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Young Players

Don’t Get It

People ask me all the time, if I was coming out ofhigh school today and was a great player, would I even go to college? And the answer is yes, I would go to college.

Realistically, none of these guys are ready for the NBA the first couple of years they come out, not professionally and not personally. The best-possible-case scenarios were Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady, and it still took them three years to become real NBA players. Jermaine O’Neal is a nice kid and a nice player but he’s not The Man yet, and it took him four years plus, and the team that initially invested all that money and time and tutoring in him didn’t even get to reap the benefits. The Toronto Raptors invested everything in McGrady, and he’s in Orlando now. So what kind of sense did that make from a competitive standpoint? You’re not only counting on that guy panning out, but still being with your team when he pans out.

Then there are the guys who get drafted out of high school and don’t make it, like Korleone Young and Leon Smith. And they have no eligibility left to start in college, where they should have started in the first place. Guys now just can’t wait to get to the pros, or even spend the time to make themselves really good players, which is really the best way to guarantee you get paid the maximum amount of money.

It all starts very early now. When I was young, we didn’t have AAU teams. Now, these kids are playing in AAU leagues and they’re in competitive situations all the time. They travel and play on the road. They’ve got adults telling them how great they are all the time. We weren’t getting attention and praise and, in some cases, money from AAU coaches. We didn’t have shoe companies giving us shoes. We didn’t have none of that stuff. So they’re just spoiled rotten from the very beginning. Most of them don’t even know that fifteen years ago NBA teams flew commercial.

But the problem is very, very complex because most of the kids who do go to college aren’t getting what they’ve been promised. There is no significant graduation rate among Division I college athletes anymore, at least not in men’s basketball. Didn’t I just hear during the 2002 NCAA men’s basketball tournament that something like twenty-four or twenty-five out of the sixty-five schools in the field hadn’t graduated a single player within the last five years? That’s ridiculous. What graduation rate? Not giving money—at least a stipend—to these kids who produce all this revenue is a scam anyway. That’s what I’ve always thought. CBS just paid more than $6 billion for the right to televise the games. Who do we think made the tournament worth that much money? Those kids who play made it worth that much. That’s why the NCAA and the networks, and whoever is involved with putting on these games and making all that money, need to figure out a way to give them at least a stipend.

Now, the good old boys used to take the position that these kids were getting tuition, room and board and a good education. But if you look at these graduation percentages, low as they are, you can’t even take the position that they’re getting an education anymore. They’re not graduating. They’re not graduating at all, and the ones who don’t make the pros—which is most of them—are screwed. We’re sending a bunch of dummies out into the real world with no education, with no real way to make themselves attractive candidates for employment, and they’re screwed. That’s all they are. The biggest schools seem like they’re graduating about 10 percent of their players, so this whole thing needs to be reevaluated.

Those kids who go to big schools to play sports but are only reading at fourth- and fifth-grade levels shouldn’t be in Division I colleges in the first place. The recruiters and the admissions people knew every one of their test scores and their GPAs and reading levels before they recruited them. Seriously, how fair is this to the kid? This kid is struggling to make it in high school and he’s going to