College Basketball's One-And-Done Rule Fails Everybody

Just before halftime of the Kentucky-LSU game on Tuesday night, the ESPN broadcast crew threw it back to the studio for a brief and presumably innocuous assessment of the roughly 18 minutes of basketball they'd just witnessed. And that's when, for at least a moment, shit got real. The consensus among analysts Seth Greenberg and Jay Williams was that we were bearing witness to some truly horrendous college basketball; the overarching opinion was that a game that had shaped up as one of the most fascinating of the early conference season—and at least on paper, perhaps the most tantalizing of the year, at least in terms of potential future earning power--had devolved into the kind of sputtering and rhythmless dud that's given college basketball a bad name over the past several years. A few minutes later, even Kentucky coach John Calipari agreed, conceding to an interviewer that this was about as bad as his team could possibly play.

Things improved slightly in the second half, but not enough to patch over the seams. At this juncture of the season, there is little doubt that LSU's Ben Simmons is the most talented player in the country, and maybe the best player in the history of this entire ignominious era of one-and-dones; there is also little doubt that Kentucky—which lost this game 85-67 on the road to fall to 0-2 in Southeastern Conference play—is a confused and searching squad, devoid of the preternatural talent that nearly carried it through all of last season undefeated. The Wildcats' top freshman, Skal Labissiere, the one player mentioned in the same breath with Simmons in the preseason, has been essentially a non-factor; and the freshmen and sophomores and handful of upperclassmen left behind on Calipari's roster are not yet good enough to carry the Wildcats through.

This is not to say that Kentucky won't get better as the season progresses, because generally Kentucky always does get better, because no matter your opinion on Calipari's overarching sense of morality, there is little question that he is a skillful recruiter and developer of top-tier, NBA-worthy talent. And this is not to say that Simmons isn't still in the embryonic phase of his career, still finding his place on a team that stumbled so hard to begin the season that we seriously began to wonder if they might fall short of the NCAA tournament. But coming as this game did, less than 24 hours oafter one of the greatest regular-season college basketball games in recent memory, it felt like something of a referendum. If Oklahoma-Kansas was everything college basketball can be when its at its best, Kentucky-LSU was yet another reminder that we're living through an utterly dysfunctional era, and that we are doing so largely because of an ongoing battle between labor and management.

I am speaking, of course, of the one-and-done rule that Simmons is currently laboring under, which is now a decade old and continues to be an unquestioned failure on every level. It is not good for the players, and it is not good for the sport; at this point, I'm not even sure if it's good for Calipari, who is expected to weave together the talent he recruits into a championship-winning squad every single year. I think most reasonable people would agree on this point by now. I think most of us would recognize that there should be a way for players who are not interested in college to avoid college altogether, and that, once in college, those players should be incentivized to stick around for long enough to make the experience something worthwhile rather than a way station. The baseball model, as proposed by sportswriter John Feinstein and others, would seemingly make the most sense: If you get drafted early out of high school, you can either turn pro right away or commit to college and not go back into the draft pool for three years. (Editor's note: college basketball players could also be incentivized to stay in school by allowing them to earn their free-market value as the highly-coveted on-air talent in the multibillion dollar intercollegiate televised sports industry that they are, but that's probably its own column).

This sort of shift, according to Feinstein, is something the NBA players' union is reluctant to negotiate in advance of the reopening of the collective bargaining contract in 2017. Getting prominent media voices like Feinstein to repeatedly and loudly advocate for a change is one way to emphasize the importance of making this change; but another way may be by making a direct comparison between games like Kentucky-LSU, which played out with all the overarching joy of an NBA D-League game, and Oklahoma-Kansas, a picturesque triple-overtime thriller that felt entirely unique to the college basketball experience.

Here's something about that Oklahoma-Kansas game you may not have even realized: According to Jeff Feyerer of BBall Breakdown, roughly 80 percent of the minutes on both sides of that contest were played by juniors and seniors; each team only starts one underclassman, and those underclassmen are both sophomores. The top NBA draft prospect in that game, Kansas's Chieck Diallo, played nine percent of the game and didn't score a point; the star of the game, Oklahoma senior Buddy Hield (who finished with 46 points), is ranked No. 33 on Draft Express' list of the country's top prospects. Kansas star Wayne Selden is No. 83 on that same Draft Express list. And how did all of this affect my enjoyment of the game? It didn't affect it one damned bit, because I watch college basketball with the expectation that I'm not here to watch professional basketball.

This may not be enough of an argument to move the players' union, which surely does not give much of a flying two-handed alley-oop whether or not those of us who still care deeply about college basketball are getting the most out of our experience. But they should care about the well-being of the future generation of players who might make up their membership. I mean, Ben Simmons is great, and he appears to a once-in-a-generation singular talent, but Oklahoma-Kansas is proof that college basketball could survive without him, just as he could survive without college basketball. It would be nice if we could find a way to let go of the charade.