ESPN College Hoops Top 25: Lew Alcindor a Good Choice, Rest of List Is Lacking

ESPN is doing yet another 'Greatest' countdown, the newest one counting the greatest college basketball players in history. Although the No. 1 name hasn't been announced, it's going to be UCLA center Lew Alcindor. ESPN.com has a listing of Nos. 25 through 3, and Alcindor's name isn't on that list. On ESPN Radio this morning Mike Greenberg said that No. 2 is Oscar Robertson, so Alcindor is obviously No. 1.

Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, is a fine choice, having been an All-American and Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA Tournament all three years of his college career. But looking at the Top 25 as a whole, one big problem stands out: ESPN and the corporate sponsor of this exercise, IBM, clearly wanted to pack the list with big-name stars, so it inflated the college greatness of players who eventually went on to have NBA success.

To echo something Matt Norlander has written, ESPN is calling this a list of the greatest college players, even though it's clear that the players' post-collegiate careers played a major part in where they were ranked. Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, for instance, are all ahead of Ralph Sampson.

'Revisionist history' is the nicest term for that kind of emphasis.

Sampson won the Naismith College Player of the Year Award three times. He absolutely dominated college basketball. He was a far better college basketball player than Bird, Jordan or Magic. That fact doesn't change just because Bird, Jordan and Magic are NBA legends while Sampson's NBA career was nothing special. It's just that ESPN wants to get attention for its list by having big-name stars near the top, and Sampson is hardly remembered today.

There are other examples: Tim Duncan was not a better college player than Danny Manning, but he's a much better NBA player than Manning ever was, so Duncan is on the list and Manning isn't. Louisville's all-time leading scorer, Darrell Griffith, and North Carolina's all-time leading scorer, Phil Ford, both of whom were national players of the year but didn't become stars in the NBA, are conspicuously absent.

A good case could even be made that Isiah Thomas belongs on the list for his accomplishments at Indiana, but given how things are going with the Knicks these days, ESPN and IBM want no part of honoring him. That would be fine if they wanted to rank the Top 25 Greatest Player in College Basketball Who Were Never Accused of Sexual Harrassment.

If there's any other problem with the IBM Top 25 Greatest Players in College Basketball, it's a problem not so much with the list as with the sport: If the NBA keeps its current eligibility rules, this list will look exactly the same 25 years from now as it does now. Kevin Durant and Greg Oden and Michael Beasley have the talent to make this list, but players like that just don't stick around long enough. Duncan is the most recent player on the list now, and he will be if they go through this exercise in another quarter century.

And Alcindor will still be at the top in a quarter century. The good thing about lists like this is that they can get younger fans interested in the history of the game, and any time the name of Lew Alcindor is introduced to a new generation of fans, that's a positive. I just wish those young fans would also learn just how great Ralph Sampson was.