There have been many instances in these last few waiver- and lawsuit-riddled years for the NCAA that a rational onlooker might have asked, What’s the point of fighting this?
The guy who played one too many games for a medical redshirt. The transfer forced to sit out (remember those days?) after transferring back home, but not close enough for the NCAA’s standards. The basketball player this season who had to go to court to extend his eligibility clock because he missed two years due to a cardiac incident.
Show some compassion, fans might have thought. Just let the guy play.
The case of Charles Bediako and his legally mandated temporary (for now) return to Alabama basketball is not one of those instances. And while the NCAA’s record in court is far from spotless, the association should fight tooth and nail to keep him and other similarly situated players off the court. Maintaining a product that reasonably resembles the sport so many have grown to love is on the line.
For those unacquainted, Bediako is a 2021 high school grad who made an immediate impact in two seasons at Alabama, starting all 37 games as a sophomore on a Tide team that won the SEC championship and earned the overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. He anchored one of the best defenses in the country and climbed onto the NBA radar in the process, so he entered and stayed in the NBA draft in 2023.
At that point, Bediako had forfeited his remaining college eligibility, just as every other player like him had for years. A key detail here: The NCAA has a separate draft withdrawal deadline from the NBA’s deadline, and Bediako was forfeiting his NCAA eligibility as an NCAA early entrant by going past that deadline unlike other players who’ve gone through the draft and later enrolled in college for the first time. He went undrafted, signed with the Spurs (first on an Exhibit 10 contract, then a two-way deal) and later the Nuggets. He never played in an NBA game, but did play in 83 G League games over three seasons. Now, he wants to return to Alabama to play out the remainder of the 2025–26 college season, the final year of the five-year eligibility clock that started when he first enrolled in college. Now, he has been granted a temporary restraining order by an Alabama judge through at least Jan. 27, allowing him to suit up on Saturday for the Tide against Tennessee.
Or, the simpler explanation: Charles Bediako tried and failed to make it in the NBA and now wants a do-over of his decision to leave college, where he can make a lot more money in one semester than he was making on a G League contract playing 15 minutes per game with the Motor City Cruise.
Bediako isn’t like the European pros who’ve come over of late, where the youth development system relies on playing professionally from a young age and previously taking even small amounts of money ruled you ineligible in the NCAA’s eyes. He’s also not like the players who signed pro contracts with the G League Ignite program or Overtime Elite, who chose pro avenues over college when NIL was still in its infancy and made those decisions as teenagers. He isn’t even like James Nnaji, who never signed an NBA contract and was functionally just another European pro coming over.
Bediako was a 21-year-old who had multiple months to decide whether to go back to Alabama or go pro. Teams had NIL collectives working at full blast at that point, making competitive financial offers to keep players in school longer. He knew what he was doing and the risk he was taking by staying in the draft. He can blame bad advice or bad luck or anything in between, but the rules of the game were made clear to him. He should have to live with that decision, not demand a redo. While this writer is certainly not legally qualified to deduce Bediako’s chances of winning in court beyond the TRO, he’d like to believe common sense could be applied.
Do not take this column as a criticism of Bediako himself. If I saw an easy path to make an additional six figures of cash and maybe revive a struggling career in the process, I’d shoot my shot, too. And while it’d be nice for someone to step up and be the adult in the room who says enough is enough, I don’t overly blame Nate Oats or Alabama either. It’s hard to be the guy that stands up for the enterprise, and nothing would’ve stopped Auburn or Ole Miss from enrolling Bediako and attempting the same sue-and-hope scheme if Oats had declined.
But the NCAA simply can’t afford to go down without a fight on this one. Exhaust every legal avenue. And not even because allowing players like Bediako into college basketball would ruin the product. The real issue with allowing players to leave and come back as they please is how much it would destabilize the entire sport’s calendar.
The primary benefit of the NCAA having a draft withdrawal date weeks before the NBA’s official withdrawal deadline is it gives a hard-and-fast date for schools to know whether players will be on teams. Recruitments for a handful of late-signing players may trickle into the summer, but by June 1, rosters are in large part set. If the NCAA can’t stop players from going through the draft and coming back, those decisions could trickle into mid-July (after NBA Summer League) or even later, if players want to see through a shot to make a pro team in training camp. They might be able to stay eligible through online classes, or simply punt on the fall semester and rejoin their college team in mid-December. Who needs nonconference games anyway?
The NBA should be incentivized to help, too, unless it plans on unveiling new rules around the draft. As things presently stand, players can go through the NBA draft only once. If they could easily bounce back to college, there’d be no incentive for most players to not at least go through the draft as freshmen, go undrafted, and then be viewed as free agents and draft-exempt for future years. NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NCAA president Charlie Baker met in New York earlier this month and discussed eligibility; it’d make sense for the two to work hand-in-hand on a solution that makes sense for both the NBA and college.
And if the NCAA truly has no legal recourse to prevent players from bouncing in between college and the pros every semester (a possibility, though one that likely won’t be settled until well after Bediako’s season at Alabama is over), then it’s well past time to more seriously engage with more drastic measures than asking nicely for help from a Congress that likely has bigger fish to fry. Collective bargaining requires a unit to bargain with and isn’t as easy a fix as some online might like you to believe it is, but the status quo of state courts deciding what’s allowed and what isn’t on a case-by-case basis is untenable.
Maybe we’ll look back on this Bediako saga as a positive in time; the moment we finally learned where exactly the line is for who’s eligible to play college basketball and who isn’t. Either that, or it’s the moment that any semblance of structure vanished from the college basketball season. Come one, come all, high schoolers and NBA flameouts alike.
Either way, it’s worth the NCAA digging in hard on this one. The answer it gets from the judicial system may well shape the future of what college basketball looks like.
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