NCAA Basketball: Should undrafted underclassmen get to return to school?

Comparing baseball to basketball

When dealing with college players and how to properly integrate them potentially into the professional leagues, baseball seems to be the ideal example. Their drafts are at a unique date which benefits the college baseball players and MLB itself, which not seemingly impacting the game.

The College Baseball World Series (baseball’s equivalent of the Final Four)  will start this week. The MLB Draft, occurred between June 4-6 this month. It’s a huge benefit to coaches in particular, as they basically know who’ll be on their rosters or have already departed for the pros.

The biggest appeal for college basketball fans is that players have the option in baseball to go back if they choose to. Everyone’s name is basically in the draft, so even underclassmen who go undrafted can just simply stay in school with no issues.

Key differences

There are a few problems with the baseball-basketball comparison, with the key one being the timeframe. The MLB Draft is 50 rounds and isn’t for viewers since it’ll take years to see many of them on the top league anyways. The NBA Draft has just two rounds and the execs and fans take it seriously, which is why it has to take place in June. It certainly would never happen during the season, meaning that it’ll always go on months after the Final Four.

Baseball has a flexibility that basketball simply doesn’t have. That benefits one set of athletes over another for sure without a clear way to solve it. However, that isn’t the real reason why I’m against undrafted players coming back to college. It involves another set of players that aren’t being brought up.