Having seen how Michigan forward Yaxel Lendeborg got himself into some trouble by bad-mouthing Purdue (Go Boilers, of course), I got curious about who this person is, and found some very interesting things:
- Dropped from his high school team for poor grades
- Somehow managed to graduate from UAB without ever declaring a major
- Now a "graduate student" at Michigan studying...basketball
- Has been playing college basketball for six years.
I didn't think that Michigan could out-do themselves from Rumeal "Remedial" Robinson, infamously a Prop 48 player somehow getting a 3.0 GPA in "General Studies" at the "Harvard of the Midwest", but apparently they're getting more and more creative in Ann Arbor at avoiding actual academics for their "student-athletes". With six years of eligibility and no apparent academic requirements to actually work towards a degree, it's pretty clear that the NCAA in general, and Michigan in particular, is rapidly becoming just another semi-pro league.
And as I've said many times before, the problem with this is that this system is giving young people Cadillac tastes and a Chevy budget with huge NIL money and then....no degree. A great example is, again, Rumeal Robinson, who despite years in the NBA, went into bankruptcy and then prison for financial fraud.
How to fix this? Let's bring Prop 48 back, but with teeth--if someone cannot achieve 700 points on the SAT, bill their high school for the cost of educating them to the point where they can. But don't immediately give them NIL money and a roster spot at a college where, academically, they clearly don't belong.
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