Roy Williams is fifty-nine years old.

When you reach that point in life you shouldn't be embarrasing yourself for a relationship.  Some guys that age do it with younger women.  Roy Williams, head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, did it for a relationship with a seventeen year old basketball player.

Granted, Harrison Barnes, has the potential to be a great player.  Like many marquee recruits, he also has the potential to be a disappointment.  And, most likely, he will be a NBA bound college dropout within two years.

Barnes is very articulate for a seventeen year old.  But, like most seventeen year olds, he has nothing meaningful to say.  But he does love to talk.

"We developed a lot of trust in our relationship.  It was great to see how, even though we developed that relationship, he didn't get comfortable with that.  he still kept coming to see me.  He still kept calling me.  He really put in the time and effort."

Translation-Roy Williams didn't let the fact he's the coach of the NCAA national champions interfere with him prostrating himself before a seventeen year old, six foot seven, blue chip basketball recruit.

After all, nobody likes an uppity coach who has the idea that you earn your place in basketball as part of a team.  What you want is a coach who plays along with a ego driven press conference and pretends there was some suspense over where Barnes was going.

Like Roy Williams.

When Williams went along with the charade and said "Well, alright!" and brought his team out of practice to crowd around the video camera at Friday's signing video conference he sent a message.  His dignity as an adult has a price (about $1.8 million annually).

The morning after the Barnes signing was treated in the North Carolina media the way the launch of Sputnik by the Russians was covered way back when.  An escalation of the arms race, a loss of face.  The face, in this case, belonging to Duke and it's coach Mike Kryzyzewski, the runners up in the courtship of Harrison Barnes.

Down here in North Carolina we have an expression.  "I don't have a dog in that hunt".  I'm not a fan of UNC or Duke.  I respect their coaches, enjoy their rivalry, but don't live and die based on what goes down at the Dean Dome or Cameron indoor.

But as an outside observer, I'll offer this heretical opinion.  The real winner in the Harrison Barnes signing was Duke, and more specifically Coach K.

You suspect somewhere in Barnes comments was a message that Duke, widely reported to be his first choice, didn't kneel down in front of him and kiss the ring.  That Coach K didn't "put in the time". 

If that's the case, good for Coach K and good for Duke.  Because once you make blue chip players bigger than the program, once you start flying across the country to prove how important they are, and once you start huddling in front of video cameras with your team for a seventeen year old who hasn't ever played for your team you've got trouble on the way.

You've sent a message to Harrison Barnes, who apparently isn't lacking in the ego department to begin with, that the world turns around him.  You've told the rest of the team basically that.  And, for what it's worth, you've made yourself look like a teenage boy with a crush on the prettiest girl at your school.

$1.8 million a year?  That would be a nice pay day.  Selling your dignity when you're at the top of your profession and don't have to?

There's not enough money in the world.

The New York Times had an article today on "one and done" players who spend their freshmen year in college before going to the pros.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/sports/ncaabasketball/23ncaa.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

The Times article was generally positive, with Greg Oden of Ohio State (an honor roll student in high school) talking about the benefits of being in the college environment for a year. Players like Oden, who already have NBA ability, are in college for their freshmen season mainly because an NBA rule keeps them there. Players must be 19 and one year removed from high school to apply.

There is a point missing in all this and that is the question of when a college student is really a college student. Are players who leave for the pros after a year really representing their college, or are they hired guns passing through town on the way to the big pay day? If that's the case, what do Greg Oden and Daequon Cook at OSU or Kevin Durant at Texas really have to do with the schools they play for?

Put another way. Suppose you're applying for college and you get to the essay section of the application. Try telling Home Town U. that your intention is to hang around campus for a year and leave to get a job. Better still, that you intend to blow off most your second semester courses to work on getting ready for what you'll be doing next year. The college admissions personnel might rightly ask why you deserve a place in their freshman class over students who might actually graduate? Or why faculty should waste their time on you, or your peers have their time wasted by your presence in class?

Take it from the player's point of view. How would you feel if you were the next Bill Gates and were forced to attend college for nine months before going off to invent the next big thing? It's an absurd proposition, but one the NBA and NCAA have devised for their own financial benefit. Players like Oden are on record as resenting the rule, but so far it hasn't been challenged in court.

The NBA's minimum age rule has no compelling reason behind it. It doesn't protect players from physical harm (after all they will play in the league in just one more year). The arguement that it protects players from foolishly declaring for the draft and then not being drafted is, at best, paternalistic and insulting. So, why does the rule exist?

The NCAA likes the rule because without it the truely great players will never spend so much as a day on campus. They would like a rule that puts LeBron James in their employ for four years, but if a year is all they can get they will take it. The NBA wants GMs to be protected from their own unwise decisions in drafting players they have seen compete only against high school players. They want the league's future players to spend a year in the minors so they can evaluate them against older competition.  Nest season O.J. Mayo will be at USC.  Mainly, according to his advisors, because he wants to associate himself with USC's athletic success for later endorsement reasons.

Recently, Congress looked at removing the NCAA's tax exempt status. It won't happen, but it is past time. When it comes to the revenue sports, the NCAA is running minor league sports teams and exploiting their employees. It's time for the NCAA to go out of business, and for college sports to go back to having some connection to the institutions it represents.