While the NFL draft is this weekend and the NBA draft not for another two months, it's the basketball version, with recent news indicating that most of the top college freshman players will enter the draft, that has attracted more of my attention.

For the second straight year since a minimum age of 19 was instituted in the NBA, freshman will almost certainly be the top picks in the draft. Last year it was Ohio State's Greg Oden and Kevin Durant who went one-two--to Portland and Seattle respectively--in the draft. This year the cream of the freshman crop are again choosing the one-and-out route at college, with Kansas State forward Michael Beasley and a pair of guards, Memphis's Derrick Rose and USC's O.J. Mayo likely to be the three top picks in some order. Insiders are predicting that more than half the lottery picks, which should include high-profile players like UCLA's Kevin Love and Indiana's Eric Gordon, will be frosh.

Obviously, this NBA rule change has been a win-win for college basketball and the NBA. The nation's elite high-school players are now doing a campus drive-by, giving the NCAA tournament more star power. And as a result, the NBA gets to draft players who are presumably more mature on and off the court with the added benefit of some March Madness exposure that helps promote them. NBA Commissioner David Stern has obviously been delighted with how his brainstorm has worked for his league and he would like to push it even further, raising the entry-age to the NBA to 20, though it's not clear that the union will accede to this proposal.

But just because the higher entry age bolsters basketball at two levels doesn't mean it's a good idea for society. Sure there were high-school players who opted to go straight to the NBA and whose games weren't ready and who weren't mature enough to handle the rigors of the pro league. But just a superficial glance at this past season, certainly the NBA's most entertaining and untroubled in many a year, reveals that of the consensus top candidates for MVP--Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, Dwight Howard and Chris Paul--four entered the league directly from high school, with only Paul playing two years of college ball at Wake Forest.

But if the premise of the immature player and his difficult adjustment is overstated, the result of the new rule is far more egregious. It's a complete academic sham. Players who would have gone straight to the NBA now spend one reluctant year taking a scholarship spot from a kid who might really want to be there. And, of course, one year may be a slight exaggeration since these gilded kids can pretty much stop going to class as soon as they've served their school by demonstrating their wares in the NCAA tournament. The graduation rates for so many of the elite basketball schools are already so embarrassing that it's hard to see how adding a layer of one-and-outs does anything but exacerbate the problem.

It may be a bit too facile to touch on how we treat youth in our broader society. But it seems ludicrous that we deem 18--year-olds mature enough to enlist in the military, with potentially dire consequences, yet are hellbent on protecting them against the consequences of not being ready for prime-time NBA basketball. If the pros want to backstop the kids, why not make a provision of every contract with a high-schooler guaranteed money that would be reserved for a college education if the NBA thing didn't work out. I understand why the NBA, with its public relations problems in recent years, prefers more mature players. And I understand why the NCAA wants to exploit the talent to boost its TV ratings before turning the kids loose. But what that adds up to in those places where basketball is not life's paramount concern is nothing short of a fraud.