Pay or don't play: paying college athletes isn't just fair to players; it could improve college basketball.

• Author: Barbash, Louis
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

The name says it: the NCAA Elite Eight, the eight best teams in college basketball, survivors of a long, highly competitive season and three hard-fought rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, March Madness. And yet players from seven of the eight colleges, underclassmen with up to three years of eligibility left, won't be back this fall. What's more, nine of the top ten picks in this year's June NBA draft, six of whom played in the NCAA tournament, are leaving college basketball before exhausting their eligibility.

The departure of so many high-performing players has taken its toll on the NCAA's product, intercollegiate basketball. College basketball "this season has been a long, fitful snooze," wrote columnist Dave Kindred in the Washington Post. The departure of players who left for the pros after their freshman year, Kindred wrote, "left spaces filled by lesser players." "Put bluntly, college basketball stinks," wrote the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Mark Bradley. "After nearly two decades of descent the sport has hit bottom."

For years, NCAA basketball was the only game in town for players with ambitions to play in the NBA. Now, dozens every year desert the college game for something they can't get in college--the chance to share in the revenues their performances create--and their departures have fractured the college basketball cartel's hold on its sport.

It's more than just a basketball story. Like many a monopoly and oligopoly before it--like Standard Oil a century ago, like Detroit's Big Three, like IBM, like Polaroid--the central tenet of the NCAA's dominance, the unpaid student-athlete, has been undermined. Like them, it can learn to compete under the new rules, or it can dig in its heels and risk irrelevance.

In 1990, I suggested in the Washington Monthly that college players ought to be paid and should not be required to be students at the college whose team they play for. They should have done it then. They should do it now: give players what they need and what they deserve to stick with college teams. Think of it as kind of a koan: To hold on, they must let go. But will they? Will they adapt and survive, like IBM has? Or will they hold on, like Polaroid, until they go into bankruptcy and are sold for their parts and brands?

The NCAA is often referred to as a cartel. But its power has historically been dependent on its symbiotic relationship with the NBA. The NBA prohibited its teams from signing college players before their class graduated, guaranteeing the NCAA a steady supply of unpaid labor whose performance could be monetized in the form of tickets, T-shirts, and TV rights. And the NBA used college basketball as a free minor-league system.

So it worked for college basketball and the NBA. For the players? Well, not so much.

Yes, they got four years of college...