The News & Observer’s Jonathan Alexander and Steve Wiseman teamed up to write this story about the recent story about the Bagley family benefiting from AAU basketball.
As it turns out, Duke and the NCAA had carefully checked the situation and found that Marvin Bagley was eligible and that there were no NCAA issues. So that’s that as far as the NCAA is concerned.
However, there’s a real howler in this article, a bit of opinion which is treated as fact. And it’s quite a whopper:
“Athletes who want to turn professional are forced to play at least a year of college and give their services in exchange for free tuition.“
With all due respect, that’s horse crap. No one is forced to go to college. Several players have gone overseas, some have spent an extra year in prep school and a handful have simply trained for a year rather than go to college.
For that matter, there are surely guys who decided not to play basketball and went to college on their own dime.
Just Thursday, former Syracuse commit Darius Bazley announced he was skipping out on his Syracuse commitment to play in the G-League and prepare for the NBA that way.
You can certainly argue that the system as it exists is stupid and that it’s less than fair to have to play for a year to get to the league.
But it’s absolutely false to argue that anyone is forced to.
Let’s see if they correct it.
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