A Bubble Watch preview, talent transitions, and college basketball's insane news cycle
And much more in the latest Buzzer Mailbag!
For most of our adult life, college basketball changed very little. Even easy, obvious improvements — little stuff like ditching the RPI, giving players a modest stipend for living expenses, or tweaking physicality rules, or whatever — happened only after years of deliberation and debate.
Compare that world to now. We are writing this mailbag from an impromptu holiday vacation that both from logistical necessity and in conceptual spirit has featured large stretches of time without devices and habitual news consumption. We’ve taken photos, used maps, made sure our fantasy football players aren’t injured, and that’s about it. It’s been nice! As a result, though, when we sat down at our computer to mailbag we learned, more or less in one fell swoop, that a) Baylor apparently signed a guy that was drafted to the NBA and that b) other teams were also maybe thinking about adding a player on a two-way league contract who played actual NBA minutes, and scored points, like, a few weeks ago:
The Trentyn Flowers stuff, it turned out, was not quite as real as the initial presentation suggested. Matt Norlander started debunking the involved schools almost immediately, and seemingly every beat reporter of note had written a “no, X team isn’t recruiting Flowers” disclaimer within hours. By dinner On3 CEO Shannon Terry had apologized for the report and said “the author” would be undergoing “additional training measures … so that it will not happen again,” which sounded ominous. (“Check what agents tell you.” There. Re-education camp over.)
Not seeing the Flowers mess play out in real time undoubtedly tempered our outrage. But you can totally understand why so many people freaked out Sunday. The Flowers report was totally believable … because Baylor really is signing James Nnaji. Scott Drew tweeted the photo with the new signing to confirm it, and then backed up his decision, in the face of widespread criticism, including from Tom Izzo and other colleagues, with a classic yeah we need new rules but in the meantime my job is to win ball games:
The outrage is totally reasonable. This is not a former G-Leaguer who never got close to the NBA, or a European import with dubious lengths of Adriatic League service and chest hair. Nnaji was chosen 31st overall in the 2023 NBA Draft! His rights were in the Knicks’ trade for Karl-Anthony Towns! This guy very obviously should not be eligible to play college basketball.
That’s our first instinct, and the instinct of basically everyone else we’ve seen discuss the topic since, and it’s probably the same way we’ll feel in six days or six months.
Still, to be honest … we really haven’t thought about it that much. How could we?
For one thing, no one knows what the rules really are, least of all the rulemakers, who are either throwing their hands up or throwing a tantrum. Until we get some practicable framework for eligibility that isn’t immediately overruled in one district court or another, or an NCAA that seems less eager to wash its hands of the entire fight, it will be hard to have a grounded, intelligent opinion about who is and is not — or should or should not be — allowed to play.
But most of all: This just happened! Everything is too fast! It’s easy to look back on the last five years of college basketball — and specifically the wholesale revolutions of NIL and the transfer portal — and feel like you suddenly woke up in a totally different world. But with Nnaji, that feeling was literally true. One day, NBA draftees were obviously off-limits. Duh. Of course. The next day, they were not. Oh. How are you supposed to form an intelligent opinion about that?
Boundaries are being pushed at an exponentially accelerating rate. It used to take forever for college sports to do anything. Now you can go out of town, intentionally ignore your phone for a few days, and when you check back in the sport you knew has apparently entered an entirely new era.
The good news: The Buzzer Mailbag is still alive and well. We have that going for us, which is nice.
This edition contains a sampling of Big Ten breakdowns, a look through the scuffling Big East, a great question about college players who surprised us in the pros (for better and worse), a salute to four-year veterans, talent consolidation concerns, and a bunch else — including the following Bubble Watch prompt that reminded us the season for obsessive tournament prospectus is nearly upon us.
Let’s do the mail:
What are the most/least interesting Bubble Watch conferences this year? And what’s your over/under for number of multi-big leagues? — Seth K
There’s a clear 1A and 1B here: The Big East and the ACC, in that order.
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