@CU123 I thought your points were excellent.
A superstar who wants to be a professional hockey player can go into a development league or play in college. A superstar who wants to be a professional baseball player can sign a big contract for the minors or play for a college. There is a well-trod path for superstar high school athletes in other sports that doesn’t force them into college. That does not exist in basketball (or football). Kobe Bryant and LeBron James went right into the NBA but even that wasn’t allowed in Zion’s case. (Is that changing soon?)
Is Zion finishing his coursework now? Or is he just done?
The NCAA is the colleges. They are one and the same. The NCAA does what the colleges want them to do.
Duke’s coach recruited Zion as a basketball player. He got to attend the Duke College of basketball for a while. He is really not much different than Duke paying a young, famous actor to pretend to be a college student for 6 months to get some good publicity for the university.
There is no comparison to Zuckerberg or Gates. Harvard didn’t admit them because their high school skills would earn money for the university. And they attended to take the classes Harvard offered. If Harvard had hired 17 year old actress Natalie Portman to spend 7 months at Harvard as a “student” who was obligated to do publicity and showcase how great the university was, and what Portman got out of it was that saying she went to Harvard for 6 months made her a more marketable actress, that would probably be a better analogy.