It’s rare for a college basketball story to enter the mainstream sports conversation on Christmas Eve, but Baylor’s announcement that it had added center James Nnaji — the 31st pick in the 2023 NBA Draft – was enough of a “What are we doing here?” moment for it to break through.
Though college sports is now professional in almost every sense — including players who have signed pro contracts in Europe and the NBA G League finding their way to college basketball this year — the Nnaji development feels like new territory. This isn’t someone who slipped through the cracks or got bad advice, turned pro out of high school and ran into a career dead end. Nnaji, who has been playing in Europe, was one draft slot away from being a first-round pick with a guaranteed NBA contract. He played in the NBA Summer League and has even been part of a trade.
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“Santa Claus is delivering mid season acquisitions…this s*** is crazy!!” UConn coach Dan Hurley wrote on X shortly after the news became public.
Is this really the type of player who should be part of college basketball? Who knows, maybe Arizona can get LeBron James on the bench for its Final Four push if he wants to play with his son Bryce.
That would be absurd, of course — and, to be clear, expressly against NCAA rules since these pro-to-college cases must take place within five years of high school — but you can be forgiven if it seems like anything goes these days.
And guess what? As more college programs pursue mid-year additions, some have even checked in with G League players on two-way contracts who have appeared in actual NBA games. That seems inevitable at some point, too, given where this trend seems to be headed.
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But don’t blame Baylor or any program for pursuing those players.
While you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in college sports who thinks this is a good development, schools are merely doing what the NCAA has given them the green light to do as it waits and hopes for some kind of antitrust protection from Congress that would allow for the actual enforcement of the rulebook rather than a mishmash of eligibility rulings.
It’s tempting to wail away on the NCAA’s ineffectiveness here, especially if you’re, say, a Kentucky fan who remembers when the NCAA denied Enes Kanter’s eligibility because he received $33,000 over his necessary living expenses from a pro team in Turkey. That seems picayune compared to what’s happening regularly now, where schools are arranging for far higher payments to European teams just to get players bought out of contracts so they can come to college.
At the same time, the NCAA is in an incredibly difficult spot. Their executives and attorneys understand that each time the line of demarcation moves, as it has here, it chips away at the NCAA’s ability to ensure college students are playing college sports, not people who bypassed that opportunity and want to suddenly turn back because NIL has become so lucrative.
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But they also see a legal environment with a deluge of eligibility cases, with some judges granting sixth and seventh years to players. Gonzaga’s Tyon Grant-Foster, who will turn 26 before the NCAA tournament, was originally denied eligibility but granted a preliminary injunction in Washington to play this season — seven years after he enrolled in junior college.
NCAA officials would argue nothing major has changed from a policy standpoint; rather, what’s different is the willingness of schools to recruit and enroll those players — and, of course, the willingness of those players to come play college basketball. Before there was big NIL money involved, it just wouldn’t have been something to consider. Now, it’s often a far more lucrative path than trying to make it to the NBA from the G League.
The combination of schools looking for players outside the traditional recruiting realm and judges eroding the NCAA’s ability to enforce eligibility rules has led everyone here, whether they like it or not.
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Sports attorney Darren Heitner theorized Friday in his “Newsletter, Image, Likeness” blog on the legal landscape in college sports that this could also be part a calculated strategy by the NCAA to present college basketball as “one option within a broader professional and semi-professional basketball market that includes the G League, international leagues and other alternatives” to make the argument that the NCAA isn’t a monopoly.
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“If the NCAA can establish through these eligibility decisions that college basketball and professional leagues occupy the same competitive labor market, it will fundamentally reshape the antitrust analysis in ongoing and future cases,” Heitner wrote.
The question, though, is to what end? Is the point of this enterprise now merely about legal survival while college basketball transforms into a place for guys stuck in the NBA developmental system to come and get a big payday?
That doesn’t seem right. And even if the NCAA can get some kind of protection from Congress — it’s been six years and counting since the organization started down that path, so no guarantees there — it’s hard to imagine some of this stuff just comes to a hard stop. Once the window opens this wide, it’s difficult to close.
Maybe it’s time for college basketball and the NBA to sit down and figure out a different model, one that perhaps mimics hockey’s system where players can be drafted but play in college until they decide to sign with their pro team.
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Imagine a world where nobody has to enter the NBA Draft, they’re just automatically in the pool of draft-eligible players the year they turn 18 years old. At that point, decisions about what’s best for their development would take place collectively between the NBA franchise that drafted them and their college team. Perhaps you could even construct a system where a drafted player can join the NBA or G League team on a provisional basis after the college season and then go back to college if they feel like they need another year.
Of course that would require a lot of work, cooperation and collective bargaining changes on the NBA side. But it makes a lot more sense than college coaches who need another body to bypass a high school kid and instead recruit a grown man who never intended to go to college with a six-figure payday.
If they’re simply going to wait around for Congress to deliver guardrails, Nnaji is going to be the first of many former NBA Draft picks to find their way back to college basketball and make the NCAA look like it has no rules at all.
