In a move that could place him with Curt Flood as a sports labor trailblazer, high school baller Brandon Jennings officially announced that he’ll skip college and instead spend his post-high school, pre-NBA year playing in Europe for money. Ever since David Stern instituted the age limit, I’ve been waiting for this to happen. (As you can see here and here, I’m not a fan of guys having to play for free.) If Jennings starts a trend (and it will be interesting to see if he does, because European teams are system-heavy and may not be excited about integrating, for just one year, young, raw American talent), the NBA will still save money by developing players elsewhere, and may see interest in their league expand abroad. But they’ll lose the marketing machine they wanted the college game to be for them. And the blowhards at the NCAA will worry about their gravy train running out of fuel.

In truth, you could probably slap school names on a bunch of mice running around a court and thousands of alums would get fired up about it. But it’d be nice if the trend started by Jennings’ departure ended up calling the bluff of the “Stay in School” crowd, so we could see how much they like it when college basketball is like college baseball–i.e. a low visibility sport that’s more about its own, small subculture and less about making money for the glorified pimps in the three piece suit. As my friend Nick said, “I just can not wait to see Coach K, Roy Williams, and Lute Olsen freak the fuck out because they’re losing their best players to Italian teams named after jeans and kids candies.

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