Going, Going, Gone

Antoine Walker was a delight to watch in the 1996 NCAA tournament, a supremely talented and crowd-pleasing sophomore forward who played no small part in Kentucky's national championship run. Seventeen-year-old Kobe Bryant, two years his junior, is a little like Walker: gifted on the court; bright, personable, confident, but not insufferably so, off it. Both have declared their intentions to play in the NBA next year, and here is the blunt truth: There are many, many basketball people who hope both of them fall on their faces in the pros. "You never hope for guys to fail," says Pepperdine coach Lorenzo Romar, who played in the NBA for five seasons, "but that might be the only way we see this changing."

"This" is the flood of players who have declared for early entry into the 1996 NBA draft. By the time the clock struck midnight on Sunday night, the hour by which early entries had to be in the mail, at least 23 players had puffed out their chests and said, "Choose me." Some of them might still pull back and return to school if they conclude that their draft prospects aren't good, as Syracuse's John Wallace did last year, or if the results of the June 26 draft don't meet their expectations. But the early line is that more will turn pro than the 13 who did so a year ago. Jacque Vaughn was only half kidding last week when, in announcing that he would stay at Kansas for his senior season, he said he was taking "a path less traveled."

As a result of this exodus of stars, the college game is suffering an identity crisis. Teams no longer stay together long enough to gel and capture the imagination of fans. Consider what the college hoops aficionado faces for the '96-97 season. Except to watch John Thompson walk around with a towel around his neck, will anyone want to tune in to watch an Allen Iverson-less Georgetown? Did you fall in love with Final Four newcomer Mississippi State? Too bad. Without center Erick Dampier and forward Dontae' Jones, the Bulldogs probably won't be back in the tournament this season. The names of Chris Kingsbury and Jess Settles may not resonate like those of Ray Allen and Marcus Camby, who are bolting from UConn and UMass, respectively, but in a Big Ten that has been slowly deteriorating of late, their defections from Iowa are a major loss. What center is still around to give Tim Duncan—the Wake Forest senior-to-be, who against all odds elected to return to college—a showcase game? Eddie Elisma of Georgia Tech? Serge Zwikker of Carolina? And as for Tech's Stephon Marbury and Cat's Shareef Abdur-Rahim, well, gentlemen, we hardly knew ye. These early entries in the NBA draft used to be called "hardship cases." Now that term is a more fitting description of the state of college hoops.

This isn't idle doomsday nattering by the negative nabobs in the media. Here's Washington coach Bob Bender: "You just won't see as many premier players over many years now, guys like Pat Ewing, who stayed four years [at Georgetown]. All the early entrants are changing the face of college basketball." Here's Atlantic-10 commissioner Linda Bruno: "It seems as soon as college basketball hooks on to a star, he's suddenly a part of the NBA. Athletes' leaving early has definitely hurt the college game." And here's a guy who you would think would be fairly sanguine about the state of the game: "Quite frankly, I think college basketball is in serious trouble." That is the sentiment of none other than Kentucky coach Rick Pitino.

Perhaps two words will suffice to illustrate the negative impact that early entry has already had on the college game: North Carolina. Had forward Jerry Stackhouse and center Rasheed Wallace, both early entrants in 1995, stuck around for the '95-96 season and the upcoming '96-97 season, the Tar Heels would have been a fascinating, high-octane team that might even have beaten Kentucky. Without Stackhouse and Wallace, Carolina was an above-average but largely uninteresting squad.

There is more than anecdotal evidence that early migration has hurt the game. Television ratings for the NCAA title game have been descending over the past four years (chart, left) despite the fact that media coverage and other attendant hype have grown. No NCAA final in recent years has approached the ratings of the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird (otherwise known as Michigan State-Indiana State) classic in 1979, which drew a 24.1 rating and a 38 share. And if you choose to view that as an anomaly, consider that no recent final has matched the 1985 Villanova-Georgetown showdown (a 23.3 rating and 33 share), either.

What do those examples say? They say that fans like to watch established stars. True, the Magic man was only a 19-year-old sophomore (who himself left school for the NBA after that game), but if today's attitudes were prevalent back then, most likely neither he nor Bird, who was a 22-year-old senior, would have stuck around in college for their epic encounter. The same is true of Ewing and Villanova's Ed Pinckney, who in '85 were established four-year stars. Fans also like to watch the development of rivalries that build up over several years. That doesn't happen anymore.

Television execs are loath to talk about diminishing ratings, and most still feel they get their value out of the sport. But they, too, acknowledge that there's trouble. "College basketball is at a crossroads," says Len DeLuca, vice president of programming for CBS Sports. "You look back to the halcyon years when Patrick Ewing developed over three Final Fours and Ralph Sampson tried to get Virginia there and Danny Manning carried Kansas to the title. That kind of development you're not going to see."

The early departures might be more palatable if they were at least creating a better NBA. They are not. "We're very unhappy about all the early entries," says NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik. "They take away from college basketball, and in most cases they don't make our game any better. If this continues, we won't be getting the polished players. We'll never get Bird and Magic again." Yes, the latest high school kid to pass on Philosophy 101 in favor of the illegal-defense guidelines, Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves, will probably be an All-Star someday. But as is the case with the Timberwolves' field goal attempts, the misses far outnumber the makes when it comes to early entries.

The NBA is saturated with players whose games never had a chance to grow, players who, as Stanford coach Mike Montgomery put it, "will have to be nurtured through [their] immaturity." For every Jason Kidd, there are any number of Dontonio Wing-fields, Donyell Marshalls and Sharone Wrights, all of whom came out with Kidd in '94, and none of whom has come close to developing an NBA game. And while there is every reason to expect that the ACC's talented early-entry troika of Stackhouse, Wallace and former Maryland center Joe Smith will flourish, there are just as many reasons to believe that their draftmates, Scotty Thurman of Arkansas and Rashard Griffith of Wisconsin, would have been better off with another year of collegiate seasoning.