Ran into an old business/sports buddy the other day. We've watched many a game together but he now has small children, and so I see him less often. Still, we both speak Sportugese, and so we got right into it, starting with the Warriors. If you live in the Bay Area right now, you are transfixed by the Warriors, their shot-making skills, of course, but more especially their movement off the ball, and the incredible passes that result from that constant flow. I know people who plan their entire social schedules around Warrior games. Then he asked me politely about my Griz, and I asked him perfunctorily about his love, Cal.
"You know," he said, "after watching the Warriors, it's just hard to watch college ball. The skill-set is so inferior. It's like watching Special Olympics."
Ouch!!
But the more I thought about it, the more I had to agree. I believe the one-and-done rule has really hurt college hoops, much more than I originally thought. Yes, attendance for college games is still up, but if you look under the hood, you see most of the attendance is with the tradition-rich bigger schools, Syracuse, Kentucky, Louisville, Duke, Carolina, et. al. Today's college stars are here and gone before we even know their names, with no time to build the kind of legacies that Bill Russell did at USF, or Christian Laettner did at Duke, or for there to develop any college rivalries with the intensity and publicity of Alcindor-Hayes or Magic-Bird. The one-and-done still works for the big schools, but I think for places like Dahlberg and the Purple Palace (where attendance is also down over the years despite Lillard and Bolomboy), the one-and-done has diminished the overall glamour we once associated with college hoops.
Remember, it all starts at the top.
"You know," he said, "after watching the Warriors, it's just hard to watch college ball. The skill-set is so inferior. It's like watching Special Olympics."
Ouch!!
But the more I thought about it, the more I had to agree. I believe the one-and-done rule has really hurt college hoops, much more than I originally thought. Yes, attendance for college games is still up, but if you look under the hood, you see most of the attendance is with the tradition-rich bigger schools, Syracuse, Kentucky, Louisville, Duke, Carolina, et. al. Today's college stars are here and gone before we even know their names, with no time to build the kind of legacies that Bill Russell did at USF, or Christian Laettner did at Duke, or for there to develop any college rivalries with the intensity and publicity of Alcindor-Hayes or Magic-Bird. The one-and-done still works for the big schools, but I think for places like Dahlberg and the Purple Palace (where attendance is also down over the years despite Lillard and Bolomboy), the one-and-done has diminished the overall glamour we once associated with college hoops.
Remember, it all starts at the top.