I'll jump on the bandwagon of people ripping Jeff Miller's column

I wasn't initially going to comment on this column from the OC Register's Jeff Miller.

Why?

Because its premise is absolutely absurd, I couldn't disagree with it more, and I had no desire to send him what little traffic I can distribute from my small corner of the internet.

So why am I bringing it up now?

Because Mike Miller, my partner in crime over at Beyond the Arc, made an excellent point in its preposterousness (I know that's not a word). From Jeff Miller's column:

The best players aren't around long enough to grab and then hold onto our ever-divided attention. There’s no point in investing yourself in John Wall knowing he’s going to be John AWOL as soon as possible. … For every Kyle Singler at Duke and Kalin Lucas at Michigan State, there are dozens of wildly talented players in college right now who will be gone before we figured out what school they were even at.

Mike's response:

See, here’s the thing: Players have never been around the college game long. A maximum of four years? That's nothing compared to NBA careers, which stretch anywhere from 10 to 15 years, and with far, far more games. That's the reason NBA players are a better known commodity than college guys. They’re around forever. Sometimes you wish they’d go away and stop taking up space for the younger guys who just got out of school. (Not to mention the nomadic nature of most NBA players. Seems like every team brought in five new players this season. How's that for continuity?)

I'll take it one step further.

Only five players can be on a basketball court at one time. In a college basketball game, there are only 200 minutes to go around. Each position? They only get 40 minutes per game, max. The goal of a basketball coach is to have your best lineup on the floor for the maximum amount of time possible while making sure that you're players are still fresh enough to be playing at their highest level.

At the same time, the goal is to also get the ball into your best player's hands. You want your stars to be taking a majority of the shots because they are the most likely to create a positive outcome on a given possession.

If every star stayed in school for four years, it wouldn't mean that there would be more stars.

It would mean that the best teams had a better bench. It would mean that college basketball would be more like college football. It would mean that this balance of power -- the parody parity in college hoops that allows mid-major teams like Butler to get to the Final Four -- would disappear.

The perfect example is Kansas. The 2008 Kansas team that won the national title was stacked. Sherron Collins -- 2009 first team all-american Sherron Collins -- was their seventh man. Cole Aldrich -- another 2009 all-american -- barely got enough minutes to be considered their eighth man. But would Collins or Aldrich have become an all-american in 2009 if Darrell Arthur and Mario Chalmers hadn't gone pro after the 2008 national title?

No. More likely, Chalmers and Arthur would have become all-americans in 2009 while Collins and Aldrich became their talented sidekicks. Then when Chalmers and Arthur graduated in 2009, Collins and Aldrich would have become the stars in 2010.

This season, Marcus Morris has an opportunity to become a household name with Aldrich turning pro after his junior season. But would Morris be the star of the Jayhawk front court if Aldrich was still hooping in Lawrence?

How many casual hoops fans knew the name Marcus Morris before this season's projections started coming out?

Marquis Teague is arguably the best point guard in the Class of 2011. He's committed to Kentucky. If Brandon Knight goes pro after this season -- which seems fairly likely -- he'll be the starter at the point for the Wildcats in 2011-2012. Based on John Calipari's track record with freshman point guards, it seems pretty likely that he'll be a star.

But would he even sniff the court as a freshman playing behind John Wall, Eric Bledsoe, and Knight?

If college basketball players all stayed in school for three or four years, we wouldn't have a higher number of stars. We wouldn't get to know them for any greater period of time.

We would just become infatuated with juniors and seniors instead of freshmen and sophomores.