Few if any are literary scholars, yet they reprise the familiar poet’s lament.
“April is the cruelest month.”
That is what T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land,” and that is what college basketball coaches echo as their players announce they’re fleeing campus early and heading for the NBA.
“It’s kind of a dangerous time [for college basketball],” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said of this phenomenon two years ago.
“A very scary time,” then-Illinois coach Lon Kruger said on that same afternoon.
“I don’t think the NBA benefits at all from kids coming out early,” Kruger says now from Atlanta, where he coaches the NBA’s Hawks. “I think the NBA would be much better off if the kids were more developed, more mature, further along. Certainly the NBA isn’t positively affected by it. Nor are the colleges. And, interestingly enough, neither are the players. Who benefits from this?”
Well, it might be the colleges as a whole.
“Parity in college basketball is at its highest right now. That’s obvious from watching the tournament unfold in the first couple of rounds,” says Thad Matta, who since the NCAA tournament has left Butler to take over at Xavier.
It is also the reality often ignored in the annual caterwauling of spring, a benefit often missed amid the annual pronouncements of basketball death, doom and destruction.
The pros wail they are getting raw products, which they go ahead and draft anyway while transforming the NBA into a glorified developmental league. College coaches bemoan their diminished talent pool. Idealists decry lost educational opportunities, which many players cared little about anyway.
And polluting the air as background noise are prophecies predicting the demise of the college game as we know it.
But in the opening round of the 2001 NCAA tournament, Butler of the little-known Midwestern Collegiate Conference toppled Wake Forest of the mighty Atlantic Coast Conference. And West Coast Conference upstartGonzaga toppled Virginia, also of the mighty ACC. And Kent State toppled Indiana of the mighty Big Ten. And Utah State toppled Ohio State of the mighty Big Ten. And Indiana State toppled Oklahoma of the mighty Big 12, and tiny Hampton ousted Big 12 power Iowa State.
“What you have are schools losing players, which I think is unfortunate,” Matta says by way of explanation.
But that gives other schools, lesser-known schools, an opportunity, Matta quickly adds.
“It’s harder to–the word dynasty, I’m not sure you’ve seen that too many times anyway,” says Michigan’s new coach, Tommy Amaker. “But it’s certainly harder to have consistent excellence in a lot of programs now. Continuity’s broken. That growth and development you used to go through isn’t there anymore, and that has created a lot more parity. I think that has helped a lot of mid-major programs, helped programs that don’t have the powerhouse name.”
Not all the losses are great.
“The kids leaving early may be immensely talented,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few says. “But a lot of them, I don’t know how many have had that profound effect on college basketball, to be honest with you. Certainly some have. But look at [Duke’s] Shane Battier and what he was able to do by staying. Now Jason Williams [the Blue Devils sophomore guard who’s staying in school] is doing the same thing. Those are the people having a profound effect . . . [and] it certainly would have been great for Arizona to get Richard Jefferson back, [Michael] Wright. Now all of a sudden you have a senior-laden team that has been all the way to the finals. Now they’re tough to stop, I think.”
But juniors Jefferson and Wright have declared for the NBA draft, as did Gilbert Arenas and Jason Gardner, two sophomore guards who started for the Wildcats in their recent run through the NCAA tournament. Their continuity certainly has been broken, which makes Arizona a prime example of how early defections level the playing field.
Arizona will enter next season not as a national championship contender but as a rebuilding team that will be lucky to contend in the Pac-10. The same is true of Michigan State, which was brought back to the Big Ten pack with the loss of freshman Zach Randolph and sophomore Jason Richardson, and, on a lesser scale, Charlotte, which lost freshman Rodney White after he helped push the 49ers to a Conference USA tournament title and an NCAA tournament berth.
Just last year, DePaul earned itself an NCAA tournament berth behind sophomore Quentin Richardson, but then he and Paul McPherson jumped into the draft and the continuity of its expected resurrection was broken. In the wake of those departures, the Blue Demons struggled through a miserable season, and another anticipated rebirth was disrupted when sophomore center Steve Hunter and junior forward Bobby Simmons declared that they too were headed to the NBA.
“I had two seniors who had been through it all. Having that, it’s immeasurable,” says Gonzaga’s Few.
Michigan State won the NCAA title in 2000 behind seniors Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson and A.J. Granger. They reached the most recent Final Four behind seniors Charlie Bell and Andre Hutson. Battier, a senior, was the engine driving Duke to this year’s title run, and the upset winners in this spring’s opening round were similarly blessed with experience.
Four of Butler’s starters played prominent roles when it narrowly lost to Florida in the opening round of the 2000 tournament, and its sixth man was a starter against the Gators. Among Kent’s top eight were two seniors and five juniors who had evolved together. Four of Indiana State’s starters had been doing that together for nearly three years.
Now forward Damien Wilkins is leaving North Carolina State after his sophomore season and forward Eddie Griffin is departing Seton Hall after only one year?
“I don’t know what kind of resume these kids had in the NCAA tournament,” says Few, and the answer is none.
Their departures, then, will hardly affect the college game, but that cannot be said of the four less heralded starters who will be returning to play again for Butler.
They will make the Bulldogs a more dangerous team, a threat to many of those traditional powers susceptible to early defections. That, again, is the reality generally missed while the spotlight shines on the players leaving early, yet it is a fact well recognized by the powers themselves.
“Scheduling is difficult at any level. But for us right now it’s really difficult,” says Butler assistant John Groce, who does the school’s scheduling. “The fact that we’ve had success, teams are less likely to want to play us.”
Have the big schools refused to do that?
“No question about that. No question,” Groce says. “We’ve called, I’m not going to give you names, but we’ve called 15 programs considered high major. Right now we’re 0-for-15.”
Home-and-home?
“Home-and-home is out of the question,” he says. “There’s no benefit to them to playing Butler at Hinkle Fieldhouse. But it’s not only that. They’re not even interested in letting us come there and play.”
Because you have four starters back?
“That’s right,” he says.
“They have the benefits of being in the system two, three years,” Matta explains. “It’s funny, as you watch guys get older, how much smarter they get. There are a lot of advantages to sticking around.”
Few agrees.
“Kids who’ve made plays in college are the ones who’ll be dearly missed,” he says. “But then I look at the list [of early entries], some of the guys on it have no business announcing.
“They haven’t done anything.”
