Kentucky coach John Calipari has built his program on freshmen like Karl-Anthony Towns … and college basketball is better for it. (Dale Zanine, USA TODAY Sports)
Kentucky might be the leading practitioner of the one-year lease, but it is far from the only one.
When Jahlil Okafor strides to the NBA draft stage in June, he will be the fourth Duke freshman in this decade who will decide against becoming a sophomore. And other Duke freshmen — Justise Winslow has been a star in the tournament — might take that walk with him. Jabari Parker, Kyrie Irving and Austin Rivers were all one-and-dones for the Blue Devils.
Kansas is no stranger to the process, either, with Ben McLemore, Joel Embiid and Andrew Wiggins.
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Kentucky has merely institutionalized it. There have been 12 Kentucky freshmen drafted in this decade, and Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker and Trey Lyles are likely to follow in June.
On Saturday night Kentucky outlasted Notre Dame in the highest-rated college basketball game in cable TV history. Granted, there’s a lot of glamour in those two names, but not many people watched the Wildcats withstand Notre Dame’s best shots and said, “This is terrible for college basketball.”
Instead, there are great advantages. The freshmen get a taste of college life, not that every normal student stays in a 4-star hotels, gets interviewed on SportsCenter and flies on charters.
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They face legitimate competition and get intensified coaching before they throw themselves into the grown man’s game. They mature. They get stronger. And, ideally, they fuse with teammates and play with urgency for that one season, because there won’t be another.
Best of all, Kentucky can only spend one season making money on a Wall, Bledsoe, Cousins or Towns jersey.
Kentucky calls it Succeed-and-Proceed, not one-and-done. By any name, it has unquestionably diluted college basketball. The 2005 draft was the last one in which high school players were eligible, and only one freshman was picked in the first round. The year before, there were two.
Last year there were nine one-and-dones in the first 20 picks, including the first four. Two years before that, there were six in the first 15 picks including the first three.
Before 2006, the pro-minded players tended to bypass college altogether, leaving the college game more cohesive than it is today.
But there’s no question that the college game is better off with, not without, Towns, Okafor, D’Angelo Russell and the rest of the one-stoppers. And that is why a Kentucky-Duke final would have such deep appeal. A heavyweight championship, without a sequel.
Mark Whicker is a columnist for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. Here is his full archive.