If you don’t recognize a joke from the movie Airplane!, you aren’t really welcome here at Brahsome. That said, it’s another Monday, and there’s another story about some high school or college star getting paid before he’s allowed to. OJ Mayo, according to an apparently former member of his entourage, has been getting cash and gifts from Bill Duffy’s company for years. Does this surprise anyone? Mayo has been the most talked about hardwood wunderkind of the last decade- moreso than Oden or Durant or even to some extent LeBron. Mayo has been in the public eye since elementary school. So, naturally, some agent wants first dibs on management when he goes pro, and the easiest way to pursuade someone to work with you is give them handouts. This shit happens all the time. I’m sure Reggie Rose found himself that nice job in Memphis and it had nothing to do with Derrick being boys with World Wide Wes and going to school there. Dalonte West obviously deserved a job at K State with his credentials- nothing to do with Mike Beasley being on his AAU team. Danny Manning’s father got a job at Kansas back in the day, just before his son committed there? You don’t say.
Street agents and backroom exchanges are what the college game is all about these days. If you’ve got boosters with deep enough pockets, and a kid is marketable enough, life is pretty easy for these kids- until one of their boys doesn’t get what he thinks is his fair piece of the pie and decides to air the dirty launrdy on Outside The Lines…
The real question now is: how hard are the NCAA and the PAC-10 going to come down on USC?
We’ve seen before where the powers-that-be like to make examples of schools that aren’t their cash cows (see NCSU banned from post-season play because David Thompson played in a pickup game with some then-current players during his recruitment) instead of messing with their moneymakes (UNC laughing off the pickup game where Sean May, Ray Felton, and Marvin Williams played against Iman Shumpert just last year). But on the heels of the Reggie Bush fiasco, this is one of those situations where they either have to make a stand, or basically give control of the college game’s future to the suits.
In the end, why not make college basketball like college baseball? Seriously- why force some of these guys to act like they want to be in college? The Mayos and Beasleys and Roses of the world just want to ball. Isn’t the point of college to prepare you for a career? They don’t make teen movie stars go to college. 
They don’t make musician’s stay in school, and they usually turn out fine. What’s different about athletics that warrants this? I say if they’re ready for the league afer high school, let em go. And if they’re not, they have to make a 3 year commitment to stay in school. That way, the college game will benefit by having guys stick around long enough to gel as a team and grow into men, and the guys who are already ready for the big time can go forth with their pursuit of the American Dream.
As for Mayo- he seems like a nice enough kid. And if someone offered us an Infiniti SUV bought with money from an organization that is supposed to be doing Sickle Cell work, we’d probably drive it. But at the end of the day, this is something that needs to be stopped. And if the NCAA doesn’t have the stones to castrate USC and/or Mayo himself over this, they might lose the battle forever.
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seriously … how many times does USC have to go through this before the NCAA does something?
I agree it happens everywhere, but USC’s name is the one that reappears time after time. At least punish them so they’ll be a little more discreet in the future.