Last week, the AP Preseason All-American teams came out. So if you are keeping score, from the time Gordon Heyward's title-game half-courter missed to the start of this season, games played: zero; AP All-American teams: one. The lowlight, as happens from time to time, was North Carolina's Harrison Barnes' recognition as a First Team All-American ... days before he ever played against live college opposition.
This is, of course, no fault of Barnes'; all he did was play well enough in high school to inspire the hype. And as much as we might be tempted to excoriate the writers, they are merely using recent history as their guide. If we fast forwarded to March, would it shock you to learn Barnes (or another newcomer) was one of the five best players in this country? The writers simply acknowledged that freshmen now emerge not only as players on the college basketball scene, but often as key pieces.
And that brings us to the premise itself. Beyond being a display of faux-credibility for the AP, is there any point in voting for preseason awards at this point? Of course not. An award, by definition, is bestowed for performance or merit. It is recognition, essentially, that "you did this well." So recognizing players for what they might do in the future on a platform they have never been on before is laughable. A process that once had merit has been rendered obsolete by new realities.
This is the conundrum the NCAA faces. College basketball has sold its soul to David Stern and realized a fairly lucrative return in the process. The NBA's age limit rule redirected the stream of young talent back to the NCAA riverbed, but it has washed away any academic credibility the body's student athletes had in the process.
College basketball is now a glorified AAU league. Core players flow in and out of programs so quickly that traditional team building is virtually impossible. Each summer, teams scramble to restock their pantries with another season's worth of groceries, well aware that few of those items will be around to mix with next week's. Only the poorest are growing anything in their own gardens.
Unfortunately, the motivations of all parties point to this system persisting. The NBA enacted the age limit to protect its teams from having to scout and draft high school players. Even just one year of forced college basketball acts as an excellent filter to determine a prospect's viability. In exchange, the NCAA gleefully accepts one-and-dones like a cartel middleman taking his cut.
And then there are the players. They did not have any say in the age limit rule, and if they were to be organized somehow, they would certainly oppose it. But the NCAA's dirtiest secret deters any kind of prep revolution. If college basketball has become an extension of AAU ball, what is to stop Nike, Adidas, or anyone else from starting a league for 18-year-olds to showcase their skills (not to mention develop relationships with the apparel companies) before they are eligible for the NBA? One word: boosters.
For whatever reason, wealthy backers of major programs care deeply whether their schools win in March. But it is not only the depths of their passion they are willing to plumb for these programs; more essentially, it is their bank accounts. I will pass on making irresponsible unproven claims about specific schools, but there is so much smoke around most college basketball hotbeds and high profile recruits that only the most blindly devout would deny the blazing wildfires of corruption raging around the country.
So as the college basketball season cranks into full swing this week, enjoy that McDonald's All-Americans enroll in your school and feign engagement in scholarship. It makes for great television, and I will be doing the same right alongside. But can we stop pretending that, at the sport's highest levels, the entire production is anything nobler than a draft lottery audition?
Corrie Trouw is the founder of Pigskinology.com.
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