[Batpuff]

WHAT'S LEFT OF INTEGRITY TAKES ANOTHER HIT WITH NBA'S NEW RULE

By Kevin Modesti

LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS

When the NBA and its players' union agreed last summer to effectively bar high school stars from jumping straight into the draft, the league accomplished something I thought was impossible: It dumped another layer of cynicism on college basketball, which was rim-deep already.

This hits home with speculation that O.J. Mayo, the 18-year-old from Ohio, might announce this week that he's coming to Southern California. Let's say it happens.

OK for O.J., a soon-to-be-senior high school guard who will have to play somewhere in 2007-08 while waiting for his NBA eligibility to kick in. The rule changes prevent him from going straight from driver's ed to No. 1 in the draft the way Kwame Brown, LeBron James and Dwight Howard did.

OK for the Trojans, the long-frustrated program that can use Mayo's talent and glamour to kick-start a new era.

Not OK for college basketball's image, which wasn't all ivy-covered walls and fight songs to begin with.

Now, hold on, you say. Wasn't it supposed to be a boon to both pro and college basketball when the NBA required players to wait until they're 19 and their graduation class has been out of high school for a year before they go into the draft? Wasn't it supposed to guarantee more polished talent for the pros and just plain more talent for the colleges? Wasn't this supposed to be a step back to the good old days, before "hardship" cases and that whole slippery slope, before the concept of the Student-Athlete gave way to the Pro Athlete in Training?

Yes, it was supposed to be.

I've read fanciful speculation that NBA-minded young studs, forced to spend a year in college, will discover the wonders of dorm life and biology labs and decide to enjoy the campus experience for four years.

But, of course, that's not what's going to happen, at least not often enough to count.

What's going to happen is that teenage stars are going to go to college because they have no choice. They're going to go for one season and only one season and then start cashing those Milwaukee Bucks paychecks. They're going to go to a school whose basketball program has nothing to lose, in a big city to maximize the name-recognition factor, with a coach qualified to offer NBA career guidance.

That is, they're going to be Ovinton J'Anthony Mayo, said to be eyeing several colleges, including USC, which has never had a basketball recruit this good, which affords the natural marketing advantages of Los Angeles, and which is coached by former Chicago Bulls and New Orleans Hornets boss Tim Floyd.

It might be that in O.J. Mayo's case -- as in all such cases -- the kid and the coach play by all the academic and athletic rules, and nobody gets hurt.

Still, it will look as if both sides are gaming the system, the sort of mutual exploitation that's the hallmark of big-time college sports. And more than ever, given the naked economic motives involved, there will be suspicions about the roles of the middlemen who populate the hoops world.

The NBA is perfectly within its rights when it raises its standards of eligibility.

Still, there's something vaguely un-American about setting an age limit for employment in a profession that, on the seriousness scale, rates somewhere below airline pilot and heart surgeon.

Now, more than ever, 18-year-old basketball players will be sitting in college classrooms not because they want to but because they have to. Gee, what could go wrong?

With one draft (last week's) in the books under the new rule, there's been nothing to contradict the arguments of Arizona Coach Lute Olson, who voiced his concerns as soon as the change was announced in June 2005. Olson called it a "stop-gap measure (that) gives the NBA the ability to say that they did something about the problem. Very seldom does one year of college benefit either the player or the program."

Duke's Mike Krzyzewski has made a sensible suggestion: The NBA should either reopen the doors to high-school players, or require at least two years of college.

Mayo, a 6-foot-5, 205-pound point guard who has played high school varsity ball in Ashland, Ky., and Cincinnati since he was a seventh-grader, almost certainly will be one of those one-and-out stars, whether he chooses USC or Kansas State or somewhere else.

Mayo won't be the only great young player in this fix. USC won't be the only university trying to take advantage. This will become a pattern, and that's a problem for a sport marked by one month of madness and 11 months of cynicism.