NBA Prescription: More College, Less Influence for Shoe Companies

The following excerpt is taken from Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN's Page 2. Obviously, the general topic is football. This particular column is dedicated to basketball.

Pro basketball is in an "up" cycle partly because the new collective bargaining agreement forbids high school players from jumping directly to the NBA. The drafting of high school players was an unmitigated disaster for pro basketball -- it's no coincidence the league's decline in television ratings coincided with the arrival of high school kids. The high schoolers have immature games that drag down the quality of the sport: And never forget, quality is the essential feature of all products. With a few exceptions, the only style of play a high school kid knows is hey-look-at-me. Selfish basketball is far less entertaining than the ensemble version -- just consider the difference between last season's Phoenix Suns and New York Knicks.


Plus, by jumping directly to the NBA, 18-year-old prospects fail to go to college and become well-known players about whom fans would be excited. It's this second point that seems haunting, because it means the NBA has spent the past decade depriving itself of stars who might otherwise have come into existence. Yes, LeBron James was terrific in the NBA right out of high school. But James also would have been great coming out of college. The players who have made the high-school-to-NBA transition successfully (Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, a few others) always were bound to become stars. It's the players who did not become stars, because they jumped too young, the NBA has cheated itself of.


Think about Kwame Brown, the high-schooler taken first overall in the 2001 NBA draft. Gifted with incredible physical talent, Brown is an embarrassing underachiever -- plus his personality appears stuck at his 17th birthday, lending him no marketing appeal. Now imagine an alternate path for the same young man. Instead of jumping directly from high school to the NBA, he goes to Kentucky or UCLA or any good basketball college. His game improves, he learns on-court concepts other than brooding selfishness, and off-court he matures in his ability to handle the world. Kwame Brown becomes a nationally known college star. When he's drafted first overall into the NBA, fans are excited. By now, people like me would be saying to my kids, "Wow, Kwame Brown is coming to town, let's get tickets and go see him!" Instead not one person has ever said, "Let's get some NBA tickets to see Kwame Brown," and it seems likely no one ever will.


This squandering of potential NBA stars is especially maddening because the pushing of too-young players into the NBA has been driven foremost by shoe companies. Somehow Nike and Reebok got it into their heads that teen sneaker buyers would identify more with 18-year-old unpolished NBA players enjoying instant wealth more than they would with mid-20s high-quality NBA players. I don't know how this idea arose, since by far the most successful sneaker endorser, Jordan, did not realize his marketing success until he was a mature player in his mid-20s. Perhaps thrusting high school players into the NBA maximized income for Nike and Reebok. But it was a disaster for NBA product quality, and hence hurt ratings.


Now the new league-union agreement mandates draftees be at least 19, a rule intended to require at least one year of college. And you'd hope that even gifted, NBA-bound athletes, after experiencing college for a year, might think, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get an education, maybe I should stick around." You'd also think the shoe companies would be aligning themselves with education over ignorance. Apparently you'd think wrong. According to this New York Times story by Pete Thamel and Thayer Evans, a shoe company consultant has been making the rounds, suggesting to some teenage future NBA prospects that they skip the minimum year of college and play in Europe, then file for the NBA draft. To avoid the horror, the horror, of having to sit in class and think!


The Times didn't connect the dots on this, so allow me. Dot 1: Most players being encouraged not to attend college are African-American. If athletic shoe companies believe African-American males are incapable of handling college coursework, they should state this for the record. Dot 2: Shallowness is a core problem of big-deal athletics. The NBA, NFL and MLB create celebrity athletes looked up to by the young. A few do become role models for an informed, intelligent approach to life -- think Tiki Barber. But most celebrity athletes couldn't tell you what Ernest Hemingway wrote, or what just happened in the Mexican presidential election, if their lives depended on it. Now the NBA is taking the high road, urging its prospects back toward the educational system. The shoe companies are resisting, while street-hustler types have been steering promising basketball prospects to storefront diploma-mill "schools" that make no attempt to teach -- see the Thamel-Evans article on that. In their 2000 book "The Shape of the River," William Bowen and Derek Bok showed that in recent decades African-American career women have closed most of their degrees-earned and income gaps with white career women, while African-American males have made less progress compared to white males. One factor might be that many young black men look up to ill-educated athletes and pop stars, while young black women have role models such as Oprah Winfrey, who constantly emphasizes books and learning. Both the NBA and NCAA need to do far more to educate basketball prospects, if only for the role-model effect on young men. And while we're on this, thanks to Thamel, Evans and their editors for fighting the cultural assumption that it's OK for star athletes to be functional illiterates.


NBA commissioner David Stern is aware of the problems described in the above paragraphs. Recently he said it was wrong that college recruiters are highly restricted in their ability to talk to high school basketball prospects about attending college, but "street runners or shoe representatives" can promise tall teenagers the moon. For Stern to criticize the shoe companies is gutsy, given their business relationship with the league. Perhaps the commissioner has realized shoe firms and pro basketball have divergent interests. Shoe firms might do fine financially by glamorizing minimally-educated prodigy athletes, while the NBA needs to develop quality players and protect its image, lest the league become perceived as an opponent of learning. Stern is floating the idea of the NBA establishing a basketball academy for the top few hundred teen prospects in the United States -- essentially a private high school that would emphasize basketball, but enforce real classroom and graduation standards. This would be preferable to the current system, which actively discourages NBA-bound young men from seeking educations.


MY PERSONAL THOUGHTS: It's hard to disagree with this argument. And I wouldn't dare. I think he brings issues to light that Bill Cosby and others have been saying. Maybe not as abrasive as Mr. Cosby, but fundamentally the same notion.

for the record though, the concept of playing overseas is nothing new. Lebron James was offered $9 million dollars by a team in the Italian league (I believe) to forgo his senior year in high school.

Back to the issue:
I have debated within myself the issue of jumping to the league for instant guaranteed millions as oppossed to getting in the league through the college route. That debate was kind of ended when Stren and the C.B.A. mandated that you had to be a year out of high to become eligible to play in the N.B.A. Considering, the opinion that college can be the best years of your life, I don't see why there is any hesitance to going. And I was perfectly placed nobody in school. Imagine being "the man" on campus and what that could afford you. But if you aren't going to learn anything anyway, I can see why some athelets say, "What's the point!" Especially, when you are going to have millions and the privilege to do things on a regular basis that people dream to experience once in their lifetime.

Let the debate continue...