LOOK: College basketball analyst Jay Bilas sounds off on hypocrisy of NCAA
When it comes to critiquing the NCAA, college basketball expert Jay Bilas has made a living of putting the archaic organization on blast for much of his broadcasting career with ESPN. On Wednesday evening, college basketball’s leading voice decided to take to Twitter to sound off on Rutgers’ linebacker Drew Singleton and the hypocrisy of his situation. Check out what he had to say.
Singleton entered the 2022 NFL Draft and signed with an agent following Rutgers’ season finale. As Bilas mentioned above, he suffered an injury in their bowl game that hampered his progress in preparation for the draft. Singleton went undrafted. Although he received training expenses from his agent, per Greg Schiano, Singleton returned the money once he decided he wanted to return to school for another season. His initial waiver request to come back to school was denied by the NCAA, and now the team is awaiting the decision on the appeal.
“He deserves to be back. He got injured playing on eight days’ notice for his school,” Schiano said in an article written by Greg Patuto of SB Nation. “Think about how many guys didn’t play in bowls. The NCAA, they keep talking to us and the league keeps talking to us, ‘You go to a bowl, your guys need to play in the bowls.’”
Bilas makes some very valid points about the NCAA and Singleton’s case. Especially in the NIL era, it doesn’t make any sense to not allow a player to come back who received training expenses for the NFL Draft but went undrafted.
Last season, Singleton finished with 59 tackles and if he was allowed to return to school, it’d bolster the Scarlet Knights’ defense. According to the On3 Consensus Rankings for the 2017 cycle, he was rated as the No. 66 overall prospect in America.
Jay Bilas broke down some of his biggest complaints with the NCAA a few months ago
As Bilas broke down his biggest complaints about the current structure of the NCAA and college athletics, he pointed to a misuse of high-ranking leaders in positions they do not hold expertise.
“The NCAA isn’t about education, the NCAA has never educated a single student,” said Bilas. “Education is up to each individual institution to take care of, that’s their purview. One of the big problems is the college presidents claim that they’re in charge. And they’re not. They don’t know what they’re doing with regard to running these sports.
“I’ll give you an example, the college presidents aren’t in charge of university hospitals. That wouldn’t go particularly well. What makes them think they can run a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry? You have to put professionals who understand that in charge so they can make decisions in the best interest of that entity. And right now – this gigantic bureaucracy we have, it’s intentional – they don’t want accountability in this. But it makes so much money and bring so much to them,” Bilas said.
The NCAA has had a lot of issues that they’ve needed to fix for a really, really long time. Until they start making some sort of progress in a number of areas, they will continue to draw the ire of Bilas and many other national voices in the media.
On3’s James Fletcher III also contributed to this article.