Should NBA remove minimum-age rule?

Sports Illustrated's Luke Winn does a great job articulating what we have been discussing here regarding the recent O.J. Mayo investigation. It's a must-read.

Essentially, Winn has two main points:

First, that USC coach Tim Floyd isn't dumb or naive enough to not have connected the dots and known that Guillory-arranged goods would be dirty. He had hoped the situation wouldn't implode and now that it has, Floyd and the rest of the USC athletic department are going to plead ignorance. While Winn says the Trojans deserve major penalties, he wouldn't be surprised if the NCAA and its mostly powerless investigative unit fails to prove any culpability for Floyd or USC.

Second, Winn questions the purpose of the NBA's minimum-age rule, which was adopted two years ago.

Winn lists some of the parties, beyond Guillory and BDA, who benefited by forcing super talents like Mayo and Michael Beasley to come to school for a year.

-USC, from ticket sales, Mayo jerseys ($75 each), increased exposure
-Magazines, from featuring Mayo on their cover
-TV Networks, from televising Mayo's games
-The NCAA, from "getting higher TV ratings due ratings due to the presence of young stars such as Mayo, Beasley, Kevin Love and Derrick Rose."

Which brings us to Winn's conclusion:

"When one takes off the basketball blinders and looks back at the recent Freshman Era, it's hard not to feel guilty about promoting the age limit as a positive thing, about trumpeting these stars as real collegians. Let players on the take jump straight to the NBA, if only so colleges don't have to deal with the Guillorys of the underworld and the rest of us don't have to endure the charade of labeling characters like Mayo 'student-athletes.'"

So that's my question to you guys: Should the NCAA remove its minimum-age ("one-and-done") rule?

I think Sonny Vaccaro makes it pretty clear how he feels about the rule in his interview on the Dan Patrick radio show. You can listen to it here.

A few of the highlights:

SV: "You have to blind-deaf not to understand that these kids are coming for one year and not to understand that there's really no dedication to the school they're going to. There's nothing that ties them to the school forever....When everyone's making money...and the kids are getting dreck, Dan, it's a very easy formula to understand. I'll say this till I die: It's not a fair system. They shouldn't be in school to begin with and there should not be a one-year purgatory. There's no way that should be human. It's not right."

SV: "My point is this: let them go out of high school. If they don't get drafted, let this institution called the NCAA take them back with open arms and then make them sign an agreement: you have to stay for three years. You eliminate the hypocrisy."

DP: It's not a "student-athlete" any more. It's an "athlete-student" and the NCAA should drop this nonsense.
SV: That's the fight I'm fighting and what I'm trying to get the public to understand. Just don't come down and beat on the kids. The most egregious parties are the universities and the NCAA."
DP: I know. The phrase "student-athlete" an oxymoron.

SV: "The kids are not innocent. There's no innocence to this at all. But they're put into a situation by the NCAA and by the NBA that they wouldn't have to be put in. Allow them to go pro. The one-year-and-out thing is the biggest fraud that the NCAA has ever come up with."

I don't know about you, but I'm in full agreement with Sonny. And he's not the only one who thinks that way.

Bobby Knight called it "the worst thing that's happened to college basketball since I've been coaching" and the New York Times' Harvey Araton agreed.

Araton also touched on the underlying racial element to this issue when he said this:

"After all these years, I am happy to agree with Knight on something, especially an issue that has long troubled me: the paternalistic attitudes regarding athletes and college, self-servingly tailored to keep a large base of African-American basketball players from having the same choices as high school graduates in baseball and hockey."

I know people don't usual like to talk about race, but I think Araton makes an interesting point.

Additionally, as CBSSportsline's Gary Parrish points out, "the make-it-to-the-NBA rate for top 10 high school prospects is remarkably high," which means there is no good reason that these highly-skilled players should be forced to spend a year in college pretending to be student-athletes when they're already good enough to play at the highest level.