You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (10 page)

It is not arguable that Jordan has been the beneficiary of the single greatest marketing effort in the history of sports. I would contend that LeBron—for his talent level—has been the
beneficiary of one of the worst. There is no impenetrable force field around LeBron James. In fact, the only thing surrounding him is a permeable membrane.

With Jordan, nothing gets in.

With LeBron, everything gets in, and nothing gets out.

Simple question: If an 18-year-old technology whiz can graduate from high school and head to Silicon Valley, why can’t an 18-year-old basketball whiz graduate from high school and head to the Memphis Grizzlies?

Simple answer: Other than one misguided rule intended to prop up college basketball, there’s no reason whatsoever.

College basketball has a problem. Strip college basketball of all the fawning media folks extolling the virtues of every coach. Set aside the mythology built up around March Madness. Forget the emotional connection you might have with your old school, and the pride you feel when it does well. If you view it through clear eyes, you’ll see that college basketball occupies a strange place in the American sports landscape.

It’s the only major sport where the best people in the sport don’t want to be there.

Think about it. The best players are held hostage by the NBA and NCAA to fulfill a bizarre and arbitrary requirement that reeks not only of paternalism but socioeconomic and racial stereotypes.

Football has a mandatory three-year rule, but an 18-year-old football player can’t play in the NFL. Physically, emotionally—it’s just not possible. Basketball is different. The best 18-year-old basketball players have proven they can compete with the best players in the world. It’s a proven fact. They can be among the top 1 percent in the sport at 18 or 19. The examples are on an All Star team near you: Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard, LeBron James, Dirk Nowitzki.

History doesn’t lie.

No other major American sport can say its best players would
rather be somewhere else. Despite hockey’s labor problems, the best players still want to play in the NHL. The world’s best baseball players want to make the big leagues. College football players—with rare exceptions—understand they can’t play in the NFL until they’ve matured physically into grown men.

The best players in college basketball aren’t fully invested. They’re biding their time, often playing for themselves rather than their teams, keeping one eye on their status for the next NBA draft and one ear bent toward their soon-to-be-agent. This is why college basketball has the bleakest and most vulnerable future of the major sports.

The erosion has been gradual. If someone gains four pounds a year, it’s difficult to see. But after ten years, you go back and look at an old photograph and you can’t believe it’s the same person. That’s college basketball: a gradual erosion that’s easy to overlook.

Up close, it doesn’t look that bad. A lot of the arenas are packed; there’s talent and excitement in many small college towns. I get that. But if you pull back a little, you see the erosion. These guys are overcoached and overregulated. They’re stifled within the system by practice restrictions and control-freak coaches. One of the most laughable arguments for keeping kids in school comes from those college coaches, who feed the media the line about college being an alleyway to becoming a man and preparing properly for the NBA. We all know where they’re coming from—hell, it’s their business to make us believe that—but that doesn’t mean we can’t call it what it is: pure garbage.

It reminds me of this old joke:

Who’s the only guy who could hold Michael Jordan under 20?

Dean Smith
.

It would be great for everybody if basketball stars were interested in astrophysics or biomechanics or molecular biology, but
they aren’t. They’re interested in basketball the way young prodigy tennis players are interested in tennis and young prodigy entrepreneurs are interested in innovation. At the highest level of commitment, there’s not a whole lot of room for anything else.

Is college basketball as an industry really better served by having kids who have absolutely zero interest academically spending two semesters on campus? These guys are no part of the university community except for on the basketball court—how does that make sense? What industry thrives when the best people aren’t interested in being there?

It’s a bad business model, pure and simple. It’s unsustainable.

To put it another way: college basketball has become the apartment complex of big-time American sports, and nobody wants to be in an apartment. Everyone wants to be in a nice condo, or they want to own a house, so there’s resentment when you’re the guy who’s forced to sit in a shabby apartment when you have the means and the aptitude to own a house. It’s athletic red-lining.

There’s a mythology built up around college basketball, and it all centers on three weeks in March.

The tournament—complete with everyone’s obsession with their brackets and fifteen seeds beating two seeds and all that—has served to mask many of college basketball’s flaws. The regular-season television ratings aren’t strong. The quality of play has declined, in part because everyone—coaches, fans, media, the players themselves—knows the best players have one foot out the door. The 2012–13 season, which saw the top ten change drastically
week by week, wasn’t a fluke. That’s the new normal in college hoops.

We hear about all the high school kids who would ruin their lives by declaring for the draft, losing their college eligibility, and never making it big in the NBA. Two things: (1) give them the option to go to college after the draft, the way baseball’s draft works; (2) that’s why player-personnel guys have jobs—to determine who can and can’t play in the league. Let the market work.

There might be washouts, but no more than there are now. Sebastian Telfair, a New York City high school legend, is often put forth as an argument against allowing players to go from high school to the NBA. Telfair was a first-round pick straight out of high school who struggled his first few years before gaining some traction in the league.

He’s your example? Really? Telfair makes $1.5 million a year doing what he loves. He’s got plenty of money to pursue a college education if he so chooses. And he’s a bust? If he’s a bust, there’s no industry in the world with a better downside. He’s the cautionary tale? If he’s a cautionary tale, that’s not a very scary place.

There isn’t some mythical alleyway strewn with failures.

There’s a litany of great players who have not only gone directly from high school to the NBA but excelled. Let’s break down their attributes. LeBron is one of the smartest basketball players ever to play. Kobe, by any standard, is one of the shrewdest, most competitive, and hardest-working athletes in the past thirty years. Flip Saunders told me Garnett is by far the smartest basketball player he ever coached. Tyson Chandler is one of the most intelligent and socially aware athletes in any sport—just look at his charity work after Hurricane Sandy.

These guys are not desperate dropouts. They’re four of the most worldly and composed athletes in any sport. It’s unthinkable
and demeaning that they would be forced to attend a year of college simply because a group of people with a vested interest in promoting and profiting from the NCAA
as a business
has decided it knows what is best for them.

That’s paternalistic and demeaning—not to mention disingenuous. It’s based on assumptions involving race and perceived impoverishment. In almost every case, it’s older white guys—the media, college coaches, David Stern—telling young black kids what’s best for them.

You grow in college, sure—we all understand that. But why are young basketball prodigies treated differently than prodigies in other fields? I had a conversation with Andrew Luck in which he told me professors at Stanford
encourage
geniuses with the next big idea to get out of college and pursue those ideas in the private sector. The idea is more important than the education. For technological geniuses, the private sector is the big leagues. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg was smart to leave Harvard and head for Silicon Valley, and the same principle holds for Kevin Durant or Derrick Rose.

They’re all prodigies, so why is one exalted for his independence and the others are forced into a paternalistic system that pretends to know what’s best for them? The basketball prodigies are patted on the head and told their dreams of going straight from college to the NBA signify an unwillingness to work hard and learn the game. It’s racial coding, plain and simple, and it’s complete garbage.

There’s a belief that these young kids need to be protected from the industry. It’s just wrong. The truth is, by the time they’re 18 or 19, they know the system inside and out. They know every marketing executive at Adidas and Nike. They know the difference between legitimate agents and street agents. They know how to deal with parasitic coaches.

They know the whole story, and they’re smart enough and savvy enough to handle it.

Mike Dunleavy Sr. told me face to face that his son, Mike, left Duke early because he couldn’t play against top talent every day in college and he didn’t want to risk his earning potential by getting hurt. Doc Rivers’s son, Austin, left Duke after his freshman year because every NBA executive knew he was ready to play the game at the highest level and get paid accordingly. These aren’t downtrodden, impoverished kids making these decisions. These are the sons of
NBA coaches
. They have access to the best advice in the world, they come from wealthy families, and they know the importance of education. They’re not leaving college early because they’re desperate; they’re leaving early because they’re smart.

It’s about hopes and dreams and talent, not a blind and ignorant rush to overcome impoverishment.

Shabazz Muhammad is a classic example. He would have been a top-five pick in the 2012 draft; instead the one-year rule put him at UCLA, where he seemed only intermittently interested in the college game. After his final game at Pauley Pavilion, UCLA coach Ben Howland provided a welcome—and rare—hit of honesty. He said Muhammad had played his last game for the Bruins, and that’s how it should be. No phony talk about the benefits of college or the purity of the game.

Howland’s message was clear:
Muhammad did his time
.

That’s all it was: a one-year obligation. What did UCLA get out of it? An okay season, nothing special, certainly nothing close to what the prognosticators expected at the beginning of the season. Muhammad had a good season, certainly nothing transcendent. The lasting memory of his career at UCLA is probably going to be his reaction to teammate Larry Drew’s last-second shot to
beat Washington. Muhammad looked irritated that he didn’t get the last shot, and he wanted no part of his teammates’ celebration.

What did Howland get out of it? Fired. The expectations, built largely on the false premise that Muhammad could become a transcendent player, were too big to meet.

To say the sport has the bleakest outlook is not the same as saying it won’t survive. Boxing is still around, but it was once huge and has since eroded. Galveston used to be bigger than Houston. JC Penney still exists; it just doesn’t have the future of Amazon.com. College basketball isn’t going anywhere, but it doesn’t have a God-given right to a spot near the top of the pecking order of American sports.

Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds was recently quoted as saying the sport of college basketball is in shambles. He thinks the sport is being squeezed for publicity because of scheduling. It’s competing with the NFL and the NBA, and Dodds wondered if it would help the sport if it moved to a later start.

Let’s look at college basketball like a business. What industry thrives when the best employees aren’t interested in being there? Let’s pretend college basketball is a steakhouse. By Dodds’s reasoning, if more people know about the steak in the steakhouse, business will pick up. He’s missing the point. It’s not a publicity problem; it’s a
steak
problem.