Players deserve time to pull out of the draft, my ballot, more

North Carolina's Ty Lawson took until the last moment to pull his name out of the NBA draft last summer. Getty Images Seth Davis's Mailbag Seth Davis will periodically answer questions from SI.com users in his Hoop Thoughts column. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

Every spring, dozens of college basketball players grapple with an enormous, life-altering decision: Should they stay in school, or turn pro? Given the high stakes, it's understandable why many of these underclassmen wait until the last possible moment to make up their minds.

As you might imagine, this waiting game can be uncomfortable for coaches, since the NBA permits players to wait until just before the draft in June to withdraw their names from the eligibility pool. Yet, that discomfort seems to be a small price to pay for doing business. After all, most of the players in this situation come from the top programs where the coaches make seven-figure salaries, or at least high six-figure ones. The players, on the other hand, often come from underprivileged backgrounds and face enormous pressure from their family and friends to take the money and run. The situation is not ideal for anyone, but all things considered, it is pretty fair.

That's why it's so disheartening that the 12 coaches from one the nation's preeminent basketball conferences, the ACC, are leading the charge to pass a new rule that would move the deadline on this decision to the day before the spring signing period for high school seniors. This year, that period begins on April 15, which means a player who competed in the national championship game would have all of nine days to make the most important decision of his life. When the NCAA's Division-I Legislative Council took up the proposal last week, it decided to postpone a vote for 60 days so it could collect more feedback from the membership. They didn't ask for my input, but I'll give it to them anyway: Do the right thing by these kids, and vote this sucker down.

The main argument in favor of the earlier deadline is that the players simply don't need nearly the time they've been taking to gather the requisite information. "I have 15 to 20 [NBA] scouts at every big game we have," North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. "We want the players to have good information, we want them to have accurate information, but there's no need to take two months."

This, however, greatly undersells the value of the predraft camps and individual workouts players go through for NBA teams -- workouts that don't begin in earnest until those teams are done with their seasons in May or June. For NBA teams, those workouts are weighed at least as heavily as the reports their scouts have sent from the games. Those workouts aren't just opportunities for a player to learn his draft status, they're opportunities to change it. It doesn't seem right to deny that chance for the sake of expediency.

Williams and his peers also like to point out that the extended time period allows outside influences (namely agents) to corrupt the players' minds with false information. Fair enough. But let's also not be naïve about the "information" being passed along by many coaches. I have had numerous NBA scouts tell me over the years about instances where a coach asked them to downplay a player's draft status in conversation with that player in hopes it would convince him to come back to school. It may sound cynical, but if agents are in business to make money off players, then so are coaches. If you forgot that, all you have to do to remind yourself is watch the embarrassing public hissy fit USC football coach Pete Carroll threw last week after his quarterback, Mark Sanchez, had the audacity to enter the NFL draft even though Carroll counseled him not to.

Which leads me to the other argument the ACC coaches are making -- namely, that they are simply asking the NCAA to adopt similar rules for basketball that are in place for football, where players have until Jan. 15 to declare their draft intentions. "College football just does it a lot better than we do," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. I couldn't disagree more. It is an absolute travesty that college football players are not permitted to participate in the NFL's scouting combine in late February before deciding whether to enter the draft. As my colleague Stewart Mandel eloquently argues, this is one instance where football should be imitating basketball, not vice versa.

I should also point out that college basketball conducts an early signing period for recruits in November, whereas college football has only one signing period which this year runs from Feb. 4 to April 1. Many top high school basketball players verbally commit to a college while they are still juniors in high school, and last November all but 18 of the top 150 high school seniors as ranked by Rivals.com signed their National Letters of Intent during the fall period. So there's not much a college basketball coach can do in the short-term if he loses a player before the spring signing period. So we might as well give his current players as much time as possible to make up their minds.

Ironically, three of the players who took the most time to make up their minds last year were North Carolina's Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green. All three eventually decided to come back to school, but if this rule had been in place it's quite possible they would have stayed in the draft. When I asked Williams on Monday if he agreed with that, he replied, "I don't know that I would agree or disagree, but the information that I gave them immediately [after the season] from the NBA was almost identical to the information they had two months later." That may be true, but the point is, those three guys deserved every chance in the world to chase their dreams. In the end, everything worked out, for them and for Williams.

Perhaps the ultimate irony in all of this is that, when the NCAA's Division I Legislative Council was asked last week to vote yea or nea on this proposal, they elected to put off their decision for another two months so they could gather more information. That's understandable. After all, these folks have a big choice to make here. Who can blame them if they don't want to be rushed?