A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

IN DEFENSE OF REGGIE BUSH: Okay, I lied. This isn't exactly a defense of Reggie Bush.* Bush cheated, and he should give back his Heisman, and the NCAA should actively try to ferret out cases where athletes are breaking its rules, and if athletes break those rules, they should be punished in proportion to the violation, which in Bush's case would have meant permanent ineligibility. Punishment, consequences, yes. Demonization and anger, no.

(It feels like everybody must have an inkling of who Bush is, since the less you know about football, the greater the probability that you know about Kardashians. If you watch neither ESPN nor E!, however, the short story is that when Bush was a standout running back at USC, he took almost $300,000 in "gifts" from an agent. USC has now been sanctioned essentially for not paying close enough attention while Bush was being paid, among other things.)

There is a bargain that a school makes when it hires -- and I use that term intentionally -- athletes who openly and realistically are on the fastest path to professional stardom. What the school gets is a marketable athlete who, in the best-case scenario, can generate millions of dollars in revenue for the school through television licensing, merchandising, and donations. What the athlete gets is a platform to launch his professional career.

That is a ridiculously one-sided deal. Anybody who thinks it is societally justifiable should turn in his Mont Pelerin Society badge. Bush's real job during his USC years was to maximize his return from an extremely valuable but highly risky leisure good (his talent). A cartel with a collective monopsony on the consumption of that good (the NCAA, whose monopsony was created by the NFL's draft eligibility rules) imposed rules capping the price of the good far below a competitive price. Any economist will tell you that that's a recipe for an active black market. It was no more morally wrong for Bush to take advantage of that black market than it was back in the 80s for Russians to arbitrage Levis in their own black market. We like the free market, right?

I, as much as anybody else, actually wish that college sports were more purely amateur. But when colleges recruit kids who they know are only trying to become professional athletes, and when the recruiting pitch is "play one year at Kentucky and go to the NBA" or "talk to our NFL alumni about what USC can do for you," coupled with an implicit promise not to care too much about anything off the field, it's easy to see how someone like Bush would get a mixed message. His only transgression was getting paid 13 months earlier than everybody else wanted him to get paid. That is against the rules, but it's not morally wrong. So lay off the fire and brimstone, Gene Wojchiechowski.

On a related, and clearly dissonant, note: I hate the one-and-done phenomenon in college basketball. I want to root for players who want to be in college, not players who have to be there. The NCAA doesn't think this is a problem, but if it did, I have a quick fix. Instead of giving each school 13 one-year basketball scholarships each year, give it 13 four-year basketball scholarships. If a player only sticks around for a year, the school is stuck with three years when it can't use that scholarship (with exceptions for players who transfer to other schools). Schools would have an incentive to limit (but not necessarily eliminate) reliance on obvious one-and-done candidates. One-and-done players would spread out to a larger numbe of schools, increasing competitive parity, and you might even see a shift of talent to minor league basketball. Yes, this would penalize schools who do a great job developing talent. Yes, it would create barriers for borderline great basketball players to go to college at all. But it would also eliminate travesties like the whole sordid OJ Mayo situation and maybe, just maybe, reduce instances of infuriating dumbasses holding press conferences to announce their college choices.