It can't be a coincidence that as the money-grubbing has increased and the stress on nonmonetary values decreased, the incidence of serious misconduct by athletes on and off the field has escalated. The athletes are not really amateurs, of course. But whatever the players get, it's chicken feed, only a fraction of the huge sums their play generates for the colleges and universities that recruit them to help the schools win games and thus increase their athletics department revenues. They're fortunate if they even attend many classes, given their heavy practice and game schedules. The unwritten social consensus seems to be that sports gambling is officially illegal, but as long as the athletes playing the games are not involved, anyone else should be able to bet on the games.
Society even winks at illegal bookmaking.
Under the current rules, we don't have enough time to check out kids well enough on their athletic ability, role-playing, character and scholastic ability. It would be good to go back to a later signing period. Then coaches wouldn't use so much bad judgment on choosing, and there wouldn't be so many transfers. We could do a better job of evaluating players if we could see them from September to May, during the season. No one reason explains why female players are graduating so much more frequently than are the men, but one factor has to be women players' realization they haven't been able to make a sustained living off basketball.