AbeVigodaLive wrote:Camden wrote:Is anyone going to give a shit about his past if he's anything close to an All-Star level player? Seriously.
I don't see any Phoenix Suns fans up in arms over DeAndre Ayton taking $100,000 from the University of Arizona. Did anyone care about Dennis Smith receiving $43,500 at North Carolina State? Isaiah Whitehead received $26,136 as a freshman at Seton Hall. Tim Quarterman got more than $16,000 while he was at LSU.
Shit, the entire Fab Five team at Michigan got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Marcus Camby made $40,000 at Massachusetts.
None of those instances had any play in how those guys turned out in the NBA. So, rather than focus entirely on a debatable mistake, I'll reiterate that James Wiseman is the best basketball player in this draft class. He turns 19 in March. That's all I've got, gentlemen.
Of course not. This stuff is rampant.
My beef was just in how you presented it. He was being shady. Hardaway was being shady. So I don't know why being asked to recoup the money from their shady dealings was out of line from the NCAA.
And let's not forget, the only reason he got to play high school ball was from favorable (temporary) rulings that were later overturned. In the end, MOST of these top prospects are getting something... as are many of their hangers-on. It's been going on in different ways for decades.
[Note: Sorta related... I'm not in favor of paying student athletes. But I'm also a staunch disbeliever in the NCAA's constant money grab. So without a dog in the fight... I choose apathy.]
Requiring a student athlete to donate $11,500 to charity to makeup for a booster donation is unheard of in college sports and it's the dumbest punishment on the student athlete side handed out by the NCAA in recent memory. The punishment was unprecedented and that's why that was out of line. Suspend him for games or even the whole season, but to essentially charge him money to be able to play basketball is such a terrible punishment. Did you have that kind of money in college cause I sure as hell didn't? I don't like any of the amount these guys get paid under the table, the amount the NCAA makes off mostly unpaid workers and then their audacity to slap the wrist of people who get paid what they're worth on the market of sports, but at the end of the day in this case a kid was told to come up with 12k with no help to be able to play basketball and that just has no place as a punishment in college sports.