by
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban raised a few eyebrows over the weekend when he argued that prospective basketball stars would be better off joining the NBA's development league after high school instead of playing college ball.
While Cuban’s idea inspires a number of questions, my most pressing is simply, “Why stop at hoops?”
Perhaps even more than its hardwood counterpart, football, in all its lucrative brutality, surely has been long overdue for a minor-league alternative to the college ranks.
Whereas the NBA’s eligibility rules prohibit players from joining the league until they are 19 years old and a year removed from high school—effectively forcing them to play college basketball for at least one year—the National Football League prevents players from joining until after their sophomore year in college.
In the NBA’s case, the age limit is more self-serving than reflective of any concern for the players. In 1995, after Kevin Garnett became the first player in 20 years to go directly from high school to the NBA, the NBA witnessed an influx of young talent that exposed the shoddy recruiting and faulty decision-making at many NBA clubs.
Too many teams got burned too often by giving big-money deals to players too immature to handle the high-pressure demands of the pro game. (Ah, Korleone Young, we remember you well.) So in 2005, amid cries of racism and a violation of the free-market spirit, the NBA sought to protect its owners from their own haste and stupidity by installing an age limit.
The league now is talking about raising the age limit to 20.
Voluntary Servitude
In the NFL, the game's physical demands afford owners a stronger argument in favor of an age limit.
While high school programs around the country teem with outsized teenagers capable of dominating players their age, there aren’t many — if any — 18- or 19-year-old players built to handle the sinew-rending, bone-grinding collisions that professional football dishes out each autumn Sunday.
But that still doesn’t mean these young men should have to hand themselves over to an exploitative college system that will milk their bodies for billions of dollars without ever paying them a dime.
In fact, if anything, the physical toll of the game and its nasty habit of cutting careers tragically short underscore exactly why elite football players deserve a professional option to the voluntary servitude of college football.
Elite math students don’t endanger their scholarships by taking jobs at engineering firms. Talented college musicians aren’t prohibited from cutting records and playing gigs while they’re in school.
Why shouldn’t top football players make money for themselves while playing a game with a near 100-percent injury rate? And if colleges insist on maintaining an exploitative system that prohibits this, then why shouldn’t there be other paths to football stardom?
Just as Cuban suggested for NBA D-League players, a football minor league could offer players paychecks as well as the opportunity to attend college in the offseason if they so desired. Players could have a portion of their checks—and part of earnings received through endorsement deals and other business opportunities—invested in annuities or other financial instruments (or even a college fund) to help secure their futures after football.
And they could get paid while risking the concussion or knee injury that could dash their NFL dream in an instant.
As for colleges, well, a successful football minor league aimed at college-age players is guaranteed to endanger at least some of the billions that major athletic departments rake in year after year.
Colleges as Athletic Pimps
But colleges are supposed to be in the business of teaching, not pimping athletic prowess. Minor leagues could ease the burden that big-time sports often place on major universities to pervert their educational mission, as schools could feel less pressure to keep the star tailback eligible or the all-conference point guard enrolled.
The thin veneer of “amateurism” that universities and the NCAA fraudulently use to protect their patently unfair labor arrangement is steadily wearing away with each new scandal, each new act of resistance to the status quo.
Former college players are suing the NCAA for using their images without compensating them. Current student athletes, such as the football players at Northwestern University, are trying to unionize.
Meanwhile, players in some sports have tried to buck the system individually. For example, current Pistons guard Brandon Jennings opted to play pro ball in Europe after high school rather than attend college for a year.
But whereas pro basketball leagues flourish in Europe, Asia, South America and other parts of the globe, the NFL has a virtual monopoly on professional football (though it should be noted that the Arena Football League continues to survive as does the Canadian Football League, which doesn’t have an age limit).
Free Farm System
And since college football serves as a free farm system for the league, the NFL also has zero incentive to invest in a minor league that could take years to break even, if it ever does.
Still, even some football experts think a minor league for recent hhgh school grads makes sense. The nation’s rabid devotion to college football — even among those who don’t actually attend college — is proof positive that fans are more than willing to watch college-age players compete.
And you’d figure that the prospect of earning, say, a six-figure deal out of high school would be enough to tempt many of the nation’s top college recruits. Add to that mix the chance to attend college anyway and such leagues — if marketed smartly and managed responsibly — may not be as unworkable as the NFL’s lack of interest might intimate. (The coaches, already used to earning exorbitant salaries off the backs of teenage superstars, would probably be the easiest get.)
I’m not saying it’s a slam-dunk idea, any more than Cuban’s D-League proposal is. The historically poor track record of football leagues outside the NFL gives plenty of reason for pause.
But at the very least a professional minor league would provide a fair and honest alternative to an NCAA system in which everyone gets paid except for the young men who do the actual work.
