Lowering the Age Limit Takes Away the Beauty of College Basketball
After North Carolina defeated Kentucky in the Elite Eight last Sunday afternoon on a game-winning shot by sophomore forward Luke Maye, the scene inside the Kentucky locker room afterwards could be described as sad. A team with national championship aspirations had fallen one win short of advancing to the Final Four in heartbreaking fashion.
The mood of the locker room and team was personified best by freshman point guard De’Aaron Fox. Sitting along a wall in front of a scrum of reporters and cameras looking for postgame reaction, Fox broke down into tears. He grabbed one of his teammates sitting nearby him, freshman forward Bam Adebayo, and they consoled each other as both players cried.
“I love my brothers,” a choked-up Fox said while wiping the tears from his face with his blue jersey.
Fox is a projected lottery pick in this June’s NBA Draft and, like many of John Calipari’s best players over the last decade, is likely to leave Kentucky after one season for the pros. But Fox’s postgame emotions showed us that his season at Kentucky wasn’t just a mandatory prep year for the NBA. Fox showed that he deeply cares about his coaches, his teammates, and the name of the school on the front of his jersey.
His raw emotions wouldn’t have been heard or seen by millions of people around the world had the age limit for NBA players been lowered from 19 to 18 years old. Instead of playing in the NCAA Tournament for the Wildcats, Fox would likely be playing point guard for an NBA team right after graduating from high school. And Fox wouldn’t have been the only player impacted by this. According to Draft Express, 12 of the 14 projected lottery picks for this June’s draft are freshmen. Of them, eight competed in the NCAA Tournament.
Lowering the age limit from 19 to 18 would take away much of the magic of college basketball and, ultimately, would hurt the game. It would deprive us of seeing some of the best young players in the game compete at the college level.
Until 2005, the NBA had no age restriction for players entering the draft. As long as a player completed high school, he could declare for the NBA. MVPs like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Kevin Garnett were just three of the many talented high school players who skipped college to jump straight to the NBA. But when the NBA and the players union renegotiated the expiring collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in 2005, the league pushed for an age limit of 20 years old to enter the draft. Despite its opposition to any increase in the age limit whatsoever, the players union compromised with the league on raising it from 18 to 19 years old, taking effect in the 2006 draft. It was then when the “One and Done” era in college basketball was born.
The controversy surrounding the age limit debate remains today. While Commissioner Adam Silver and the NBA are still pushing for an increase in the age limit from 19 to 20 years old, the players union is hoping to bring the age limit back down to 18. Increasing the age limit to 20 years old could be a good solution, but dropping it back down to 18 years old would damage college basketball.
Alan Parham agrees with this school of thought. “It definitely hurts the quality of the college game,” said Parham, who serves as the NCAA compliance manager for a high school and college recruiting organization called National Scouting Report (NSR). “The game simply is not as good as it could be if those players were made to stay in college and play a minimum of two or three years.”
According to Parham, he and other members of NSR support rules that keep students in college as long as possible. He believes that a further decrease in the age limit wouldn’t allow for students to develop to their full potential and enjoy the educational benefits of college.
“The nuances of the game are getting lost because not enough players stick around long enough to learn them,” said Parham, who believes that very little strategy is used anymore at the college level because of the game’s transition to a run-and-gun style. “Fundamentally, players need time to absorb and experience the complete team game and a coach’s system.” Parham is right; college players who stay at school longer could be more pro-ready in terms of their fundamentals compared to those who leave after one season.
But Parham brought up something even more important: education. If the age limit is lowered to 18 years old, less high school basketball players are going to play college basketball. That means that their highest level of education will be a high school degree. In a world that requires college and advanced degrees now more than ever, having just a high school degree doesn’t cut it if you want to be competitive in the global society. Sure, it worked out fine for LeBron, Kobe, KG, and many others. But it doesn’t work out that way for most players. They will have nothing to fall back on outside of basketball when their careers inevitably end. It’s a huge and, frankly, unwise gamble on the part of the athlete to not have an education to fall back on when his basketball career is finished.
Let’s make sure that the age limit is not lowered to 18 years old to protect the student-athlete, the NCAA Tournament, and the college game from being fundamentally changed for the worse.
