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Jun 30, 2008, 06:52AM

Grading The Draft: F For College Basketball

The NBA made history during last week's draft by readping the rewards of their mandated training year in college for top prospects. The first three picks were college freshmen, who apparently weren't sold on the whole "education" thing when faced with millions of dollars in professional contracts. Could college basketball get any more watered down?

Last night’s NBA Draft had its fair share of beneficiaries: The Chicago Bulls and Miami Heat hit home runs scored touchdowns slam-dunked their way to respectability by respectively snagging the draft’s two most coveted prospects, Derrick Rose and Michael Beasley. And while an ESPN basketball insider might make the case that draft night was a fiasco for the Sacramento King’s selection–by virtue of the fact that their pick now has to move to Cowtown, USA–no one had more to lose from the over-hyped media frenzy last night than college basketball. For the first time in draft history, picks one, two, and three were college freshman (Rose went to Memphis, Beasley was a Kansas State man, and OJ Mayo spent a year at USC). Today’s Baltimore Sun might have said it best with their headline, “NBA draft highlights college rent-a-freshman dilemma.”

Can’t really blame the athlete; choosing to take big bucks instead of finishing general education requirements seems like a (insert sports cliché here). And while we have said it once, we will say it again: It’s really not a good time to be a college basketball fan. I was thinking about suggesting alternative December-March college activities for fed-up basketball fans, like actually going to the gym and playing your own basketball pick-up games instead of vicariously living through athletes, but then I realized that those expectations are ludicrous. Sigh. Alright then, I guess we just have to settle for watered-down college sports.

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