Last Friday, former President Barack Obama spoke at a major sports analytics conference at MIT. As reported by Reason magazine, he discussed his own career as a so-so high school basketball player, remarked that playing basketball with other people revealed much about their character, and argued that the NBA would be well-served by a junior league "so that the NCAA is not serving as a farm system for the NBA with a bunch of kids who are unpaid but are under enormous financial pressure."
"It's just not a sustainable way of doing business," said Obama. "Then when everybody acts shocked that some kid from extraordinarily poor circumstances who's got 5, 10, 15 million dollars waiting for him is going to be circled by everybody in a context in which people are making billions of dollars, it's not good." Creating an alternative league for people eventually headed to the NBA "won't solve all the problems but what it will do is reduce the hypocrisy" of pretending that all student-athletes are both students and athletes.