G-League back to NCAA

Clonefan32

Well-Known Member
Nov 19, 2008
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I apologize if this has been discussed, but pretty great stuff from Izzo, who seems to be one of the few of the old guard holding on in this new landscape. Basically Louisville just added a guy to their roster who was paid to pay in the G-League for the last 2 years.


Seems like the floodgates could open back up for professional players who had remaining eligibility to return to college. You think of a guy like Wiggington who couldn't stick on a roster but didn't use up all his eligibility. Could be really interesting to see how far this extends.
 
The NCAA supposedly is trying to help out the guys who went to the now defunct G League Ignite out of high school. Basically throwing them an eligibility lifeline if they haven't gone pro outside of the G League by now and counting their Ignite years against their NCAA eligibility.

Still doesn't seem right.
 
The NCAA supposedly is trying to help out the guys who went to the now defunct G League Ignite out of high school. Basically throwing them an eligibility lifeline if they haven't gone pro outside of the G League by now and counting their Ignite years against their NCAA eligibility.

Still doesn't seem right.
Decisions should have consequences.

Just another log on the dumpster fire that college sports has become.
 
The NCAA supposedly is trying to help out the guys who went to the now defunct G League Ignite out of high school. Basically throwing them an eligibility lifeline if they haven't gone pro outside of the G League by now and counting their Ignite years against their NCAA eligibility.

Still doesn't seem right.

Ok that's fine-- now do the player who an agent talked into going into the draft that wound up not drafted. There's no end to this logic.

Hell we could have Hakeem Butler here by Saturday.
 
I suppose its not completely different from foreign semi-pro and pro players coming to college here, but it's weird to see it coming from an entity tied directly into the NBA, the local pro league (which has seen players skip over college entirely to get into already in the past). So now if someone flames out in the G-League or even straight up the NBA, they can just come back to college teams now? Doesn't feel right.

Ultimately to Izzo's point, he's right -- college sports do not have authoritative organizational bodies over them anymore due to the NCAA's complete inability to win any regulatory lawsuit over anything.
 
I suppose its not completely different from foreign semi-pro and pro players coming to college here, but it's weird to see it coming from an entity tied directly into the NBA, the local pro league (which has seen players skip over college entirely to get into already in the past). So now if someone flames out in the G-League or even straight up the NBA, they can just come back to college teams now? Doesn't feel right.

Ultimately to Izzo's point, he's right -- college sports do not have authoritative organizational bodies over them anymore due to the NCAA's complete inability to win any regulatory lawsuit over anything.

I think that's where we're ultimately headed without some kind of legislative help for the NCAA. The courts seem to pretty much side with plaintiffs on any case against eligibility rules.

The 5 year clock will probably go away too eventually and we'll just have X years of eligibility, opening the door for those that jumped to the NBA early to come back to college at the tail end of their careers.
 
All of this crap could have easily been taken care of but the NCAA sucks and here we are.

Could it though?

I think the NCAA fought a lot of this so hard for years in part because they understood that once the dam broke it was going to be a flood exactly like this. Even if they'd opened up NIL on their own and other similar things, athletes would have still likely sued to expand those opportunities (and won) just as they are now.

The only real fix was a legislative one, but good luck with that.
 
Could it though?

I think the NCAA fought a lot of this so hard for years in part because they understood that once the dam broke it was going to be a flood exactly like this. Even if they'd opened up NIL on their own and other similar things, athletes would have still likely sued to expand those opportunities (and won) just as they are now.

The only real fix was a legislative one, but good luck with that.
That's the real problem -- the NCAA didn't have enough foresight (or...money?) to get ahead of this stuff years ago with legislative changes. They needed to buy some congresspeople to get some protections put in place before the NIL dam broke.

It's just eventually going to funnel away from "college sports" and just realize itself as semi-pro sports without an attached educational entitiy. "College sports" will be non-power schools and downward, functionally.