League, accent about the virtues of indoctrinating "amateurism" into the classes, so as to make them better able to "...work the colored" in the equatorial colonial regions. Chop, chop! Restart the Olympics, chaps. We Brits will be the Greeks and you Yanks can be the Romans, and we'll all have a grand time, and save a few quid by not having to pay the wankars in the process of teaching them a thing or two about team work."
PRACTICING LATE 19TH CENTURY AMATEURISM RIGIDLY IN THE 21ST CENTURY IS A DISGRACEFUL COLONIAL ARCHAISM.
This archaic institution of amateurism has some virtues, if we can prune away the imbecilic aspects of it.
There is no flipping reason why professional players that don't make it in pro ball should not be allowed to come back and go to school on scholarship and play D1 basketball, while they get their degrees. Allowing this will probably sharply improve the integrity and quality of the D1 game, and end a lot of the exploitative drama growing up around the decision when to jump. And it will sharply reduce the control of D1 Adam Silver and the NBA currently wield. And there is not a damned thing Silver and the NBA can do about it, except whine.
This is one change that could be enacted before high tea, chaps.
Let's get on with it, shall we?
