NCAA to Vote on Draft Deadline

From Eric Prisbell of the Washington Post via SLAM:

It has become college basketball’s rite of spring: After the Final Four, the best non-seniors declare for the NBA draft, then spend the next two months mulling whether to return to school. In the meantime, their coaches wait to find out whether they’ll need to scramble to find replacements late in the recruiting season.

That familiar scenario could change as soon as 2010. The NCAA Division I Legislative Council is scheduled to vote this week on an ACC proposal to sharply reduce the time underclassmen have to decide whether to remain in the draft. The issue promises to be one of the highlights of the NCAA convention, which is taking place this week at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Prince George’s County.

Underclassmen currently have until late April to enter their names in the draft, and until mid-June to pull out and retain their collegiate eligibility so long as they have not signed with an agent. The ACC’s proposal would give players about a 10-day window after the Final Four in April to make a final decision on the draft.

“If you give somebody forever to make a decision, they are going to take forever,” North Carolina Coach Roy Williams said. “It leaves your program in limbo. It leaves your current players in limbo.”

From David Aldridge at NBA.com:

Moving the declare date up will limit the number of workouts teams can have with players in the weeks leading up to the draft, and that will make evaluating borderline draft picks harder. The NBA has already reduced the window during which college players can work out for prospective NBA teams; no team can conduct workouts with individual players until after the league’s pre-draft camp in Chicago in May. The Chicago camp has already eliminated actual games, with propspective players now only being weighed and measured much along the lines of the NFL’s Combine in February.

And the Portsmouth Tournament, a four-day evaluation for college players which occurs the week after the Final Four, currently does not allow underclassmen to participate.

Florida State Coach Leonard Hamilton told the Washington Post that “too many kids are putting their names into the draft and taking their names out. Their names shouldn’t be in there in the first place. You have so many kids making poor decisions, it is obvious some of these kids are getting poor advice.” How does shortening the time allowed to make that decision help the situation?

I agree with Roy Williams. But I can’t see how shortening the period to 10 days is in anyone’s best interests. A 10-day period isn’t going to cut down the number of early entrants, if anything, that number will increase because players won’t have enough time to make an educated (no pun intended) decision. Like most of the NCAA’s rules and regulations, this one appears to be totally self-serving.