My view of major college athletics soured a lot when one of the top players at Ohio State publicly complained about being expected to go to class while at college. I'm not sure that some of the recruits don't have offers for more money if they sign with a major college, but I think it's good that players that have no interest in going to college have another outlet. The current situation with kids transferring en masse creates an environment where I think that the best Rice will do is the situation that we had under Willis Wilson. Competitive basketball that was probably never going to make the NCAA tournament, but represented the University fairly well, and had decent attendance.
A question that I have is whether kids can go to school for one or two years and then jump to the G-League. What I want to see out of Rice programs is to have kids that are competitive, apply themselves at school and for the most part, stay at Rice for four years and get their degrees. Otherwise, I don't know where Rice belongs in the current environment.
My hope is that an NBA G-League provides an outlet for kids that are only interested in basketball but not at all interested in college
and helps refocus NCAA athletics as a mechanism for kids to get degrees and play competitive athletics, then realize the benefits of both for the rest of their lives, whether it's as an engineer, a professional athlete, a hospital administrator, a teacher, or investment banker, or whatever... just as long as those athletes feel they've benefited from the experience. I have a lot of pride having sat in Money and Banking classes with football players, quantum physics classes with football players... all while I did not understanding the material terribly well in either case.
Rice is too small to turn athletics into a John Calipari-like one-and-done circus.
Kids that don't care enough about high school classes to blow them off on the promise of the G-League might wind up in Junior College where they may have had a college future where they didn't care about their college classes. They might still have gotten a degree at a school like North Carolina, but would they have really benefited from being in college if they never cared about school to begin with?
Minor League baseball provides about 3-4 layers of professional leagues on top of MLB. For the G-League to have a significant effect, it would have to provide a similar depth... the G-League has 27 teams, so I don't see it really having a big impact to major college programs. The biggest impact may be kids that want to transfer but decide to jump to the G-League ...
NBA G League Introduces Professional Path For Elite Basketball Prospects - NBA G League