Auburn’s Bruce Pearl offered a recent proclamation that sums up the current state of college basketball.
With so many new players on his team, Pearl reasoned, he’s just going to let his basketball players play pick-up for a while this offseason before he starts to coach them. With so many new faces, he says, it’s time to try something new.
Pearl is one of the best coaches in college basketball, but his plan in the beginning for next season’s new team is to not coach them at all. He’s just going to let them sort it out for themselves, which sounds crazy at first but actually is a rather genius idea when you start to think about it.
If it’s clear someone doesn’t belong, they’ll just transfer … but now they can’t blame the coach.
Welcome to the new world of college basketball, which isn’t dying (as some are predicting), but is going to be something different when everything in its orbit finally shakes out. Is college basketball in trouble? Nah, but the people who are hoping for a pre-pandemic return of the old game might be.
The doomsday preppers of college basketball received more signs of the apocalypse on Friday when another highly rated high school prospect decided to skip college for the NBA’s G-League. That trend isn’t exactly new, but what made this latest decision different was that Scoot Henderson of Cobb County, Georgia, was going into his junior year of high school before this week and considering offers to play college ball at either Auburn for Pearl or Georgia for Bulldogs coach Tom Crean.
Both Pearl and Crean are excellent, but Henderson and his family decided to go with option No.3.
Now the 17-year-old is graduating high school a year early and turning pro to play two years of developmental basketball with the NBA G League’s specialized team for highly rated high school prospects. Currently, that means Henderson cannot play in college if things don’t work out for him in the NBA G League, but who really knows the future the way the rules are changing in the NCAA?
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Henderson’s new team is located in Walnut Creek, California, and called NBA G League Ignite. It sounds risky for a high school player to turn pro, but the gamble is being offset by guaranteed contracts for $500,000 per year and a full scholarship to Arizona State. Henderson signed a two-year, $1 million contract to join the team, which will play in the NBA G League along with the NBA’s other minor league affiliates.
Birmingham will be the new home of the New Orleans Pelicans’ NBA G League team when renovations to Legacy Arena are completed. With a rise in minor league basketball on the way, and teams being funded and owned by parent NBA franchises, this seems like the perfect time for Birmingham to get in on the action.
Legacy Arena will be the largest venue in the NBA G League. Will team’s like the one in Birmingham detract from the college game? If someone says they know how things are going to play out for college basketball after these new transfer rules and NIL considerations and minor-league basketball proliferations, then that person is either lying or trying to fill hours on sports talk radio.
No one knows anything. Pearl doesn’t even know who’s going to be in his starting backcourt. With college basketball and football players now allowed one transfer per career without it affecting their playing eligibility, the entire landscape of collegiate athletics is shifting this summer.
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Elite prep basketball players can still go the one-and-done route in college, but they can also now just cut college out of the discussion completely. The NBA G League is an option, but there is another upstart developmental league called Overtime Elite which is recruiting players out of high school. Currently headquartered in Atlanta, Overtime Elite signed its first two players on Friday. Twins Ryan and Matt Bewley of the Orlando, Florida, area are rising juniors and were being recruited by Auburn, Alabama and Florida.
Players in Overtime Elite are guaranteed at least $100,000 contracts, according to the venture, and will have other potential revenue streams available to them like nonfungible tokens. What are nonfungible tokens? No one really knows. Not even Elon Musk.
I remember when tokens bought turns on video games at Diamond Jim’s in Eastwood Mall, but now tokens are video internet basketball cards … or something like that.
It’s a wild new world, kiddos, if 16-year-old basketball professionals are being paid in tokens. Not smart enough to know what all this means, but at least I know it’d be dumb to de-value an education because of it.
Joseph Goodman is a columnist for the Alabama Media Group. He’s on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.
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