Suppose there is a college basketball player who is good enough to be one of the top three chosen in the lottery, if not the first. He reads http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mor...e50/index.html and sees all the endorsement earnings of the superstar athletes but concludes that while he’ll be a solid player in the NBA he probably will not become a superstar there. However, he thinks that he might be able to achieve superstar status (and therefore hefty endorsement contracts) a different way.

He decides that if he stays in college he will be able to rise to the superstar level as a big fish in a little pond: everyone else good enough to go pro has gone pro, putting him head and shoulders above the remaining college players. By staying in college and putting on dazzling performances for a team that is a national champion contender he figures that he will get much more national attention than he would have gotten in three years in the NBA, especially if he leads his team to one or more national championships. His presence on the team also will help recruiting, increasing the championship possibilities as well as the attention focused on the team. He will try to maximize his national media exposure by speaking and doing work on behalf of popular causes.

Also suppose that he is the kind of person whom companies want as a representative: articulate, squeaky clean personal life, likable, engaging. How likely is it that this approach would generate additional endorsement income over the course of his life at least equal to the three years of player salary that he gave up to stay in college? How important should it be to his decision that this form of income is more stable in that it tends to continue even if he stops playing because of injury?

Should a player with significant talent think of this as a legitimate alternative route – building up star power in college which probably would not have been available to him had he started from scratch in the NBA (especially if (a) he might sit idle a large part of his first year in the NBA because of a labor dispute, and (b) he wanted a college degree for other reasons)?