Gregg Doyel is a self admitted John Calipari fan, and probably one of the biggest backers of Kentucky basketball of the mainstream media that I know. Doyel has an excellent take on the Enes Kanter situation, and wonders how the NCAA can let players make money playing professional baseball and then let them play College football. Here is an excerpt.
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In the meantime, though, what’s with the NCAA’s schizophrenic rulebook?
How are professional baseball players — pro athletes — allowed to play football in droves after their baseball careers hit the skids? Those are two different sports, and I’m aware of that, so if you’re going to e-mail me that I’m comparing apples to oranges, save it. The NCAA clearly has drawn a distinction between a pro in one sport and an amateur in another, but to me that’s nonsensical gobbledygook. A pro is a pro is a pro.
When Chris Weinke won the Heisman Trophy for Florida State in 2000, he was more of a pro than Reggie Bush was five years later at Southern California. Weinke was 28 years old, for god’s sake. He had earned more than half a million dollars as a minor-league baseball player and had lived the life of a full-time professional athlete for six years before giving college a try. And that was fine with the NCAA.
It was also fine that Josh Booty was practically a multi-millionaire pro athlete — he signed with the Florida Marlins for $1.6 million in 1994, then spent five seasons as ballplayer, including parts of three seasons in the major leagues — when he became the quarterback at LSU in 1999.
Quincy Carter signed for $425,000 with the Cubs in 1996, then played football for Georgia. John Lynch signed for $103,000 with the Marlins in 1992, in the middle of his college football career at Stanford, and stayed in school. In the early 1990s Scotty Burrell was a UConn basketball player in the fall and a Toronto Blue Jays minor-leaguer in the summer. All of that was fine with the NCAA.
It’s fine with me, too. My point here is not to argue that Kyle Parker should sit Saturday when Clemson plays Wake Forest. Parker is a millionaire professional athlete in one sport, but an amateur in another? Fine by me. My beef isn’t with Parker now, or with the pro athletes who came before him, guys like Weinke, Carter, Burrell or Booty.
My beef is with the NCAA, which did with Kanter what it does too often — took a brutish, hard-line stance on an issue that required finesse and logic. The fate of Enes Kanter, and future prospective athletes like him, isn’t a black-and-white issue. There’s nothing here but gray, starting with the culture of European basketball. If a skilled teenager in Turkey wants to improve, short of leaving his family he has no choice but to play for a professional team. He can turn down the contract that will be offered him — Kanter could be earning more money than you and me combined, right now, had he wanted to — but eventually some of that money splashing around will spill onto him. Kanter got damp. Not sopping wet, but damp. That was enough for the NCAA to throw him out like, um, a baby with the bathwater.
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I know the appeal is coming up and it doesn’t look good for Enes to gain elgibility, but it seems more and more that the NCAA is like the gestapo, enforcing their law and changing it anytime as they seem fit. I just think there should be more consistency with their rules. It is a shame that a kid can use money for education of all things and lose his amateurism at the same time. Maybe one of these days the US government will intervene in the hiearchy of the NCAA and make there be some type of consistency with the rulings of these kids who deserve better due process, instead of a dictatorship that can do whatever they want, when they want.
