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 and so it is not something the NCAA, universities, or coaches can yet alter inside the cranium, 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 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 the dead give away even to we unpaid board rats supporting our teams that this system was rigged to improve the athletic departments' bottom lines.
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, but 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.
