Yale Daily News

I think you miss the point that recrited college athletes are generally exploited. They pay for tuition, room and board while bringing in millions of dollars to their colleges and universities.Perhaps colleges should do away with student-athle tes entirely and hire their own professional teams.

to the above commenter: i think you're wrong. i seriously doubt that most major college athletes pay for anything, let alone tuition and/or living in a dorm.

to the columnist:

while your conclusion may be right, your arguments seem weak.

first a minor point -- i think your NFL analogy is off. football is more physically demanding than basketball, but that doesn't mean that there are literally zero high school players who couldn't succeed immediately in the NFL. to give one example, amobi okoye was drafted out of Louisville last year at the age of 19. to give some perspective, oj mayo is going to turn 21 this year, and there are plenty of prep bballers who are 19 or older. the NFL has a college requirement (aka players must be 3 years out of high school) that can supplant any age restrictions on draftees (i think), and while most 19 year olds aren't ready for the NFL, a rare handful might be.

second, i think you fail to point out the top arguments in favor of an NBA age restriction. you make a blanket statement that the age restriction hurts players because it (a) deprives them of an ability to make a living; and (b) disallows them from making a free choice about whether to attend college.

to begin with, (a) is factually incorrect. oj mayo, for example, toyed with the idea of playing professionally overseas for the year in which he would have otherwise attended college. though he ultimately chose USC, he could have made a significant chunk of dough in europe. how is that deprivation of a living?

beyond this fairly microscopic point, though, what you don't emphasize in your article are the causes of the problems the NBA had with prep-to-pros players before the age restriction. for every kobe bryant and kevin garnett, there were others who never made it in the NBA. i can assure you that raw talent was usually not the sole reason why these kids failed. high school players, especially those who grew up poor, when suddenly given millions and millions of dollars, for some reason have a tendency to not know how to live on their own. whether it's being taken advantage of by agents and friends, or whether it's simply that they don't think they have to work hard b/c they now have money, or whether it's depression over sitting at the end of an NBA bench as a rookie, prep-to-pros had a history of struggling with the stark jump to the NBA. even tracy mcgrady almost didn't make it.

even a single year of college can be immensely beneficial for these athletes, not only as basketball players (do you really think carmelo would have been as good coming out of high school than he was coming out of syracuse?), but also as people who need to learn how to live on their own. college coaches teach discipline, as cheesy as it sounds, which is immensely important, especially for players who come from bad neighborhoods and/or had behavior problems in high school (michael beasley, for example).

i agree that the NBA age restriction is paternalistic. but what's wrong with paternalism, especially when it has the potential to have such great benefit, with very little risk involved? sometimes an argument is made such as the following: if player X got injured in his freshman year of college, he might be entirely deprived of his chance to play in the NBA. while facially persuasive, i can't think of one person to whom this has happened. the closest thing i can think of is greg oden, and it didn't seem to hurt him. i really don't think there's much cost, if any, to attending college for a year, especially because in the vast majority of cases, playing a year of college ball prepares players to have longer and more successful NBA career than they'd have without college.

and while attending college is indeed a privilege, how can you fault the nba for forcing kids who don't know any better to get an education? when i say education, i don't only mean academics, but also education on how to live as an independent individual.

that was some serious rambling, but my ultimate point is this: the NBA age restriction is paternalistic and seems unfair on the surface, but at core, there is really nothing harmful about forcing kids to go to college.