In his “One & Done” documentary that aired this weekend, Ben Simmons railed against the NCAA, saying, among other things:

“The NCAA is really f—ed up. Everybody’s making money except the players. We’re the ones waking up early as hell to be the best teams and do everything they want us to do and then the players get nothing. They say education, but if I’m there for a year, I can’t get much education…

The NCAA is messed up. I don’t have a voice…I don’t get paid to do it. Don’t say I’m an amateur and make me take pictures and sign stuff and go make hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars off one person…I’m going off on the NCAA. Just wait, just wait. I can be a voice for everybody in college. I’m here because I have to be here [at LSU]…I can’t get a degree in two semesters, so it’s kind of pointless. I feel like I’m wasting time.”

Not really mincing words there. College, in essence, is career training. If you want to be in business, you go and take business classes. If you want to be an NBA player, you play college basketball. In between, you gotta take other classes and round off the experience, but when institutions and schools make money off of your name, likeness, and ability, and you don’t see a dime of it, it’ll piss you off. It’s reasonable. Saying those things will piss off the head of the NCAA.

Mark Emmert, the NCAA president and former chancellor of LSU, had some words for Simmons right back:

I was reading today where someone who played basketball at LSU was very unhappy with the one-and-done rule. That’s not our rule. That’s the NBA’s rule. But (he says) it’s another stupid NCAA rule.

“The one-and-done rule is something I’ve made no secret about how much I dislike it. It makes a farce of going to school. But if you just want to play in the NBA, you can do that. You can go to Europe or play at a prep school until you’re 19…

If someone wants to be a pro basketball player and doesn’t want to go to college, don’t go to college. We don’t put a gun to your head. First and foremost, it’s about being a student at a university. We’re in the human development business.

If I wanted to hire someone to play football, why would I hire a 17-year-old (out of high school)? Why wouldn’t I hire someone who just finished playing in the NFL or the CFL? If you want to hire a team, hire a team.

Those kids have to be students. Philosophically, they have to be representatives of the university, so what we can and should be doing, which what we are doing today, is provide them with everything they possibly need to make them successful students and athletes.”

First off, real pro move saying “someone who played basketball at LSU” and not his name, you overgrown child. Second, the whole one-and-done vs. staying four-years (or foregoing college altogether), going to class vs. not going to class debate is a long and complicated one. It won’t be solved with a he said, he said. But Emmert completely avoided the whole point Simmons made about “everybody’s making money except the players.” Maybe because he doesn’t have an answer for it? Or he can’t state his case for not paying the players while universities rake in millions on free labor without sounding like a total asshole.