Recruiting to Win: The Flaws of College Basketball

The mindset of a winning coach in college basketball is geared towards the concept of “Recruiting to Win” in an effort to build a winning program that will propel its school to the top of the national standings.  Coaches seem to roam the country with wide eyes and ears to the high school gossip about which players show the most talent.  Many coaches pride themselves on the ability to recruit players with more than talent, eluding to the fact that they value character and morality as much as an ability to play their sport.  But, with the ever-present allure of professional sports, the characteristics that determine the type of player coaches recruit are more complicated than college sports have ever experienced.

With the NCAA attempting to preserve the purity of collegiate athletics through its refusal to allow players to earn money from their college likeness, it is no wonder the programs in college sports are forced to decide what qualities they want in a player they recruit.  The present-day argument over whether a program should recruit “one and done” players that will spend one year as a college athlete before heading to play professionally or choose players that will spend four years developing within a program and lifting their chosen team to new heights for the duration of their four years of college eligibility goes much deeper than this superficial argument.  

In addition to the “one and done” debate, the emerging trend that seems to be developing is the idea that players should preserve their athleticism for the professional stage.  This means players choose to forgo or not play in the last part of a college season to limit their risk of injury and preserve themselves for the professional level of play where they can earn money from their athletic talents.  Earlier this year, fans and coaches witnessed star players choosing to “sit out” of bowl games to preserve themselves for the NFL.  And now college basketball players seem to be following the trend as players choose to not play the rest of the season in order to have a better chance in the NBA Draft.  This emerging trend puts college coaches in a modern-day recruiting dilemma.  With the emerging trend of players choosing to miss games, the programs that hold these athletes are left to scramble to compete in the most crucial games of the year without their star players, putting them at a disadvantage to their opponents and misrepresenting the ability of the team.

As coaches today begin to recruit players, it is likely they will be looking for possible motivational cues as to whether a player could abandon their team instead of contributing to the program’s success during the championship portion of the season. One thing is for sure, the face of college recruiting will be forced to change in order to accommodate the new trend.