Sports Media Review by Jonathan Weiler

Sunday, July 2, 2006
11:38:00 AM EDT

John Kincaid of ESPN radio is often hit or miss. But, this morning he scored a direct hit on the stay-in-school arguments regarding future NBA players. In talking about LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony’s imminent contract extensions, for five years, $80 million, Kincaid went after the absurd logic of basketball’s “stay-in-school” crowd. Kincaid noted that Anthony, who left in 2003 after leading Syracuse to the national title during his freshman year, will now make sixteen million dollars a year, while his class is just graduating. Of course, LeBron never went to college and, as Kincaid pointed out, we can see how that’s hurt his game. Kincaid had three main criticisms of the stay-in-school mantra.

1) That it’s a bad decision for players. As Anthony and LeBron demonstrate, that’s a matter of perspective. Yes, there are certainly players who probably would have been better off going to college while their bodies and games matured, but Kevin Garnett, Jermaine O’Neal, Tracy McGrady, Kobe Bryant, Amare Stoudamire and LeBron are not among them, not to mention guys like Carmelo who only stuck around briefly.

There’s no meaningful sense, financial or otherwise, in which these players, as a group, would have been served by extra time in school. More on that below

2) That the game is diminished by the presence of 18-year olds in the NBA. Though Kincaid mocked this argument without elaborating, this argument has never made sense to me. If the players aren’t good, they’ll sit on the bench for a couple of years, like Jermaine and McGrady, making money, practicing against NBA players and learning the game the way it’s actually played in the NBA. And, if they’re sitting on the bench, or playing a few minutes a night, how exactly are they hurting the quality of play? Was the league better off when the Chuck Nevitts of the world were the 11th or 12th men on a roster? The infusion of good young players has only meant that the depth of talent extended further down a roster than it had previously. Unless, that is, the player was good enough to play immediately, like LeBron, in which case it’s hard to see how the quality of play in the league would have been diminished.

3) Finally, that the stay-in-school crowd is looking out for the players’ best interests. Kincaid regards this as a crock. I mostly do, too. Surely, there are coaches andcommentators who really think it’s in a player’s interest to go to college, at least for a while. But, if they’re likely to be an NBA player, college is, to put it mildly, overrated as a necessary career move, including preparing for life after basketball. Furthermore, it continually goes unexplained by sports media why age limits and college life are so critical to the character and personal development of athletes in football and basketball, but that such concerns never merit attention in hockey or baseball. A couple of weeks ago, the NHL held its annual amateur draft. And, as usual in the first round, there were a parade of teenagers chosen, including Canes’ star Erik Staal’s 17 year old younger brother. Of course, the sensation of the 2005 draft was the then 17-year old Sidney Crosby. This is par for the course in hockey. Likewise, baseball sees a stream of high school players drafted every year, again, without comment by sports media about the potential danger of foregoing college to the health and welfare of these athletes.

Why would this be? One possible explanation is that basketball and football are multi-billion dollar NCAA enterprises. In other words, there is a powerful financial interest in making sure that those entities are stocked with as much talent as possible. The stakes for NCAA hockey and baseball (though college baseball’s profile is increasing) are dramatically lower. Does it follow that every sports media type takes marching orders from the NCAA concerning what to make a fuss about? Of course not. But, the fact is, as Kincaid suggested this morning, there is a strong self-interest in the arguments for staying in school by NCAA officials and coaches and by the professional leagues that maintain close relationships with the NCAA. And, in the absence of an equally compelling self-interest on the part of those who think the stay-in-school arguments are vastly overblown, media types are likely to pass along what amounts to a one-sided conversation about the issue.

Another possible explanation is race. I don’t want to keep repeating myself, but I will -when I suggest race is a factor, it doesn’t mean that I think every advocate for staying in school is a racist. But, it is noteworthy that African-American players dominate the NBA and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the NFL. By contrast, there are almost no players of color in the NHL and, as has been well-documented, the percentage of African-Americansin Major League Baseball has slipped into the single digits. It may be subtle, it may be unconscious, but there remains a much greater concern about untamed, insufficiently disciplined African-American youth than there is about non-Black athletes and it’s certainly possible that this partly explains the undeniable double-standard about premature professionalism in the NBA and NFL compared to hockey and baseball. 

About a year ago, when the NBA and the players union were haggling over Commissioner’s Stern proposed age limit, I heard two revealing exchanges on 850 the buzz, the triangle area’s premier sports radio station. The first was an exchange between host Morgan Patrick (a big hockey and NASCAR guy) and a caller. In that exchange, the subject of race as a factor in discussions of age limits came up. The caller bristled at the suggestion that race had anything to do with the proposed limits for the NBA and the absence of any such proposal in the NHL. The caller remarked angrily: “if age limits were proposed for the NHL, no one would be talking about race then?” Indeed. Perhaps no one would. But, the point is, of course, that we’ve been talking about professional immaturity and what to do about it in basketball for years, and the topic never receives an airing of any kind in hockey. So, the caller’s point would be a good one if it bore any relationship at all to the reality of the conversation. Much as a segment of the sports radio public likes to believe that a racial double standard redounds to the detriment of whites, the reality remains that, implicitly, young Black athletes are treated as a potential menace in need of close supervision and grooming in a way that whites aren’t.

The second revealing exchange, also on 850 the buzz around the same time, took place between host Adam Gold (one of the best in the business, by the way) and Mike DeCorsi, senior basketball writer for the Sporting News.  In support of the age limits, DeCorsi animatedly lectured Gold (who didn’t disagree) about the perils of early entry into the NBA. And, appealing to high schoolers’ self-interest, DeCorsi said that of 60 players in the NBA making seven million dollars a year or more, only 8 were American players who never went to college. DeCorsi repeated, over and over again, that if these guys had the facts, they wouldn’t make such bad decisions. It’s a good thing DeCorsi isn’t advising these guys on their bad decisions. Because, unless more than 1 in 7.5 players in the NBA is an American high schooler (I'll save you the trouble - there are few high schoolers than that), then the only conclusion to be drawn from DeCorsi’s data is that high schoolers are disproportionately more likely to make big money in the NBA than the post high schoolers. 

Finally, though Kincaid didn’t mention it this morning, it passed with no commentary that Commissioner Stern decided this Spring to lower the age limit in the NBA’s developmental league from 19 to 18. Now think about that for a minute. If there is a population of players whose non-basketball welfare requires more attention, do you think it’s blue-chip high schoolers who would otherwise be headed to the NBA (like Ohio State bound Greg Oden, who would surely have been the Number 1 pick in the 2006 draft), or players who might be closer to the margins of professional competitiveness? If players aren’t mature enough to play in the NBA, why is it fine for them to throw away a college education to play in the NBDL? Could it be that Stern’s self-interest in the NBDL’s talent pool trumps his otherwise famous concern for the welfare of America’s teenagers?

Hats off to Kincaid for not taking these arguments at face value.

 

 

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