The recent NCAA ruling that freshman forward Nikola Dragovic
will be ineligible for the first 10 games of the season represents
everything that is wrong with college sports.
What exactly does the NCAA gain by continually making these
kinds of decisions?
Dragovic will be ineligible to compete for the Bruins until late
December simply because somebody he played with on his Mega Ishrana
club team was a professional.
It was somebody else’s mistake, yet Dragovic will be
paying the price.
“Me and my dad tried to do everything to stay eligible to
play because I was thinking about playing for college for the last
two years,” Dragovic said. His only goal was to come to
America to play basketball in college, but that is being taken away
by a technicality.
The NCAA needs to institute a common sense rule to protect
itself from itself in these situations. I understand rules and
regulations are there for a reason, but more often than not, the
NCAA’s red tape stands in the way of simple logic.
There is no question that Dragovic was never paid as a
professional. In his home country of Serbia, it is against the law
to even sign a contract before your 18th birthday.
Dragovic played with his club Mega Ishrana until he was 17.
It’s not even possible for him to be a pro. What exactly did
he do wrong here? Nothing, if you ask me.
“The rules have changed,” UCLA coach Ben Howland
said. “In 2003, there was an intent rule, but that is no
longer the rule.”
This intent rule is key because it has already been tested and
utilized in a high profile case just last season. Kentucky’s
Randolph Morris declared for the 2005 NBA Draft before deciding to
return to school. He was declared ineligible for the season for
reportedly signing with the sports agency SFX.
A fax produced by Wildcat coach Tubby Smith, though, showed that
Morris always intended on simply testing the draft process. Morris
missed 14 games before being reinstated. At the time, the NCAA said
the fax “provides additional understanding of Morris’s
original intent to enter the NBA draft as well as his mind-set
during that process.”
Well, in this case it’s clear Dragovic always intended on
staying an amateur, but that no longer matters to the NCAA.
Dragovic is paying too severe a price for, in all reality, doing
nothing.
The only problem is Dragovic played with somebody that was a
professional. Is this some sort of bizarre mathematical transitive
property I don’t know about that makes Dragovic a pro? Only
the NCAA knows, I guess.
The NCAA proved earlier this season, though, that it isn’t
completely devoid of logic and compassion. It provided a waiver for
Clemson football player Ramon McElrathbey to receive extra benefits
because he must care for his 11-year-old brother.
McElrathbey’s parents are unfit to care for his brother,
so he is allowed to receive financial support and extra benefits
like day care and transportation so that he doesn’t have to
undertake this extraordinary task alone.
The NCAA did right by McElrathbey. It makes all the sense in the
world to allow him to get help in order to care for his brother,
but it’s technically against the rules. Does anybody really
care though? It’s the right thing to do.
Granted Dragovic’s case is not as extraordinary as
McElrathbey’s, but it still follows in the same vein. What is
there truly to gain by suspending Dragovic?
What kind of lesson is the NCAA trying to teach him? Not to
befriend professionals? To do background checks on everybody you
know?
The ruling only serves to make the people at the NCAA feel warm
and fuzzy inside for trying to enforce only the strictest
interpretations of the rules while ignoring the much wider problems
that pervade college athletics.
E-mail Lee at jlee3@media.ucla.edu if you also think the
NCAA is idiotic and that Dragovic should be allowed to
play.