Derrick Rose... and the End of College Basketball.

A few free-throws away from it being a National Championship season, but already an NCAA-record 38 win season, John Calipari's 2007-08 Memphis squad will be erased, asterisked, and/or labeled straight-up irrelevant forever. The NCAA announced Thursday that all 38 wins must be vacated. Why must they be vacated? Derrick Rose reportedly used a stand in to take his SAT for him...

...ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Stand-in?! That's just mind-boggling.

Or is it?

Sorry, JT, it's not. It's not crazy considering how high we rank these players when there's a ton of them just playing high school ball. It's not crazy considering how young we start looking at these kids, some while they're in middle school. It's not crazy considering the pressure put on these young individuals to perform on an incredible athletic and academic level, just to earn money for a school they'll refer to as their "alma mater," but they won't get a dime for it, unless you're OJ Mayo. Whatever happened to honesty and integrity? It's really too bad that this all had to happen.

It's incredible that this SAT scandal could even get pulled off, and I only hope John Calipari, a coach I admire, was unaware of these events. This won't be the first time he's had wins vacated though, and neither will it be for Memphis for that matter. I just think this might be another reason for why college basketball is on the decline. We have juniors in high school talking about skipping college, playing overseas for a season, and then getting drafted. Unless the NBA does something quick, we won't be complaining about players not staying all of their 4 years, we'll be complaining about players going to college at all. If these players see no financial benefit to playing in college as opposed to playing overseas, where they can rake in millions in tax-free dollars, without even a high school diploma, we are going to see more and more players skip college and stay in Europe for a year or two.

These college athletes already risk career-ending injuries to play for their respective universities, why not get paid for it? I get it, the financial aspect of it all, but could a price ever be put on education? Which clearly many of these atheletes do not have enough of? Maybe, if Plaxico had a little more education, he wouldn't of shot himself in the leg and be forced to spend the next 2 years in jail, which he will be officially doing. Unfortunately, right now it's too early to come up with a theorized solution for what the NBA should do to stop this problem that I foresee in the near future. I'll just have to get back to you on that one.

-GonZo