A Madness for all seasons

Give NBA commissioner Adam Silver this much: Maybe he's proving the Blob wrong when it said the NBA didn't care what its silly you-have-to-be-19-to-play-in-our-league rule was doing to college basketball.

The League is now trying to come up with ways to kill the one-and-done monster it created, and then turned loose on the NCAA. Silver and Co. haven't arrived at the obvious solution yet, but they are getting closer.

(The obvious solution: Let a kid enter the draft straight out of high school, the way the NBA used to. But stipulate that, if he's drafted, he has to spend a year in the G-League learning how to be a pro. Re-structure the G-League to facilitate that process, making it the developmental league it was allegedly intended to be. The kid gets his signing bonus as a draft pick and pulls down a minor-league salary in the interim, same as baseball. Simple.)

And the NCAA?

For all the talk about how the one-and-dones have hurt it -- and have ushered in a supposedly unprecedented level of corruption -- they haven't hurt it that much.

This just in: For the first time, the NCAA cleared the $1 billion mark in revenue in 2016-17. The workforce that generated that, of course, still gets no cut of it aside from a full-ride scholarship that isn't guaranteed (i.e., it must be renewed each year.)  The workforce also gets no cut of his or her school's chunky apparel deals, serving as unpaid billboards every time they trot out there bearing the apparel company's logos on their uniforms.

Ostensibly this is because they're amateurs serving an amateur athletic entity. One that pulled in a billion dollars in 2016-17 and is indistinguishable in every way from the NBA, NFL or any other professional sports entity, but, you know, still.

And yet here the NCAA honchos are, wringing their hands over what they themselves have created.  The NCAA is an incredibly successful profit-driven business; the kids are therefore approaching college basketball and football as a business opportunity, cutting deals and exploiting college athletics just as college athletics have always exploited them.

No one should be shocked by this. No one should be scandalized by what's coming out on those FBI wiretaps, because it's merely commerce, and it's been going on for a long time. And that's because commerce is what a $1-billion-in-revenues entity is all about.

They've made their well-feathered bed, in other words. Complaining about having to lie in it now is simply bad form.