Former Seton Hall men’s basketball head coach Kevin Willard has never been one to mince words.
After his Villanova Wildcats defeated the Pirates in his return to the Prudential Center on Dec. 23, 2025, Willard criticized the current state of player eligibility in the NCAA, calling it a “joke.”
“This era is crazy, man,” Willard said. “This era is insane, like [with] what [SHU head coach Shaheen Holloway] has to deal with and what everyone has to deal with. The NCAA is totally clueless, lost. It’s a joke.”
Willard then told a joke of his own, saying he just tried to recruit an imaginary player who plays for an imaginary league overseas (one of the best quotes from any coach or player this season, for sure).
“I just tried to sign like a 47-year-old Chinese guy from the ‘Chinese European League.’ I’m sure he’ll get eligible,” Willard said, sarcastically. “I think Oklahoma just signed a 24-year-old Russian. It’s like, ‘What are we doing?’”
The second player Willard was referring to is Kirill Elatontsev, one of several former European or international pros who have been deemed eligible to play college basketball by the NCAA, a trend which started in the early 2000s and has only grown since.
But in regard to the current era of player eligibility more broadly, especially in light of recent events, Willard’s right: What are we doing? With the inclusive “we” meaning, of course, the NCAA.
If not already clear, this season has been marked by several controversial decisions made by the NCAA regarding player eligibility. Many feared that the introduction of the transfer portal in 2018, then NIL in 2021, would blur the line between amateur and professional sports (as it has)—but these recent decisions and their future implications have the potential to bring an end to amateurism as we know it if things don’t change.
It all started just two months before the season began, when Santa Clara signed Thierry Darlan, the first professional athlete to be granted immediate eligibility after having spent the past two years in the NBA G League.
Naturally, other teams and players followed suit, with Louisville then signing London Johnson, a former teammate of Darlan’s on the now-defunct G League Ignite, in October, and BYU signing Abdullah Ahmed, who also spent the past two years in the G League, in November.
But can you really blame these teams and players for doing so when the NCAA’s rules allow it? Having never played in an official NBA game or signed an official NBA contract, and being within five years of their high school graduation, these players all met the immediate eligibility requirements of the NCAA—who not even a decade ago required players to sit out a full season after transferring from one school to another.
With this, it seemed that the NCAA was drawing a line between the G League and the NBA, despite both being fully professional leagues. In other words, former G Leaguers within the five-year window were OK to play or return to college basketball, but those formerly in the NBA at some point were not.
But even that seemed to change when, on Christmas Eve, just a day after Willard’s comments, Baylor announced the midseason addition of James Nnaji, who was the No. 31 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft, making him the first former NBA draft pick to play college basketball. Like Darlan and the others, Nnaji met the eligibility requirements—and according to the NCAA’s backwards logic, being picked in the draft did not technically make him an NBA player (but what else would that make him?).
The 21-year-old “freshman,” who played in both the 2023 and 2025 NBA summer league, will also (somehow) have an additional four years of eligibility remaining.
This was a tipping point for many of those in and outside of college basketball, including Hall of Fame head coaches like Tom Izzo and John Calipari, who have been adamant all season about their disappointment in the NCAA and their ridiculous rules.
“Now we’re taking guys that were drafted in the NBA and everything?” Izzo said on Dec. 27. “I mean, if that’s what we’re going to do, shame on the NCAA. Shame on the coaches, too, but shame on the NCAA, because coaches are gonna do what they gotta do, I guess, but the NCAA is the one. Those people on those committees that are making those decisions to allow something so ridiculous and not think of the kid.”
Calipari added on Dec. 30: “Let me give you this, real simple: the rules ‘bes’ the rules. If you put your name in the draft—I don't care if you’re from Russia—and you stay in the draft, you can’t play college basketball…. If your name is in that draft and you got drafted, you can’t play, because that’s our rule.”
But if that wasn’t concerning enough, former players who are no longer eligible to play are now finding ways to circumvent the NCAA’s rules altogether. Take Alabama’s Charles Bediako, who made his return to college basketball on Jan. 24 after an almost three-year hiatus thanks to a convenient mix of judicial corruption and the NCAA’s lack of a backbone.
Like Nnaji, Bediako declared for the 2023 NBA Draft as a sophomore. But unlike Nnaji, Bediako went undrafted and has instead signed three different contracts in the years since, including a two-way contract with the San Antonio Spurs.
Having signed a contract, Bediako forfeited his college eligibility—that was, until he sued the NCAA for denying his initial request to return to Alabama, and then was granted a temporary restraining order by Judge James Roberts Jr.,a six-figure donor of Alabama’s athletics department who later recused himself from the case, that allowed him to re-join the Crimson Tide for a limited time (but most likely until the end of the season, given that Roberts Jr.’s replacement is an Alabama graduate who is overseeing a murder case involving another former player of the university).
“If somebody in the Big Ten [for college football] needs a left tackle, somebody gets hurt, can you pull a guy off a practice squad of an NFL team?” SHU alumni and UConn head coach Dan Hurley said in reaction to the Bediako news on Jan. 23. “Can a guy from the [Cleveland] Browns come back and play left tackle somewhere? I mean, s–t is absurd.”
From Darlan to Bediako, if players like these continue to be granted eligibility or to find ways to sidestep the rules, college basketball will cease to be “college” basketball altogether and will become something it was never meant to be. College students will no longer cheer for their fellow students or classmates, but instead for players with years of professional experience whom they have no real connection to.
Some SHU students or alumni might not take issue with this, and to those individuals I say: imagine going to the Prudential Center expecting to support the men’s basketball team, only to find, say, the Brooklyn Nets suited up in the Pirates' blue and white instead. Wouldn’t hit quite the same, would it?
College basketball will indeed become just a tertiary avenue for already established players to play or to continue playing professionally, while high school recruits who aspire to play at the next level will be given fewer and fewer opportunities to do so because of it. Following this logic, the best programs in the nation will be those with the least amount of student-athletes.
“Who other than dumb people like me are going to recruit high school kids?” Calipari said. “I get so much satisfaction out of coaching young kids and seeing them grow and make it, and their family and life changes, that I'm going to keep doing it. But why would anybody else, if you can get NBA players, G League players, guys that are 28 years old, guys from Europe?”
Another analogy, especially for any parents out there: imagine your child plays basketball for their middle school and their opponent is a high schooler with years of experience at the high school level, playing down against much younger, less-experienced competition. That wouldn't seem fair, would it?
And the way things are trending, if the NCAA doesn’t change their rules, it’s only a matter of time before a former, full-fledged NBA player—perhaps even a Brooklyn Net—finds their way back into college basketball and dominates at a level they were never supposed to play at or return to once they went pro.
Zachary Mawby is the head editor of The Setonian’s Sports section. He can be reached at zachary.mawby@student.shu.edu.
