INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The concept used to be so simple: Professionals played sports for money. College players did not.
Now, it is not so clear-cut, and that confusion now gets wrapped into virtually any conversation about the state of college sports. Not surprisingly, it's bubbling up at the Final Four, where Illinois has five players on the roster who boast pro experience in Europe, and Arizona has a couple of starters who came out of the European pro leagues.
An NCAA playing field founded on the idea that amateurs play college sports has become much more of a business in which players get paid — forever considered the best way to define a pro — while their eligibility hinges on where that money comes from.
All the Illinois players with European roots are allowed to play because their pro teams were more like club teams; they didn't enter a draft or actually get drafted, the way a player might if he was looking to go to the NBA.
The topic is still so fresh that the NCAA announced just this week it was considering changing rules to bar athletes who enter and stay in a pro sports draft from coming back and competing in college, as happened in two instances earlier this season.
All of that is further jumbled by the fact that many of these players will probably make more in college than they would at their “pro” jobs — whether it be basketball, finance or coaching — thanks to the influx of name, image and likeness payments that now permeate college sports.
“The way I would describe it is it's a middle ground, between what college athletics used to be about, which was not paying, to now, where you're paying student-athletes,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said. “But in a way, we've always paid student-athletes. We've given them a scholarship. We've given them something of value. Now, the only difference is, we’re adding cash to that for their name, image, likeness.”
That cash has widened the recruiting pipeline to Europe and other points overseas. Nobody has exploited it better this season than the Illini, whose “Balkan Bloc” — including twins Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivisic and David Mirkovic — accounts for 36% of both their scoring and their minutes.
Illinois' key recruiter in Europe, Geoff Alexander, explained that a European “pro” who comes to the U.S. for college is something much different than, say, a player with experience in the NBA.
“In Europe and around the world, they don't have high school basketball," Alexander said. "They go to these clubs as youths and find their path. That's like their high school. So anyone who wants to pigeonhole these guys into all this discussion about college eligibility, it's apples and oranges.”
The eligibility discussion concerns an NCAA proposal that came out this week to tweak the rules about who can play and who can't. It was partly a reaction to two players, Alabama's Charles Bediako and Baylor’s James Nnaji, who each played in college this season after entering the 2023 NBA draft.
Bediako's case drew headlines because he actually played three years in the NBA's developmental G League. He sued the NCAA after it denied Alabama's request to allow him to return to college this season, arguing he remined within his five-year eligibility window. One judge issued a temporary-restraining order that allowed Bediako to play. That lasted five games until new rulings barred him again.
Looming next could be the case of 22-year-old Amari Bailey, a former UCLA star who played 10 games in the NBA with the Charlotte Hornets. He has hired a lawyer and is seeking a return, telling ESPN, "right now, I’d be a senior in college. I'm not trying to be 27 years old playing college athletics."
Neither are the European transplants, though many certainly do play against players 27 and older in the overseas leagues before they arrive in the U.S. college system.
“If you've played in the EuroLeague, you are not a freshman,” Michigan coach Dusty May said, in reference to Arizona freshman Ivan Kharchenkov, who has played at different levels for a club team in Munich since he was 12 and could end up in the NBA soon.
Another Arizona starter, Motiejus Krivas, is from Lithuania.
Wildcats coach Tommy Lloyd spent decades at Gonzaga, a school that took a lead in international recruiting (Domantas Sabonis, Rui Hachimura) long before the onset of NIL made coming to America a more lucrative proposition for the up-and-coming European club players.
“To be honest with you, I think it’s maybe opened a few more doors,” Lloyd said. “One of the detriments to international recruiting back in the day was if a kid wanted to get paid, the European clubs could pay them legally, and obviously we couldn’t.”
Lloyd predicts that soon, “the convoluted notion of who's eligible” will get sorted out and it will become more clear that college sports is for players in their late teens and early 20s.
Illinois coach Brad Underwood acknowledges that no matter where the players come from, the business model of college sports has changed.
“I’d argue that in today’s world, all these kids are finding opportunities that allow them to receive compensation,” he said.
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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness
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