As David Viscott once said, the purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is to give that gift away and share it with the rest of the world.
Of our 10 players who have been eligible to graduate by the end of their senior years, all 10 will have graduated after this weekend. For you math majors out there, that’s 100 percent. We’ve also had a 3.0 cumulative grade-point average over the last three years. It’s the norm, not an aberration.
We’ve had success in the past in conference tournament play and NCAA Tournament play. We’ve had teams advance and win championships and had a ball doing it. Every player benefitted by the success of the team. That’s what “players first” is about. It isn’t “player first.”
Make no mistake about it, we are still in a great position to do whatever we want to do. We can still write our own story. The only way to do that is to fight back, to fight our way out of this. We can blame whoever we want to – fate, luck, whoever – or we can take it upon ourselves to choose our own path and fight our way out of this. If we don’t fight, we don’t have a shot.
What happened to Nerlens raises a couple of issues that I think we should all be talking about more: insurance for our student-athletes and the current draft rules.