More than ever, it feels like collegiate athletics is the Wild West where anything goes, and there’s nothing anybody can do to get things under control. One recent example is James Nnaji, a 21-year-old basketball player who was selected 31st overall in the 2023 NBA Draft.
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Nnaji played in Summer League but never in a regular season NBA game, and he recently was granted four years of eligibility by the NCAA to come back and join the Baylor Bears.
That decision has nearly caused a revolt from some of the top college basketball coaches in the country such as Tom Izzo of Michigan State and John Calipari of Arkansas, who see the Nnaji decision as a kind of Pandora’s box that will kill college basketball once and for all.
On the most recent episode of All the Smoke, Matt Barnes addressed the elephant in the room by bringing in Jay Bilas, one of the most respected college basketball minds out there. Bilas always has a unique and well-reasoned perspective, and so unsurprisingly, he saw the Nnaji situation from a different angle.
“What I hear from guys like Cal and Izzo is, ‘Look, we’re not taking these guys, [but] we don’t want to play against them,'” he said. “And this sounds really similar to the one-and-done debate we had 15, 20 years ago. Cal got criticized relentlessly for taking one-and-dones. ‘You don’t care about education. They’re rentals. They’re mercenaries, they’re only gonna be there for a year.'”
“And he didn’t listen to any of that crap. And then Coach K started doing it. Coach K didn’t like it at first either, and then realized, look, a lot of these guys wanna come to Duke, and if we don’t take ’em, we gotta play against ’em, so why not take ’em? And it worked out fine for both,” he recalled.
Bilas went back to his own playing days in the early ’80s to point out that throughout basketball history, there’s always been an issue du jour that has seemed like the end of the world, but in the end, everyone adjusts and life moves on.
“When I was in high school,” he said, “my coach and his coaching buddies all complained that all we did was play pickup ball and we were never working on our games in the gym.”
Barnes chimed in that his friends and he would all just go to the playground and organize their own games, but kids today won’t do that on their own. He also said that back then, young athletes didn’t specialize in just one sport.
Bilas summed his argument up in a way that may be shocking to those who are only used to hearing him on ESPN, but it certainly got his point across. “I guess my point is that there’s never been a time in basketball,” he continued, “where those in charge haven’t been complaining about it being f***** up.”
Is the system perfect? No, and far from it, Bilas says, but it’s not as bad as people think. “I get it. I’m not happy with everything that goes on in basketball,” he said.
“I’m certainly not happy with everything that goes on in college, but what I will tell you is I would rather have these young people have choice than be restricted,” he asserted.
That’s not a popular viewpoint at this moment in time, but if history is any indication, eventually everyone will calm down an realize that this isn’t the end of the game they love. A new issue will come along, and we’ll all get worked up together over that.
