Seeing the light

 Self-interest is a wonderful vehicle for clarifying things. The truth may be out there, but until it affects you personally, you sometimes don't see it.

Consider Mick Cronin's vision much improved, in that case.

See, he's got his UCLA Bruins playing in the Sweet Sixteen today, but he doesn't have Dashien Nix. Nix was a showroom guard he had on the hook a couple years ago, until he didn't. Nix opted to go play in the NBA's G-League instead, an option now available to top-flight prospects coming out of high school.

Cronin doesn't have a problem with that. What he has a problem with is the G-League actively recruiting Nix after it knew he was a major UCLA recruit.

And here we go again, the NBA talking junk about how the pros and the colleges are all in this for the athletes' welfare, while treating the colleges like something you scrape off your shoe. And Cronin's damn sick and tired of it, because now it's affecting him.

"A free farm system for 40 years for the NBA," is how he described it the other day.

Well, yes, and the colleges have gone right along with it. Instead of taking steps to push back against the NBA for its absurd 19-year-old rule, they've merely exploited it by signing every year's new crop of Dashien Nixes knowing full well they're just using Whatsamatta U. as a waiting room until they turn 19. 

Which of course makes an utter joke out of the professed mission of college athletics, which is to allow gifted athletes access to first-class educations.

That has been a laughable notion for a long time in the upper reaches of college athletics, and nothing illustrates it more starkly than the one-and-dones precipitated by the NBA's idiotic rule. College coaches and administrators wring their hands and talk junk themselves about it, but the bottom line is the bottom line. If signing a handful of one-and-dones can gain you access to another round of cash in the NCAA Tournament, they'll gladly keep doing it.

Because if they were serious about not using these kids as ATMs, they'd stop recruiting them. Or tell them they wouldn't recruit them without at least a two-year commitment.

Or do a lot more than just complain about the NBA's restraint of trade.

"It's America," Cronin told ESPN Radio the other day. "A guy can go to war when he's 18. He can grab a gun and get killed for his country, but he can't put his name in the (NBA) draft? Come on, man, it's ridiculous."

Indeed it is.

So stop talking and start doing.