Why some of college basketball's biggest stars are starting to stick around
The NBA Draft used to be an escape hatch for even marginal prospects looking to get paid. Now, four years into the NIL era, the number of early entrants has plummeted
Three days after the 2024-25 NBA season ended, the league welcomed in its next crop of players.
The 2025 NBA Draft came and went this week in Brooklyn, with things largely going as they were predicted to for weeks.
The fate that was forecast for Cooper Flagg since he was a middle schooler came to fruition, with the Duke superstar getting taken with the No. 1 overall pick. He was one of three Dookies to be selected in the draft’s first 10 picks, with teammates Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach joining him. Two players from a sub-.500 Rutgers team went in the top five picks, including one, Ace Bailey, who seemed committed the past few weeks to becoming Basketball Shedeur Sanders. On the more unexpected side, neither Kentucky nor John Calipari produced a first-round pick for the first time since 2009, all while Penn State had its first-ever first-round pick – Yanic Konan Niederhauser, who one year ago was coming off a season in which he averaged 7.3 points per game for a Northern Illinois team that went 11-20.
Though this year’s draft had more starpower than its predecessor – even 12 months later, I genuinely wonder what percentage of basketball fans can name the top pick in the 2024 NBA Draft – it might have been as notable for who wasn’t in it as who was.
College players aren’t fleeing to the NBA at nearly the same rate as they did in the not-so-distant past. And it could just be the start of what’s to come.
Underclassmen are leaving college basketball at a much lower rate
There were 25 college underclassmen who were early entrants in this year’s NBA Draft, all of whom left behind their college careers despite holding on to remaining eligibility.
While that figure may only mean so much out of context, it’s quite notable. That’s the lowest such mark since all the way back in 2004, before many of this week’s draftees were even born.
The sheer volume of early entrants has dwindled over the past several years. Last year, it was 33 and the year before that, it was 44. This year’s figure, however, represents yet another significant drop, particularly when compared with what it was not all that long ago. In 2021, only four years ago, that number was all the way up to 70. Two years before that, it reached its apex, with 85 early entrants scrambling to get picked in a draft with only 60 selections.
What has come to define the draft since 2007 – when the effects of the draft’s age limit (the so-called “one-and-done rule”) first came into place – didn’t change this year, with college freshmen still dominating the early part of the draft. Each of the top eight picks in the draft were freshmen.
What most significantly impacted the number of early entrants this year weren’t ballyhooed freshmen who have been projected as first-round picks since they were underclassmen in high school. It was all other college players.
Of the 25 early entrants, only seven of them were sophomores or older, or 25% of the total pool. That’s by far the smallest mark since the one-and-done rule came into effect. Last year, 18 of the 33 early entrants were non-freshmen, a mark of 54.5% that had been tied for the smallest percentage since that fateful 2007 draft. As recently as 2019, college players who were at least sophomores accounted for 50 of the 70 early entrants, or 74.1%. Until 2022, that percentage had never been lower than 64.1% in the one-and-done era. And just three years later, it’s nearly a third of that previous low-water mark.
Though it’s a layered issue, there’s one variable in the decline that looms much larger than the rest.
How NIL is reshaping the NBA Draft
When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in NCAA v. Alston, which opened the door for college athletes to earn money off their name, image and likeness, change only came so quickly, at least when it came to how NBA-level prospects approached their draft decisions.
The 2022 NBA Draft, the first after NIL took effect, there were 61 early entrants, only nine fewer than the previous year. In the years since, as an NIL market has taken hold and athlete compensation has ballooned, those numbers have plummeted to their current levels.
In that way, the influence of NIL has been undeniable in helping keep players in college.
“Basically now if you’re an early entry and you’re not a top-20, top-22 pick — where the money slots — you can pretty much make that in college,” new NC State coach Will Wade, a longtime expert when it comes to paying college players, said to the Associated Press.
There was a time not all that long ago that standout college players wrestled with what became a familiar dilemma.
These young men were program pillars for successful teams, beloved celebrities on campus who earned national awards and often helped guide their teams on deep NCAA Tournament runs. Beneath all that fame and adoration, there was one big problem – for all they had achieved in college, they weren’t regarded as top-tier NBA prospects for one reason or another. Some, whether physically or athletically, didn’t have what NBA scouts deemed to be a particularly high ceiling. Others, who were already in their early 20s, were seen as too old. One particularly cursed group, made up mostly of traditional, back-to-the-basket big men, were those who weren’t a logical fit for the roles of a modern NBA offense.
That player could choose to remain in college, of course, but it came with risks. They would be entering a draft a year or two later, and a year or two older, in a league obsessed with upside while putting off six- or seven-figure paychecks – whether in the NBA, the G League or abroad – only to remain in a college game that didn’t allow even its biggest, most marketable stars to earn money from their name, image and likeness. There’s something to be said for being a beloved local figure and chasing a Final Four while playing in front of thousands of screaming fans, but from a cold, dollars-and-cents standpoint, it was often a no-brainer for many players. They would rather enter the murky, even unwelcoming professional waters rather than remain in college.
Now, that calculus has changed.
When Texas Tech All-American JT Toppin announced he was returning to the Red Raiders despite being projected as some by a top-15 draft pick, CBS Sports reported that the 6-foot-9 forward would be making $4 million in NIL funds. That figure will make him one of the highest-paid players in college basketball next season – if not the highest-paid – but he’s far from the only player whose NIL opportunities in college have convinced them to return to school.
Toppin is one of three consensus first- or second-team All-Americans to spurn the NBA for at least another year, with Braden Smith of Purdue and PJ Haggerty of Kansas State (he transferred from Memphis after the 2024-25 season) the other two. It’s tied for the most returning All-Americans since 2001. The two years with which it’s tied, 2004 and 2008, had three returning All-Americans out of six and seven underclassmen on those teams, respectively. This year, the returnees hit at an even higher rate, with only five underclassmen between the two All-American teams.
In short, college basketball’s keeping some of its brightest, most recognizable stars around for at least one year longer than it would have three or four years ago, back when players like Toppin, Haggerty and even Smith (who’s slightly undersized at six feet tall) would have tried to capitalize on their draft stock at a perceived high.
You don’t have to look that far back for such cases. Baylor’s Jared Butler in 2021 and Virginia’s Kyle Guy in 2019 were both star guards who had just guided their teams to national championships and had remaining eligibility if they wanted to run it back. Today, both would be in line for seven-figure NIL deals at programs where they were newly minted legends, but both of them, having accomplished their ultimate team goal, headed for the draft, where both were second-round picks.
There are a slew of other examples of players fleeing the college game to cash in on whatever they could as pros:
Ayo Dosunmu, Illinois: consensus first-team All-American in 2021 who left with one year of eligibility to become a second-round pick (No. 38 overall)
Keita Bates-Diop, Ohio State: Big Ten player of the year and consensus second-team All-American who was a second-round pick (No. 48 overall) in 2018 and is currently out of the league
Nigel Williams-Goss, Gonzaga: a consensus second-team All-American in 2017 who led Gonzaga to the national championship game before leaving early to be the No. 55 overall pick in the NBA Draft. He’s been out of the NBA since 2020
Jalen Brunson, Villanova: the national player of the year who led Villanova to its second title in a three-year stretch. Was the third pick of the second round of the ensuing NBA Draft, where, as you may have heard, he’s done OK for himself
Carsen Edwards, Purdue: a consensus second-team All-American who led Purdue to the brink of a Final Four in 2019 and, despite being just six feet tall, left early to be the third pick of the second round of the 2019 NBA Draft. He’s been playing overseas since 2022
Kofi Cockburn, Illinois: a dominant college big man who was a consensus second-team All-American as a sophomore in 2021 and a first-team All-American as a junior in 2022, Cockburn left Illinois with remaining eligibility, only not to be drafted. He has never played in the NBA and currently playing pro ball in Japan
At the time, all of their decisions, difficult as they may have been, were defensible. They each had their own inherent flaws, but there was money to be made in the professional ranks, wherever that may be, that wasn’t there for them in college (or, in Cockburn’s case, was a system of payments still in its awkward infancy).
Today, though, a player picked at the end of the first round is making $2.1 million under the NBA rookie wage scale while the minimum first-year NBA player salary is $1.2 million. The NBA two-way contracts, in which a player can shuttle between an NBA team and its G League affiliate, top out around $600,000 while G League deals themselves start at just $40,500.
At the power-conference level in college, rotation pieces on projected NCAA Tournament teams have reportedly been getting deals in excess of $1 million this offseason, meaning you don’t have to be an All-American like Toppin to bring in more than you would have in the NBA or G League.
“These NIL packages are starting to get up to $3 to $4 to $5 to $6 million dollars,” Detroit Pistons president of basketball operations and former Duke star Trajan Langdon said. “These guys are not going to put their name in to be the 25th pick, or even the 18th pick. They are going to go back to school in hopes of being a lottery pick next year. With that pool of players decreasing, it kind of decreases the odds of the level of player we get at No. 37, just the pure mathematics.”
We’ve seen that reality reflected not only in the three returning All-Americans, but a slew of other impactful players who withdrew from the draft and who will now be among the most famous faces in the sport next season – among them, Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg, Houston’s Milos Uzan, NC State’s Darrion Williams, Kentucky’s Otega Oweh, Auburn’s Tahaad Pettiford, Duke’s Isaiah Evans and Florida’s Alex Condon.
In a sport that has struggled to capture the interest of the casual fan as rosters turn over effectively every offseason, it should offer some much-needed familiarity. The days of the game’s biggest stars staying for three or four years are a relic outside of a few rare cases, but the continuity for which so many have longed while talking about how college basketball used to be so much better is much closer to a reality than it has been in at least two decades.
For as much as NIL and the impending revenue-sharing from the House settlement have been used as bogeymen for people to air their grievances about college sports – and while it offers inducements for players with no eligibility to try to hang around the game longer than they’re allowed to – they’re undeniably a good thing in trying to get college basketball closer to what it once was.
My favorite things I read this week
I’ve forgotten to include this at the bottom of the past couple of posts, so allow this to serve as a bit of a catch-up.
- at the Three-Point Stance deftly addresses a question I’ve been wondering about the past few months: does the revenue sharing era in college sports mean the end of ridiculous coaching buyouts, particularly in football?
- ’s latest in his Historical Portal series at SID Sports looks at an all-timer of a hypothetical: what if Penn State was welcomed into the Big East in the 1980s?
The NBA Finals are over, but Ramona Shelburne’s piece on Pacers assistant coach Jenny Boucek, a single mom, is still worth your time
If you’ve been keeping up with American immigration policy and been wondering how the hell we’re going to be welcoming millions of people from across the world next summer, you’re not alone. Brian Phillips of The Ringer dug into it here
Derek Thompson’s January cover story from The Atlantic on what he terms as the “Anti-Social Century” is equal parts fascinating, revealing and concerning
(Photos: NBA.com, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, The Daily Illini)