Wetzel: How college basketball ended up signing NBA draft picks

Ideally, college basketball would have organized itself so that teams weren’t adding dudes from European pro leagues in the middle of the season.

Your roster on, say, Nov. 1, is your roster. Is that too much to ask? They have trade deadlines and signing windows in the NBA and NFL, after all. How about this: If you enter the NBA draft, you can’t still play college ball.

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Of course, ideally, the NCAA and college sports’ leadership — from conference commissioners to high powered athletic directors to famed coaches — would have, at least by the late 2010s, recognized that change was inevitable and begun planning for it.

Instead, they pouted, complained and in an enduring effort for control (especially of the money), clung to losing arguments, waged losing fights and let confusion engulf them.

That’s how Baylor got a stocking (and hoop) stuffer on Christmas Eve, when it announced it had signed James Nnaji, a 21-year-old, 7-foot center. You might remember him as the 31st selection of the 2023 NBA draft.

Detroit picked him that night. He was later traded to Charlotte and then the New York Knicks. Nnaji has never seen NBA minutes (other than in the summer league) but has been playing pro ball in Europe since 2020.

Somehow, Nnaji has four years of college eligibility remaining. Sure, why not? What’s LeBron’s status?

Nnaji is expected to join the Bears on the court next week in time for Big 12 play.

“Santa Claus is delivering mid season acquisitions,” Connecticut coach Dan Hurley quipped on social media.

“I just know they told us he can play, so I’m happy,” Baylor coach Scott Drew said.

Don’t blame Drew. He didn’t make the rules. It’s all perfectly legal. Drew has an obligation to his players, not to mention his school, to surround them with the best talent he can. So he did.

Besides, Baylor isn’t the only team bringing in pros from Europe, even at midseason. Oklahoma just signed a Russian center. Dayton, BYU and others, including Kansas State women’s hoops, have done similar.

It might be jarring, but the world is not ending. Nnaji, for all the attention, has averaged just 3.4 points a game as a pro. Set up with thought and structure, granting guys like him eligibility isn’t even an entirely bad idea — college hockey is packed with NHL draft picks.

Done this way though?

“This s— is crazy!!” Hurley wrote.

It certainly feels that way.

The fault falls to college sports’ “leadership,” which spent the past few decades trying to hold the line on amateurism, a dated concept that was almost assuredly doomed in the face of legal challenges.

The first came way back in 2009, when former UCLA men’s basketball player Ed O’Bannon sued to argue the NCAA was selling his name, image and likeness in a video game (which they were, as a judge ruled in 2014). The writing was on the wall. Public sentiment quickly shifted against the NCAA.

Yet instead of accepting the need for a new way of doing business, the NCAA just got more entrenched. Rather than share the revenue from the video game, the game was canceled.

College sports embraced a hard line, continuing to pour millions into ill-fated legal defenses and, later, Washington lobbyists who gladly cashed checks and sold the pipe dream that Congress would save them.

The NCAA, for example, argued in front of the United States Supreme Court that the Sherman Antitrust Act should not apply to college athletics because fans would tune out if an athlete was ever compensated for anything, even cash awards won via academic contests or legitimate endorsement opportunities.

Apparently Caitlin Clark’s State Farm commercial wasn’t a marketing boon for women’s basketball, but an existential threat.

“That argument is circular and unpersuasive,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in 2021, in a concurring opinion to a 9-0 decision against the NCAA. “… Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate.”

With the courts almost universally against them, the NCAA turned to Congress, seeking antitrust exemptions. Lobbyists were hired. Senators were courted. A few dog and pony show hearings were held.

No legislation ever came even close to passing. It was a completely predictable waste of time and money.

O’Bannon just wanted a fair cut, but being in opposition to the Sherman Antitrust Act (which has been around since 1890) has left the NCAA on the losing side of numerous eligibility fights, which has changed the way the games are actually played.

In the simplest of terms, the NCAA can’t stop someone from earning a living, which means it can rarely stop someone from playing for them and thus — earn a living.

That reality opened the floodgates to immediate eligibility for all transfers, caused junior college seasons to no longer count, flooded rosters with mid-20s grad students and, yes, even allowed for a once NBA-drafted, twice NBA-traded, European pro to join up in January.

Rather than pursuing outdated legal strategies and transparently one-sided legislation, the NCAA should have recognized the players as employees and then negotiated with what would almost assuredly be a weak union. If needed, it could have asked Congress for limited, common sense, antitrust carve-outs that might have stood a bipartisan chance of passing.

Then maybe compromises would’ve been reached on, say, the transfer portal or postdraft eligibility or whatever else comes up.

“To me, until we get to collective bargaining, there’s not going to be a solution,” Drew said.

He’s right, but that has also been obvious for years now.

The old guard of college sports just couldn’t accept it though. It was the old way, or no way.

So the lawyers and the lobbyists got paid.

And college basketball got midseason EuroLeague signings.