The kids who can go to college opt to play college ball for at least a year.
The US Postal teams salaries leaked at one point. Basically, if you’re a domestique, you’re almost paying to be there. It was basically Lance $5.5 million; George $500k; everyone else minimum wage ($35k); and Armstrong would give a few $$ here and there to keep his favorites with the team. It was speculated that a doping program cost about $30k/year.
This has similar info, but I couldnt’ find the source.
That rule is largely symbolic at this point for the “one and done” level of talent. These kids without academic aspirations don’t go to school, they go play basketball in college for a season. Varies somewhat by school, but it’s generally a joke to call it school. I still agree that it’s somewhat of a barrier, but I’d categorize it as more a logistical challenge than an academic one.
Athletic scholarships. Access to college is qualified by 1) are you good enough to get scouted for an AAU team (and if you’re good enough, your parents won’t have to pay the club fee); 2) are you good enough to get a scholarshiup offer from a D1 school, as a result of your AAU performances? 2) have you kept up the minimum 2.0 GPA to qualify for a scholarship?
So, it’s still a low socioeconomic bar for access, if the kid has the talent.
Over the past 20 years, AAU ball programs have become more important than HS ones. They’re similar to elite junior development clubs in Europe. There’s also no shortage of shady money moving around the AAU circuit. If you’re a serious baller, someone will come up with the cash for you to play AAU.
They are now going to Euro leagues. They actually get paid for their skills, instead of being used for more recruitment and making money for the school. because lets face it. The best kids playing college are not going to finish the degree when there is money to be made.
NBA and NCAA have an agreement. The NCAA was losing to top prospects to NBA draft (Garnet, Kobe, LeBron, K. Malone come to mind as NBA all times who skipped college). NCAA loses business if kids realize they can probably make more money of they just skip school (an argument against this can be made for sure).
But i have to say, the majority of kids who play college BB and actually finish the degree now days, do not make it to the NBA.
Then I guess socioeconomic mobility reasons are heavily reduced (via the owner’s side) when it comes to basketball, yet still very much alive on the player’s side — make more money playing ball than working at Amazon.
Karl Malone played at Louisiana Tech.
But, point taken.
It was also a mutually-beneficial agreement between the NBA and NCAA – look at some of the HS-to-NBA busts. If the kid could make it through one year of college (really, just one semester of basic classes – then flunk out in the spring term), they stood a better chance of being worth the guaranteed 3-year contract.
Woops… meant Moses Malone…
And I agree than most HS kids would benefit from some form of pre NBA.
Not sure if college is the right place tho.
Now with more kids turning into pro Euro leagues for development, we will see what happens.
Massive thread drift warning:
I teach high school, and over the last 20 years I’ve taught and coached many kids who went on to get D1 scholarships, and far more who didn’t, but “chasing the dream” while they played for their AAU or HS team motivated them to keep their grades up, so they still graduated HS with a basic skillset rather than dropping out.
I’d argue that one uninteded benefit of the NCAA minimum eligibility standards is that it keeps the “supply side” (the kids) from devaluing themselves from other possible life choices.
This was a heart breaking documentary:
One of the athletes fizzles out just as he’s on the cusp of a multi-million dollar contract. He was top 10 ranked in college basketball but he ruptured a disc and had back issues after 10+ years in the game. No fancy surgeons or treatments, just the end of the road.
Agreed. But that “pre-NBA” would need more structure and guidance than, say, minor league baseball. Take an 18 or 19-year-old jock and put them on their own with hangers on and shady types looking for the next gravy train and you have a worse system than the current charade in college.
If there is a good degree of institutional control and mentoring from the college program, that year can really help develop a young man, and not just develop an athlete.
McGregor was a plumber’s assistant and on welfare. I could go down a long list of fighters that came off the streets. A lot of fighters were just that, fighting on the streets. Jose Aldo, Anderson Silva, Ronda Rousey, McGregor on and on none of them came out of MMA gyms. That said this is a cycling forum and the Lance thread so, let’s go with basketball and move on 
Consider Brien Taylor. The Yankees did cover short-term medical expenses, but when it was clear he wasn’t going to fulfill his pre-injury promise, he was back to poverty square one in rural North Carolina.
Regardless of the sport, chasing the big-time dream leads nowhere, for most.
edit: but is chasing the dream to get an “ordinary” pro contract — in order to move up the socioeconomic ladder — a feasible dream? Ludo Dierckxsens for example.
Are we even going to discuss the documentary at this point or is this thread a ship with no captain lol? 
Given his friendship with Hincapie I was a little surprised by this line…
“The country of America idolizes, worships, glorifies George Hincapie and invites him to races and gives him jobs, buys his shit,” says Armstrong in LANCE. “And they disgrace and destroy me. That’s why I went [to see Ullrich]. Because that’s fking bullst.”
In case you haven’t seen it yet, or anyone else in the UK is looking, both parts are on BT Sport 2 tonight at 19:30 back to back.
Im sure GH knows lance is a massive asshole, and brushes it off. Like how lance always talks over him on the podcast
But George doesn’t even have to be on the podcast. I guess maybe Lance doesn’t really have any true friends at this point so he’s just an asshole to everyone, including his loyal lieutenant.
Interest read on the documentary basically summing up a lot of points in this thread.
To start the second and final part of ESPN’s 30 For 30 documentary on Lance Armstrong, he is asked if he is still relevant.
“I am relevant,” Armstrong said.
I’ll be pleasantly surprised if you read this far into a column about Lance Armstrong.
Lance Armstrong is not even a pariah. He’s just history.
ESPN’s second major 30 For 30 released this spring, the documentary on the racer from Plano, Texas, is far superior to the 10-part infomercial on Michael Jordan.
Feasible, sure. Probable? Nope.
To tie back to Armstrong, one of his equally admirable and contemptible complexities is that he knew the odds were long but refused to accept that they were, and went full Cortez, burning personal and ethical boats to do what had to be done to make the feasible probable.