It hasn’t been a banner week for college basketball.
A slew of cases involving top programs taking part in some corrupt behavior have surfaced of late, leading to many schools making all sorts of negative headlines.
High-profile basketball figures like LeBron James have ripped into the NCAA, calling it corrupt and suggesting a need for change.
But it goes beyond just current athletes. In fact, the former leader of the United States has taken a stance.
Barack Obama — a noted lover of basketball — spoke at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday, and he dove into the topic of the NCAA. His comments were supposed to be off the record, but “Reason” leaked them, and we now know Obama is pretty clearly in favor of a system other than NCAA basketball for players aspiring to compete at the next level.
The former president insisted an NBA development league (similar to the G-League) should be available to young players “so that the NCAA is not serving as a farm system for the NBA with a bunch of kids who are unpaid but are under enormous financial pressure.
“It’s just not a sustainable way of doing business,” Obama continued. “Then when everybody acts shocked that some kid from extraordinarily poor circumstances who’s got 5, 10, 15 million dollars waiting for him is going to be circled by everybody in a context in which people are making billions of dollars, it’s not good.”
Certainly a good point.
While there aren’t any immediate plans for changes, something is going to have to give sooner or later, because the NCAA is in an absolute tailspin.
