To the editor:

The NCAA is talking about stripping Memphis of its national runner-up banner from ’08, as well as their NCAA record 38 wins, because Derrick Rose allegedly had someone else take his SAT for him.

When men’s college basketball got in bed with the NBA and forced high school basketball stars to wait one year before entering the NBA draft, you knew academic fraud was going to become rampant. But all the NCAA saw were dollar signs. The NBA wanted to use college ball as a minor league to drum up excitement for the future stars of their league, and the NCAA was tired of losing the best high school players to the pros; it was win-win.

Now the NCAA is saying, “For shame! You mean to tell me a kid who didn’t want to go to college and was already good enough to play pro ball, didn’t take academics seriously?” Amateur collegiate athletics is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise pretending to act as if it cares about the academic portion of a student athlete’s college experience.

You watch; the blowback of this whole Derrick Rose situation will be that a lot of high school superstars will end up playing pro ball in foreign countries for a year and then entering the NBA draft instead of playing an arbitrary year as a marketing tool for a major university.