NCAA: What early departures REALLY mean

If you’re an Arizona fan, this April may seem like cruelest of months. The Wildcats started the month with a loss to Duke in the NCAA Championship Game, ending an emotional season on a down note. Now, just a few weeks after that loss it seems like all chance of a repeat Final Four run next season is dead.

And your taxes were also due. Where will it end?

Four to five players from this year’s NCAA runner up won’t be back in Tucson when the 2001-02 season tips off next fall. Everyone knew senior Loren Woods was taking his game to the NBA, and more than a few probably suspected one or two members of the ‘Cats talented supporting cast would jump early and join him. But four? Junior Michael Wright, junior Richard Jefferson, sophomore Gilbert Arenas, and sophomore Jason Gardner have all announced their intention to play—or at least try to play—for pay next year.

Of those four, only Gardner hasn’t retained the services of an agent and can, under NCAA rule, return to Arizona before the draft if he doesn’t like what he hears from scouts.

The kneejerk reaction for Arizona fans would be to write off their team’s chances of contending in the Pac-10 already, much less the NCAA. But that would be wildly premature and perhaps even grossly inappropriate. No one is saying all these losses won’t have an effect. They will. It could be ugly early next season for Arizona as they try to develop chemistry between new and inexperienced players. But good teams know how to overcome these things, because they’re a reality of college basketball.

Not only has the university announced no plans to convert McKale Center into a mausoleum between now and next fall, there’s a better than even-money chance the ‘Cats won’t struggle nearly as much as a lot of people are currently predicting.

A college player comes to a school with an extremely limited four-year warranty. The NCAA occasionally grants a fifth year for medical or other reasons, but most scholarship offers are tendered with the realization that four years is it, the max, the limit, period.

Few freshmen start from day one. It happens, but not that often. So, in essence, the typical college career is three years at most—that’s barely enough time to get acquainted.

If the player in question is of NBA caliber—and maybe even if he’s not, but more on that later—he might be gone in two or less. So be it.

So even in the very best of cases, a school will get a talented player for four years. That’s it. There are no five or six or ten-year contracts here. And that limited warranty has all kinds of out clauses.

Long term success isn’t built on recruiting stud NBA-worthy talent, and every college coach who’s worn a whistle for more than a day knows it. It relies on constructing a program with replaceable parts. Some players are better than others, and having talent is almost always a boon, but it’s the system that wins the games and titles, not the individual.

Call me crazy, call it a hunch, but something tells me that Arizona coach Lute Olsen—with four Final Four teams, one national title (’97) and well over 600 career wins—knows a few things about building teams, and they don’t all involve recruiting. Arizona has put its share of underachieving product out there over the years, but 600 plus wins pretty much speaks for itself.

For a better perspective on the whole thing, Arizona boosters should take a break in projecting their collective animus towards Durham, North Carolina, and look at what Duke has done over the last three seasons.

In ’99, the Blue Devils lost the national title game to Connecticut. A few weeks later, the sting was compounded when Trajan Langdon , William Avery, Corey Maggette, and Elton Brand all went pro—Avery, Maggette, and Brand all ahead of schedule. Chris Burgess grumbled his way into obscurity and was last seen somewhere in or near Salt Lake City. That was all she wrote--the Blue Devils were destined for several hard years of rebuilding, second-tier status in the ACC, and early March exits, if they got to the Big Dance at all.

In 2000, Duke won the ACC regular season and tournament titles and got to the NCAA Sweet Sixteen with only one significant senior player.

This year, just two full seasons after the mass exodus, the Blue Devils hoisted championship hardware in both Atlanta (ACC Tournament) and Minneapolis (NCAA).

A few one-year wonders (see: Rhode Island) get hold of great players and make surprise runs now and then, only to slip back into reality after that player graduates or transfers or jumps to the pros. It’s the Dukes, North Carolinas, Kentuckys, and, yes, the Arizonas of the world that don’t shape their long-term fortunes around one or two recruits. These programs recognize the ephemeral nature of the college playing career, and surmount the problem by keeping smart coaches on the bench and building smart systems…and only then recruiting the right players.

So the impact of early departures—at least on solid college programs—is really pretty minimal. The long term damage will be felt in the NBA.

“How many young people are in [the NBA] who, from a maturity standpoint, needed some additional time to grow up?” was Lute Olsen’s rhetorical question just this last week, and he hit a bullseye.

It’s the me-first NBA that’s going to suffer in the long run, and the motley collection of money-grubbers running that league / sideshow either seem to don’t know it or don’t care. The way things are going now, the NBA will be too far gone to save itself by the time the owners stop counting their filthy lucre and take a look around. Yes, NBA fans, no matter if you care to admit it or not, it is that bad.

Just so you know, I’d rather watch an average day of C-SPAN than an NBA game, even though C-SPAN is overweight men with gin-blossom noses and the NBA has cheerleaders. In fact, I haven’t seen more than five minutes of any NBA matchup since my last article on the league, in which I posited that a game between Portland and the Los Angeles Lakers was somehow rigged, and people actually thought I was serious.

It isn’t just maturity in terms of behavior—it’s maturity in terms of playing ability. For every pro-ready Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett, there’s several Koreleone Youngs or Corey Maggettes or William Averys or Chris Washburns, players who will spend most of their “careers” on a bench somewhere and will, at best, somehow keep from doing anything to publicly embarrass themselves or the league. Or, in Washburn’s case, get banned for life for repeated violations of the substance abuse policy.

These young, immature, ill-prepared players are becoming the norm. The NBA’s talent level and image are going steadily downhill, the league has nothing and no one but itself to blame.

Says Olson, “The college game is going to survive. The people who are in trouble are the NBA.”

The NBA addressed its myriad of woes by repealing the illegal defense rule and allowing for zone defenses. In related news, Nero was spotted fiddling away while flames consumed Rome.

Or was that David Stern?