This weekend I’m planning to do two things I used to do a lot more often: go to the movies, and watch college basketball. The movie will be Project Hail Mary in IMAX, a top priority in my house because my wife loved the book and loves space movies. It will be one of maybe three films I’ll see in theaters all year. The basketball plans need no explanation with the NCAA Tournament unfolding as you read this.
Given my lack of college hoops diligence, though, the tournament’s not what it used to be for me. I feel guilty about this but I have to be honest. I’ll watch and enjoy it, but there were about 20 years when these next few weeks were the highlight of my year as a basketball fan. When I first started writing online, back when Twitter was more fun, every February and March would have me going back and forth with analytics-forward NBA bloggers, stubbornly arguing that college hoops was not, in fact, an inferior product to the NBA.
Despite way more skill and athleticism at the pro level, the college game had better crowds, bigger rivalries, more entertaining games for the first five months of the season. But the appeal waned, at least for me. The years passed, I became more immersed in the NBA because of work, and meanwhile college hoops hollowed out: one-and-done became ubiquitous, player and team narratives became impossible to track year over year, and most importantly, the pool of elite, NBA-bound talent was cut in half (at least) compared to the version of college basketball I’d fallen in love with in the ’90s.
All of which brings me to a topic that’s an interruption from government standoffs and outright war, but is nevertheless very important to our shared future: The next time the NBA and the Players Association renegotiate the collective bargaining agreement, the league should raise the age limit.
This wasn’t in my “fixing the NBA” article last month, but it should’ve been. Like the NFL, the NBA should require all amateur players to be at least three years removed from high school before entering the league. Do that, and it makes college basketball twice as entertaining—with genuine superstars, and narratives that build year over year as the main characters actually stay in school—while the NBA eventually becomes replete with young stars that America actually recognizes.
Granted, it may seem crazy to lobby for this during a college basketball season featuring the deepest class of NBA-ready freshmen talent in my adult life, but yes, I’m here to argue that it would be better for the league if all of those players stayed in college for two more years. The college game, meanwhile, is in the midst of a genuine revival and does not necessarily need the help. Alongside the superstar freshmen draft prospects, there are deep, veteran-laden teams like Michigan, Arizona, Florida, and Houston that have been powerhouses all year long. Viewership is up across the board, college games regularly out-rate the NBA, and people who love college hoops seem to be having more fun with the game than ever.
So let me be clear: The NBA should raise its age limit not because college basketball is broken or because I’m personally watching less than I once did. If anything, the league should do it because the NBA is broken and college basketball is working great.
Consider the following five points.
1. It’s Not Problematic Anymore. There was a time when it was argued, not unreasonably, that forcing players to spend multiple years in college basketball would make the NBA complicit in keeping players poor for longer than necessary and perpetuating the sham of amateurism and an NCAA rulebook that allowed everyone to get rich but the players. That’s over now. Caleb Wilson is making seven figures to play at North Carolina, Darius Acuff got a similar deal at Arkansas, and virtually every top prospect has similar money available. Delaying their entry to the NBA does diminish the lifetime earning potential for players, but eventual NBA superstars are netting hundreds of millions of dollars in any scenario. If it would be in the best interests of fans, teams and the league (and arguably existing players, i.e. members of the NBPA), we should be clear that it would not be immoral (or illegal) for the NBA and its players to decide in the course of collectively bargaining that, actually, it’s better if America’s best young players spend three years making millions of dollars in college before they come to the NBA.
2. Cooper Flagg Would Be a Bigger Star Today If He Were Still at Duke. I’ve heard that Flagg struggled with the decision to leave Durham last spring. He ultimately chose to leave, of course, because it would have been financially insane to wait a year before entering the league and working toward a second contract that could pay him $280 million at 23 years old (and a third contract that could clear $400 million by 28). Still, Flagg wanted to stay, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Caleb Wilson feels similarly. Instead, Wilson will definitely declare in a month (and be a top five pick), while I don’t have a single normie friend (read: not online, not working in basketball media) who’s watched more than one Cooper Flagg game in Dallas this year. Consider the alternative, then, where Flagg is still at Duke right now, returning after a run to last year’s Final Four and a crushing defeat in the national semifinal, looking for redemption after another All-American season in Durham. That would be the biggest story in sports for the next three weeks. Whatever happened, we’d all be along for the ride, including millions of normies.
3. College Basketball Already Saved the WNBA. The NBA has a problem minting new stars. Cade Cunningham is great, but no one knows who he is. SGA literally won a title and an MVP, yet even he barely registers. Instead, still, the most famous players in the league are LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Steph Curry, all of whom are either past 40 years old or fast approaching it. The inverse of that story is the WNBA, where the biggest names in the league are Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, A’ja Wilson, Angel Reese, and Sabrina Ionescu. Each of them made their name playing four years in college and starring in blockbuster March Madness games. Their examples should be taken to heart by the NBA and its owners as they search for ways to market a star-driven league that doesn’t have a bankable American star under 35 years old. Everyone loves college basketball narratives, many of the biggest brands in college hoops are bigger than 28 or 29 NBA teams, and the WNBA is proof that the benefits of the college platform as a marketing springboard are not theoretical—the NBA just hasn’t realized those benefits in about 20 years.
4. Keeping Players in College Would Be Better for Teams and Fans. Handicapping the fate of high-upside 19-year-olds while drawing from high school tape and four months of college games is a pretty high-variance bet as teams try to build for the future every year. Likewise, teenagers take time. For every Kon Knueppel outlier, there are more Dylan Harpers, Ace Baileys, Derik Queens, Tre Johnsons, etc—good players, but not driving winning yet, leaving fans to wait around until they turn 22. Compounding the madness, the youth of top draft picks means that just three or four years after the draft, teams are forced into ominous, nine-digit decisions on contract extensions, often before their draft picks have won anything in the NBA. What would you pay Walker Kessler this summer? Amen Thompson? Bennedict Mathurin? And how did Jabari Smith Jr. get a $122 million deal last summer?
This is the least sexy element of the age limit argument—let fans cheer for young players who can actually compete for wins, allow teams to make smarter investments at the draft and on second contracts—but the strategic and financial benefits should be obvious to any NBA owner who’s paying attention. The draft was never supposed to be a mechanism for acquiring players who are two years away from being two years away. Top picks should be used on rookies who can actually win, and massive second contracts should go to players firmly in their prime. A smarter age limit would fix a lot of dynamics that have gotten pretty irrational lately.
5. What’s Best for Basketball? On this point I’ll return to my other plans this weekend: the movies. Hollywood has made a lot of mistakes over the past 15 years. Chief among them were licensing content to disruptive competitors, destroying their own business models in a bid to goose share prices, and failing to protect distribution models like windowing (keeping movies in theaters for 4-6 weeks, waiting 4-6 months before they’re available to rent, and another 4-6 months before they hit cable) that artificially imposed scarcity in the market and built anticipation for not only new releases in theaters, but also for movie rentals and cable TV.
The benefits of windowing were realized both upstream and downstream. And the net result of abandoning models like that, as well as a handful of other strategic and artistic trends, has been an American culture that cares a lot less about movies than it used to. The audience for the Oscars has been cut in half over the past 20 years. Blame technology if you want, but that absolves the folks who proactively discarded market structures and business models that had preserved the industry for a full century.
As for basketball, it’s not a perfect analogy, but college hoops at its peak in the ’80s and ’90s was effectively a windowing strategy for the biggest young basketball stars in America. First they played multiple years in college, were marketed to the entire country with the power of massive brand names and rivalry games and the NCAA tournament, and then a few years later they entered the NBA already well known to sports fans everywhere. And for the NBA, unlike the studios that paid millions to market movies in theaters, all of this came for free.
It was a business model that made a lot more sense than drafting two dozen 19-year-olds every year, paying them, waiting for them to get good, and only then, three to five years into their career, beginning to get America’s attention. Worse, like movies, I do worry that the NBA eroding the models that maximized buzz and drama may just render all of this less culturally meaningful to mainstream audiences over time.
Again, structural choices matter. When there’s less elite talent in college basketball and the elite young talent in pro basketball spends years gestating in obscurity, it makes both worlds less interesting, and makes the shared history of basketball, and the culture of basketball in America, less popular than it could be. Beyond free marketing and better scouting, that’s the best reason to raise the age limit.
The NBA investing in a healthier college game may look like stifling young talent and building up a direct ratings competitor—but only if you’re not thinking very hard. Consider how fandom actually works and how traditions take hold, and it can’t possibly be a bad idea to improve the storytelling and quality of play at the two highest levels of basketball in America. Best case scenario, you create the conditions for the whole country to love the sport itself.
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