Remember back in the day, when there were superstar juniors and seniors in the NCAA tournament? Just a few years back in 2002 when Maryland won the title, their team featured a starting lineup with three seniors (Juan Dixon, Byron Mouton, Lonny Baxter), one junior (Steve Blake), and one sophomore (Chris Wilcox). Even in 2005, the North Carolina Tar Heels had two seniors and (Jackie Manuel and Jawad Williams) and three juniors (Ray Felton, Rashad McCants, Sean May) as their starters.
But the past few years have been most notable by the fact that the best players in college basketball stay for a single season and then go pro. We all understand the reasoning: money. And I don't think many of us are mad at the kids themselves for wanting to get paid to ply their craft; we're just mad that college basketball doesn't feature the long-term superstars these days. Tyler Hansbrough gets made fun of constantly, because he's stayed at North Carolina for four years. The talk is that he's "not good enough" to go pro, and the NBA draft preview sites concur.
Here's one more draft projection, and this is the one I want you to look at. When I was browsing around to see who my lowly Wizards might take in this year's NBA draft, a piece of data on here stood out to me. I think it might actually be the key to encouraging college players to stay in college. Can you spot it?
Stay tuned, I'll post my idea at the end of the tournament.
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