First, let’s straight away rid ourselves of the notion that Georgia and Mark Richt are immune from this discussion. It’s true that no Georgia player has been unloading firearms around Athens lately, but for the most part all programs are dipping into the same pool when it comes to recruiting top talent.

I struggle with a cynical response to all of this. Is it that coaches have a difficult time identifying character issues, or do they have a problem overlooking those issues? After all, if you pass on someone due to character issues, not only do you risk being "known as the person that denied Johnny a scholarship", but you also risk the prospect winding up down the road at a regional or conference rival. Then you get to answer that other question: why can’t you recruit top talent?

Like most, I find it hard to believe that coaches are/were using text messages or even evaluation visits to brush up on a prospect’s character. They’re not hanging out with the kid’s friends or observing how they approach schoolwork. The extent of communication or observation that would be necessary to get a real sense on someone’s character goes well beyond any reasonable limit. There are teachers who see these kids every day who don’t have a handle on the real character of many of their students.

Fulmer does make a valid point when he says that, "it’s hard sometimes to find out information about them because people aren’t completely honest with you about them." Recruits (and their parents) are increasingly savvy about packaging and parceling out information.

So what to do? Willingham mentions using a "service" to get information, but I’m not sure how far that goes. With the amounts at stake, I could almost see programs placing private detectives on retainer to do the digging. NFL teams do it. The only difference is the age of the players – there’s something borderline creepy about tracking an 18-year-old. You don’t want to be the first program caught snooping around its prospects, but are we not far away from the point where that becomes a necessity?

It’ll be here before you know it, and it’ll go by too quickly as it always does. So long as everyone stays well and out of trouble, we should have something worth anticipating this year. Countdown clock coming soon.

You almost have to pity Gamecock delusion because, well, reality isn’t a very fun thing to consider. When a moment of clarity arrives for the Gamecock fan, it isn’t pretty.

This screed is what happens when a Gamecock reaches the breaking point. If you hadn’t noticed, it hasn’t been a very successful year all-around in Columbia (even by South Carolina standards).

You f#!king suck, man.

Here’s how your sorry ass stacks up in SEC conference play: football, 3-5; men’s basketball, 5-11; baseball (prior to the UT series), 13-14; softball, 8-18; women’s basketball, 4-10; volleyball, 7-13; men’s tennis, 1-10; and women’s tennis, 5-6. The only team, in fact, at the entire school with a winning SEC record is women’s soccer, which eked out a 5-4-2 record.

…Oh, you started off talking all kinds of s#!t. Conference championships in football. New recruits and transfers in basketball. Best infield in the nation in baseball and the program’s best-ever slugger. And yet, man did you ever fall on your face in front of everybody, over and over again, week after week, loss after loss.

With that sad existence as the alternative, it’s understandable that a certain level of rationalization and detachment is required to keep South Carolina fans from crying themselves to sleep each night.

The NCAA membership has maintained an odd duality when it comes to the 1-A football postseason. On one hand, they disclaim any role or even influence in the process that determines the BCS champion. True enough. On the other hand, the NCAA is granted some oversight such as the requirement that a team must win at least six games in order to accept a bowl invitation.

Why?

Though bowls started out as a tourist attraction, along the way we’ve attached the implication that a bowl bid is some kind of reward for which only certain teams should be eligible. If at their core the bowls are just business arrangements between teams, conferences, television, and organizers, why put restrictions on the participant pool? This restriction might mean that there won’t be enough teams to fill all of the bowls certified by the NCAA.

In any season there are several big-name teams who sit on the postseason sidelines. Even with a depressed or angry fan base, these teams might be more attractive in terms of attendance, name recognition, television appeal, and publicity for the bowl. You think a Notre Dame team even at 3-8 wouldn’t be a bigger draw for a lower-tier bowl than, say, Florida Atlantic?

It’s not like 6-6 or even 7-5 is a season for the books. If we’re going to keep this traditional, quirky, and great postseason based around bowls (and it looks as if we are), throw off the restrictions on the marketplace and let all teams regardless of record compete for a spot in these exhibition games.

I’ve put my two cents in about the one-and-done rule before, and I know it’s easy to tell David Stern and Myles Brand that the chickens have come home to roost.

But the NCAA isn’t the only party that “would rather have the money the Mayos of the world can generate.” Mayo and the people around him have been bad news since 2005, but Tim Floyd wasn’t about to return the present that was given to him in 2006. AD Mike Garrett didn’t step in, even in the wake of the Reggie Bush mess, to question the recruiting of a very shady player. Mayo was worth quite a bit of money to the Trojans also.

When Brandon Coutu was selected late in the seventh round of the 2008 NFL draft, he became the 40th Bulldog from a Mark Richt team to be drafted. Since 2002 Georgia has had as many as eight and no fewer than four players taken in each draft. There have been six first round selections, but only one Bulldog (Tim Jennings) has been drafted in the first or second rounds of the three most recent drafts.

2002 (8 total):

First round: Charles Grant
Third round: Will Witherspoon
Fourth round: Randy McMichael, Terreal Bierria
Fifth round: Jermaine Phillips, Verron Haynes
Seventh round: Josh Mallard, Tim Wansley

2003 (7 total):

First round: Jonathan Sullivan, George Foster
Second round: Boss Bailey, Jon Stinchcomb
Third round: Musa Smith
Sixth round: Tony Gilbert
Seventh round: J.T. Wall

2004 (4 total):

First round: Ben Watson
Second round: Sean Jones
Fourth round: Robert Geathers, Bruce Thornton

2005 (6 total):

First round: Thomas Davis, David Pollack
Second round: Reggie Brown, Odell Thurman
Third round: David Greene
Fourth round: Fred Gibson

2006 (7 total):

Second round: Tim Jennings
Third round: Leonard Pope
Fourth round: Max Jean-Gilles
Fifth round: Greg Blue, Demario Minter
Sixth round: Kedric Golston
Seventh round: D.J. Shockley

2007 (4 total):

Third round: Quention Moses, Charles Johnson
Fourth round: Martrez Milner
Sixth round: Charles Shackleford

2008 (4 total):

Fifth round: Marcus Howard
Sixth round: Thomas Brown
Seventh round: Chester Adams, Brandon Coutu

Defensive Line U.

To no one’s surprise, the Bulldogs have cranked out defensive linemen and defensive backs like few others. Nearly half (18) of Georgia’s 40 picks have come from those two units. The overall offense / defense split isn’t as drastic as some might expect (17 vs. 22), but the difference is in the first two rounds: eight defensive picks versus four from the offense. Given their relatively limited role on the field, it could be argued that Georgia has been most productive in terms of draft picks at the tight end spot.

Quarterback: 2
Tailbacks and fullbacks: 4
Tight ends: 4
Receivers: 2
Offensive linemen: 5
Defensive linemen: 9
Linebackers: 4
Defensive backs: 9
Kickers: 1

Stating the obvious

The past three drafts haven’t been as kind to the Bulldogs. From 2001 through 2005, the Bulldogs had at least one first round pick. They haven’t had one since, and Tim Jennings in 2006 has been Georgia’s only selection from the top two rounds since 2005. This slump is very likely to change as soon as the 2009 draft, but the results of the 2007 and 2008 drafts help to illustrate that there was more to the struggles of 2006 into 2007 than just the quarterback transition. It’s impressive that Georgia has sustained a high level of play over some lean draft years, but when you look over the national champions of the past few years high draft picks figure prominently. Having a few first round picks doesn’t necessarily lead to titles, but the inverse is usually true.

Draft Picks 2002-2005

Draft Picks 2006-2008

Terry Bowden commends the ACC for considering a 9-game conference schedule, and I agree with him.

If we’re going to keep the college football postseason unchanged, the one title a team has complete control over is its conference championship. Yet as conference expansion has pushed membership in several conferences from eight to twelve members, conference schedules in most cases haven’t grown in response. The PAC 10 and Big East are the only BCS conferences in which all teams play each other.

Playing eight out of ten or eleven other schools might seem good enough, but the quirks of scheduling can mean that a conference champion hasn’t necessarily played the best competition that the conference has to offer. Last season’s SEC champion, LSU, didn’t have to play Georgia. The 2006 ACC champion, Wake Forest, didn’t play Miami. Ohio State won the Big 10 in 2006 without playing Wisconsin. Georgia avoided a 10-2 Alabama team in 2005. It doesn’t always work out that way of course, but not all schedules within a particular conference are created equal.

While some schools have used the 12th game to improve their nonconference schedules, others have used them to pad the schedule with an additional easy home game (and given what gets rewarded in college football, I can’t blame them). It might be impossible to get nationwide consensus on tougher scheduling, but it is an issue that can be tackled conference by conference. Two of them have already done so, and the ACC is considering heading down that direction (along with an 18-game conference basketball schedule!). The occasional marquee nonconference game might seem like an appealing alternative, but there is still room on the schedule for those if a team is willing to give up some of its lighter fare.

Bowden’s money quote:

Isn’t it funny how protecting the integrity of the regular season is so dadgum important when it comes to a playoff, but it doesn’t mean squat when it comes to the teams we actually play?

Perfect…right down to the classic Bowden "dadgum".

It’s a strange question given the win-or-lose nature of sports: is the team with the best record the best team? In the context of a conference or league where teams play all or most of the others, that conclusion is more than reasonable. But in a division of hundreds of teams with at most 14 games for any one team the record becomes a less reliable indicator.

I ask this question in response to a question raised by Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops (hat tip as always to Get the Picture) about undefeated teams in a plus-one scenario.

"(The ‘plus-one’ is) a good scenario when there’s an odd number of teams with no losses or one loss," Stoops said last fall. "It doesn’t make sense in years like 2000 when we won a national championship and were the only team with no losses. Why should we have to beat all the one-loss teams?"

Stoops’ meaning is obvious: the record defines the quality of the team. Your first instinct is to agree with him. Oklahoma won all of their games, so why should some one-loss team get a pass for losing? And then you remember Utah or Hawaii. Both were undefeated (in the regular season anyway), but it’s hard to imagine June Jones or Urban Meyer making the case that they were above playing any of those inferior one-loss teams.

So record, even for teams playing at the same classification, can’t be an absolute indicator of superiority. Fine. It’s still accepted in our system that in most cases record trumps any other metric. Without an improbable Pittsburgh win over West Virginia, last year’s national champion would have never had the opportunity to play for the title. Why? LSU had two losses while Ohio State and West Virginia would have had just one. It didn’t matter that both LSU losses came in overtime to bowl-bound conference opponents. 1 is less than 2 or, in this case, greater than 2.

I don’t necessarily consider this reality a flaw in college football; after all, the point is to win games. Record is as close as we have to an objective measure for so many teams with relatively few points of comparison between them, but it isn’t a perfect indicator. We’ve tried to take that reality into account in the BCS whether it was the overt strength of schedule adjustment early on or the current built-in adjustments of the computer polls. Even human pollsters (consciously or otherwise) sometimes consider schedule in some rough form.

That brings us to Dennis Dodd who unfortunately captures a meme we’re going to hear a lot this preseason. One, Ohio State is good enough and has a favorable enough schedule to skate through a weak Big 10 and remain in the national title picture even with a loss to Southern Cal. Two, Georgia might be a great team, but their schedule is just too tough to expect them to come through unscathed. Agree or disagree with his analysis, but his conclusion makes sense when you look at things in the context of the pursuit of the unblemished record.

Ohio State could lose three games and be irrelevant in the title discussion, but that hasn’t been the way to bet lately. And if they do beat Southern Cal and run the table, I’ll be the first to welcome them to the BCS championship. The thing of it is that Dodd seems to be setting up his apology in advance for having to rank Ohio State near the top if they sweep the Big 10 schedule but lose to the Trojans. Given the way we decide things in college football, it’s an entirely reasonable approach.

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Les Miles stuck his neck out last summer and made some pretty bold comments about LSU’s schedule relative to Southern Cal’s. But you know what? It worked. LSU was just one of a number of two-loss teams, but there they were at the end. Mark Richt hasn’t had to say a word about Georgia’s schedule; pundits like Dodd are doing the work for him. If Georgia survives its gauntlet, how can anyone using Dodd’s logic deny them a shot at the national title?

In a regular season of 162, 82, or even 30 games, the difference of one loss between two teams is insignificant. In a 12-game season, it’s a chasm. Not to turn everything into the scheduling debate (here we go again…), I’m left with this question: is it rational for a contender from a major conference to schedule challenging non-conference games? Why is Ohio State playing Southern Cal when a diet of mid-major schools from the state of Ohio would get the job done with less risk?

First, let’s get the good news out of the way. Georgia came out just fine in the APR numbers released on Tuesday. In fact, it was better than good: Georgia was among the SEC’s top three in football and men’s and women’s basketball. The football team led the SEC. Bottom line is that none of Georgia’s programs face sanctions, and it looks as if all programs have student-athletes making satisfactory progress towards graduation. Cool.

Now on to the SEC. All SEC football programs met the minimum APR requirements. Tennessee and South Carolina however did not meet requirements in men’s basketball, and it cost each a single scholarship for one season.

Nationwide, 17 Division I-A football programs will be penalized. Only two of those schools – Kansas and Washington State – were from BCS conferences. It makes sense when you think about it. Schools in conferences outside the BCS:

• Are often lower-quality colleges to begin with. Directional State is typically not going to be your state’s flagship of higher learning.
• Have to take risks in order to compete. A weaker program can get better in a hurry by taking a chance on an academic or character risk that the big boys can afford to pass over. If you’re taking more risks on marginal students, chances are it will come back to bite your APR score. I wonder if this point affected Kansas’ place among the penalized. Historically a weak program, Coach Mangino might have had to take some academic risks in order to raise the competitiveness of his team.
• Have less money to throw at academic resources. The $2.2 million Georgia spent at the Sugar Bowl could just about fund some smaller football programs. The large, typically public, schools that make up the BCS conferences invest quite a bit in keeping student-athletes eligible, and they would have the flexibility to do what it takes to raise dangerously low APRs. Huge well-organized tutoring programs, computers, dedicated facilities…these are all luxuries when most athletic departments struggle to break even.

Given those built-in disadvantages, it’s no shock that though the BCS conferences have over half of the Football Bowl Subdivision membership, they get a disproportionately low share of the APR penalties. The news isn’t much better on the basketball side of things. There are an awful lot of HBCUs on the list of penalized schools.

If further study determines that the APR does in fact make things much tougher for the little guy than for State U., don’t expect those schools to stay quiet about it for very long. And, just damn, hasn’t Temple suffered enough already?

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. San Jose State coach Dick Tomey was one of the first to beat the drum:

“There’s such a difference between the B.C.S. schools and those who are not,” Tomey said. “I don’t think it’s an intended difference, but it highlights financial things like not being able to throw money at the problem and solve it very quickly.”

WAC commissioner Karl Benson also spoke up for the non-BCS conferences.

“When the A.P.R. first was introduced, I think all of our schools took it to heart and put in plans to face it and to fight it,” said Karl Benson, the commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference. “But I know that we may not have had the same resources that others have had.”

Many of us, myself included, have made a point out of the fact that the NFL draft didn’t seem to hit Georgia all that hard. But in reality, only three SEC teams had more players taken than Georgia:

Alabama: 0 draft picks

Arkansas: 6 draft picks (1st round (2), 3rd round, 7th round (3))

Auburn: 5 draft picks (2nd round (2), 3rd round, 4th round, 7th round)

Florida: 2 draft picks (1st round, 3rd round)

Georgia: 4 draft picks (5th round, 6th round, 7th round (2))

Kentucky: 4 draft picks (4th round (2), 6th round, 7th round)

LSU: 6 draft picks (1st round, 3rd round (3), 4th round, 7th round)

Ole Miss: 0 draft picks

Mississippi State: 0 draft picks

South Carolina: 1 draft pick (7th round)

Tennessee: 3 draft picks (1st round, 3rd round, 5th round)

Vanderbilt: 3 draft picks (1st round, 3rd round, 5th round)

16 picks in the first 3 rounds isn’t bad for a conference, but it is down a bit (-24%) for the SEC from 21 selections a year ago. Georgia fans might be giddy about all of the returning talent, but they’re not alone.

I was glad to see Kyle sign on to the "embracing expectations" approach to the 2008 season that I put forth back in January. With a successful spring practice behind us and the major injury bug dodged so far (knocking wood), I see no reason to shy away from title talk.

There are some very key points in Kyle’s reasoning. This is the biggest one as far as I’m concerned:

…do we really want the luxury of languishing in the relative obscurity of lowered expectations if it means taking the chance of turning out like underappreciated Auburn in 2004?

Exactly. If college football were a law school class, the 2004 Auburn season would be one of the landmark cases studied every year. It provides insight into so much about the sport – everything from the technical (the perfect storm of Chizik and Borges) to the personal (the redemption of Jason Campbell) to its national implications. Even this far removed from the 2004 season, we’re still talking through those implications.

There is one line of thought, expressed by Kyle himself last week, that the lesson had to do with the consequences of a weak nonconference schedule. I’ve been more of the opinion that Auburn’s schedule mattered much less than the fact that Southern Cal and Oklahoma were put on a collision course from the moment the 2003 season ended. Yes, the Narrative.

2007 provides another example. Last summer LSU and Southern Cal were the teams of destiny at the top of the preseason polls. Les Miles cemented the Narrative by calling out Southern Cal’s schedule and conference. Though Stanford made sure that the Tiger-Trojan championship game would never take place, I have to think that LSU’s #2 preseason position in the polls made a difference when the pollsters chose them as the first two-loss team to play for the BCS championship. No one was talking about Kansas or Missouri last July. LSU’s presence in the preseason national title discussion certainly didn’t hurt their position even after a typically fatal late-season loss.

Poll position matters in racing and college football. If you want to have the best chance at a title run, start as high as you can. Counting on higher-ranked teams to lose and clear the path works sometimes, but it can get very crowded at the top. It’s a somewhat unusual situation this year in that there really isn’t a clear preseason #1, so getting an early nose ahead of the rest of the field might really matter this season. There’s definitely danger in having the bulls-eye on your back, and Doug’s very right that it can overwhelm a team. The teams that are able to use those expectations as motivation instead of as distraction have become some of our better college football champions. Why not Georgia?

This isn’t good news for Jim Delany. It’s an issue I’ve heard Cowherd talk about several times – shifting demographics spell big trouble for northern football. The problem isn’t only demographic. Not only are people moving south and west away from Rust Belt states; it stands to reason that few student-athletes from warm-weather states would choose a worse climate away from home.

Of course there’s plenty of talent outside the Sun Belt, but how many power programs can it sustain? Is the Big 10 headed towards looking like the ACC of the 1990s with everyone playing for second place?

Two programs missing from the second list – Penn State and Michigan – might really be at a crossroads in terms of their ability to keep the pipeline full. It doesn’t help that JoePa is having to dismiss talk that his contract status is another factor hurting Penn State recruiting.

By now you’ve probably heard about Georgia’s 10-10 tie in Sunday’s series finale at LSU. Though the tie snaps Georgia’s SEC winning streak at 10 games, the Diamond Dawgs can still claim an 11-game SEC unbeaten streak. The team sits at 14-3-1 in the league which puts them with a comfortable 3.5 game lead over South Carolina, the closest team in either division. There are still series remaining with Florida, Vanderbilt, and Ole Miss – three of the better teams in the conference – so Georgia has the opportunity to shut the door on several of the other contenders.

LSU isn’t having the best season, but it’s still a significant accomplishment to take an SEC road series. Ties suck, but they beat the alternative of losing.

Ties aren’t all bad. It all depends on context. The last draw by a Georgia football team came at Auburn in 1994. In Eric Zeier’s last attempt at a legacy, the Bulldogs scored two second-half touchdowns to erase a 23-9 Auburn lead. As we watched and exhaled as Auburn’s last-second field goal attempt sailed wide, the tie didn’t feel so bad. The Dawgs had ended Auburn’s 20-game winning streak, and they had done it by getting off the mat in the home stadium of a rival. Not bad, though a win instead of a tie in that game surely would have meant a bowl bid in my senior season of 1994. I’m not bitter though, not at all.

Back to baseball. A lot can be said for a tie in Sunday’s game. Saturday’s game was wild enough with Georgia blowing an 8-1 lead before winning it in the 9th. Most teams would have been happy to get out of town with the series in hand. Down 10-3 on Sunday, you couldn’t blame the Dawgs for looking east towards the trip home. It says a lot about this team that they were able 1) to regroup after giving up the lead on Saturday and 2) to come up with seven runs late in the game on Sunday. With a tough schedule remaining, that half-game in the standings could be a very important trump card to hold at the end of the year.

The Senator says that the preseason talk around the Bulldogs has an "uncharted territory" feel to it, and I have to agree. It’s a challenge for the team, and excitement and optimism can seem like kryptonite to a fan base full of Munson disciples.

But a high preseason ranking wouldn’t be a first for a Mark Richt team. The Bulldogs were a consensus #3 in 2004, and they even started #1 according to the Sporting News. The outcome of 2004 notwithstanding, a lot was expected of the final year for Greene and Pollack. The Senator’s right, though: there’s just a different feeling about the hype surrounding this year’s team. Why the difference? I see two reasons, and both have to do with the aftermath of the 2003 season.

1. Momentum
2. The post-2003 college football landscape

Momentum. Though Georgia played in the 2003 SEC Championship, they didn’t finish the season well. They "won" the SEC East after an obscure tiebreaker broke a three-way tie with Tennessee and Florida. Then they got steamrolled by LSU in the Dome. Finally, the Dawgs escaped the Capital One Bowl in overtime against an ordinary Purdue team after blowing a lead in extraordinary fashion. It was 10-win season, and I’ll always consider that defense one of the best of the modern Georgia era, but that was a pretty shaky way to end the season. Though Greene and Pollack returned, there wasn’t much momentum from 2003 into 2004.

Contrast that picture with the current state of the program. Georgia has an active seven-game winning streak. They closed the season with double-digit wins over rivals Florida, Auburn, and Georgia Tech. Finally, they finished the season with a BCS embarrassment of Hawaii which earned Georgia the #2 ranking. The momentum began building right away as nearly all of the first looks at the 2008 season had Georgia at or near the top. The momentum has sustained itself through Signing Day and spring practice, and it shows no signs of letting up.

What does 2003 have to do with now? Given the drama towards the end of the 2007 season, the consensus in support of LSU’s championship is strong. Other contenders either didn’t win their conferences (Missouri, Georgia) or lost their bowls (Virginia Tech, Oklahoma, Ohio State). It was a different story of course in 2003 when LSU and Oklahoma played for the BCS championship while Southern Cal claimed the AP title after their bowl win.

The fallout from 2003 immediately established Southern Cal and Oklahoma as the teams to beat heading into 2004. LSU, as defending champion, was somewhat in the picture but was ranked no higher than third by any preseason poll. The Trojans and Sooners were so clearly established as #1 and #2 entering 2004 that even Georgia as #3 generated very little title noise.

(As an aside, I believe the above also explains why discussion of Auburn’s 2004 schedule as a factor keeping them from a shot at the national title is a red herring. No one was passing Southern Cal and/or Oklahoma unless one of those two lost a game. Auburn could have played the Colts, Patriots, and Steelers out of conference and still had no shot for anything better than #3.)

There is no such clarity heading into 2008. Instead the preseason talk has been to identify a pool of about eight contenders. Ohio State will be good again, but two title game losses have pundits nervous about naming them a favorite. Southern Cal will be in the mix as always. Georgia, Texas, Florida, LSU, Oklahoma, and Missouri have just as much place at the table. With a top ranking as much up for grabs this year as ever, why not Georgia?

Without a clear favorite entering the season, it will be interesting to see if that lends itself to greater poll volatility early in the season. Will the polls pick a #1 and stick with them, or will the first few weeks be an audition?

The Florida Factor. I can’t let this post go without mentioning this point. Last summer when everyone was talking about who was and wasn’t a national power, I put down three simple criteria that seemed to hold up. One was that you can’t be under another team’s thumb. Georgia had lost six straight to Florida entering the 2004 season. With that kind of track record in Jacksonville, it was pretty easy to dismiss Georgia as a title contender even at #3. Though it will take a few more wins (consecutive wins would be a big first step) to declare the Gator domination over, the Dawgs are certainly in a much better position vis-à-vis the Gators entering 2008 than they were entering 2004.

The topic of the NBA age limit has come up again, and it continues to puzzle me why the league would want to restrain itself. I don’t know if age limits have really been tested in court. Maurice Clarett was supposed to be the test case for the NFL, and that challenge, um, kind of fizzled out. But let’s say they’re fine and that it’s the NBA’s right to set whatever age limit they want. Why would they?

Fortunately Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has put his thoughts down to give us the first-hand perspective of an NBA owner. He favors an age limit of 22, citing concerns over the maturity of younger players. His concens make sense, but they still come off as "please protect us from ourselves."

Why have NBA teams continued to draft high school players or, lately, one-and-dones? There are only two reasons that make any sense: 1) they are better prospects than older alternatives in the draft and 2) these are likely to be high-profile players who can instantly sell tickets and merchandise and raise the profile of the team. If the young players were a negative for the league, you’d think that fewer would be drafted over time. Watch this year’s draft and tell me if that’s the case.

I don’t buy Cuban’s line that a 22-year-old is more likely able to handle the fame and fortune of the NBA. We’re talking about a lifestyle and sums of money that are incomprehensible for almost all Americans. Being thrust into that situation whether 18 or 22 or 42 is a life change that can’t be understood until you live it.

Cuban replies to some comments by saying that "there are plenty of companies that will only hire college graduates. Others will only hire Phds." True. But those requirements have little if anything to do with maturity. For those companies, a degree or doctorate is a way to establish that the applicant has a minimal skill level or aptitude for the job. An NBA team’s scouting and player evaluation takes care of that.

For the NCAA, this is a great deal. Their product is worth more when high-quality players stick around whether it’s by the players’ own choice or through artifical restraints on the job market. A few years riding the gravy train with someone like LeBron James? Yes, please.

The NCAA gets to play the academic integrity card too, though it’s a small point. A one-and done can breeze through a trivial fall semester and then blow off his spring classes once the season is over. Someone who stays for two seasons must at least pretend to be a serious student for a full academic year and then some. College isn’t and shouldn’t be the NBA’s purgatory.

So we have a deal that’s great for the NCAA and seems to be a step in the right direction for at least one NBA owner. Win-win all around, right? Sure, unless you’re the talented 18-year-old who must go through the motions of pretending to be a college student while taking the NCAA’s vow of poverty for two years instead of working in your chosen profession.

I’d be OK with a system based on what baseball does. They’ve seemed to manage fine without requiring a cup of coffee in college. If someone wants to come out of high school, fine. Let them and the NBA teams take that risk. If a player would rather head to college, require a minimum stay of three years to show a commitment to education and allow the programs some shred of long-range planning.