Columnist Dean Juipe: NFL joins real world

Dean Juipe

Friday, Feb. 13, 2004 | 10:05 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

With its offices on Park Avenue and its battalion of expensive lawyers, the National Football League is perfectly able to make a case for or against any issue within its purview. It has the power, the expertise and the financial wherewithal to implement its will virtually as it sees fit or chooses.

Yet no amount of money should be able to override the Bill of Rights and existing antitrust regulations, let alone, in theory, common sense.

No amount of money should be able to keep the NFL from preventing a young man from applying to the league for consideration to be drafted. No amount of money should be able to justify a practice that is, in essence, a restraint of trade.

The NFL knew this was coming; I remember writing about it years ago. It knew when the right player and the right situation came along, it would lose the ability to ban players from its league simply based on the age of those players.

The dam gave way this week when a U.S. District judge ruled that the NFL did not have the right to prevent Maurice Clarett, a running back from Ohio State University, from applying to the league to be considered for selection in its annual April draft.

It's about time.

Here's what the NFL is really trying to protect: its farm system. It likes the fact it pays nothing as colleges recruit, build and develop players who eventually gravitate to the NFL.

It likes the fact the colleges weed out the imposters from the select few, and it would rather not be bothered with taking chances on kids right out of high school.

But the situation is about to change. The NFL is about to join a real world that each of the other major sports leagues willingly joined long ago. It is about to realize it is going to have to pay attention and spend money evaluating high-profile players while they're still in high school.

It took Clarett to set the process of change in motion. He's 20 years old and feels he's ready for the NFL, but the league's existing policy prevented him from doing that because of a clause that bars players "less than three years removed from high school" from being draft eligible.

Judge Shira Scheindlin looked at the evidence and saw the obvious: Clarett was being denied one of his inalienable rights. She ruled in Clarett's favor, and, later in the week, denied the NFL a stay of execution.

The NFL can still and probably will take the matter to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but the result should be the same: It was overstepping its bounds by banning young men from the league solely because of their birth dates or college-class status and it is going to have to change -- immediately.

Whether it's prudent for players at 17, 18 or 19 years old to declare for the NFL draft and believe they can play in that physically demanding league is irrelevant. As many will undoubtedly find, pro football is too tough of a game if you are not fully developed both mentally and physically.

But that's also irrelevant. The NBA has survived and even prospered despite an influx of younger and younger players, and while kids fresh out of high school are unlikely to alter or impact the NFL it is going to have to accommodate them.

The ban the NFL had in place all those years was just waiting to be overtuned, as everyone even remotely familiar with the 1969 case in which Spencer Haywood successfully challenged the NBA on a similar restraint of trade knew it would.