A path no longer resisted

You don't know who Daishen Nix is, unless you're one of those obsessed individuals who cruise recruiting websites 24/7 and hang on the word of every teenager with a crossover dribble. But maybe you should.

He's blazing a trail, you see. Same as Dan'l Boone and Lewis and Clark .'n' them, kinda.

Daishen Nix, it seems, is one of those teenagers with a crossover dribble, a five-star point guard from Nevada whom UCLA thought it had locked up. That was until Nix decided to de-commit -- and not to go to some other bulwark of academics and chunky apparel deals.

No, sir. Nix ain't doin' the college thing. He's going straight to the NBA via the G-League, which the NBA made accessible in the fall of 2018 by unveiling the G-League pathway program.

The way it works is, a kid coming out of high school can go to the G-League for a year until he turns 19 and is eligible for the NBA draft. That way he can spend a year learning what the pro life is all about, and skip making a pile for John Calipari or Mike Krzyzewski.

The Blob has been pounding the drums for this for a good long while, although why the NBA doesn't go all the way with it is beyond me. In other words, why still make a kid wait a year? If he wants to enter the draft straight out of Millard Fillmore High, let him do it. Then, if he gets drafted, assign him to the G-League for a year.

That's essentially what the NBA is already doing, after all.

In any event, Nix is now the third player from the class of 2020 to opt for the G-League, enough of a trend to perhaps have the colleges sweating and yanking at their collars a bit. But it's hard to feel very sorry for them, given that this pretty much just their chickens coming home to roost.

See. as much as they lament the advent of the one-and-done culture in college basketball, and blame the NBA's asinine 19-year-old rule for it, they've certainly not been shy about exploiting it. There are One-and-Done U.'s all over America now, baldly transactional  programs banking all the coin they can from their short-timer mercenaries. How can they now complain when those mercenaries decide to act like, well, mercenaries?

Seems to me that's just the kids getting what they're supposed to get from their college experience.

An education.