OJ Mayo and the hipocracy of the NCAA

Recently, a former friend of USC roundball star OJ Mayo [and former cocaine dealer] levelled accusations of improper gifts and payments at the player and an employee of a sports agency which Mayo recently chose to represent him before the upcoming NBA draft. Mayo has waived his amateur eligibility by hiring an agent, and will likely be a lottery pick after fulfilling his mandatory one-year sentence in college hoops.
We're facing another distinctly un-American racket here, folks, 'cause if Mayo had been allowed, the young man would most likely have come straight to the pros out of High School, and been paid most hansomely for it. Now, I'm no lawyer, but about 12.654 seconds [and just three lucky clicks] on Google found me a quote from our own United States Supreme Court [you know, like, the highest legal authority we got] which seems to leave this whole notion of mandatory college attendence in the legal dust of involuntary servitude [also known as "slavery"]. Straight up Fourteenth Amendment, y'all. Check it:
"The liberty mentioned in that [Fourteenth] Amendment means not only the right of the citizen to be free from the mere physical restraint of his person, as by incarceration, but the term is deemed to embrace the right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties, to be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he will; to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any livelihood or avocation, and for that purpose to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary and essential to his carrying out to a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned." (165 US at 589: Allgeyer v. Louisiana -- a UNANIMOUS decision, if you were wondering.)
Shouldn't a young man of legal standing -- 18 years old, and in possession of one of our country's most lucrative talents -- be allowed to offer his services to whichever team owns his draft rights? Now, granted, there are provisions which set professional sports apart from your everyday contract situation, but at its heart, this requirement is first-day-of-law-school, flat-out unConsitutional. And if it ain't, [my legal research skills are shoddy at best] it damn well should be. if not illegal, it's blatantly unAmerican.
Unfortunately, this is the point in the argument where sports journalists and the rest of our media friends jump in with another steaming helping of age-old bullshit: "it's for the best," we like to say. "These kids [make note of the term, if you would] have no idea what it's like in the pros. They'd get eaten alive without that experience of a higher level of play."
Now the problem with this argument [not that there's just one] is that if it were true, no high school player would have ever been drafted in the first place. Obviously, there are as many [or more] failures as successes when it comes to 18-year old draftees, but that question is irrelevant. Regardless of whether or not a single given player is equipped to make the decision, we have no choice but to assume he's capable. Simply put: it's the law, and his right to do so if he chooses.
Let's put aside the legal issues associated with curtailing a player's rights to go pro after high school. For a moment, we'll live in the fantasy world constructed by the NCAA which preserves the ridiuclous notion of amateurism. The motivations behind this requirement are as shady as its legal underpinnings, and deserve a bit of exploration.
Now, the NCAA is always quick to spout the same nonsense as most sports journalists out there on this topic: that the provision is designed to protect young men from the awful realities and potential ill-effects of professional sports. ['Cause, you know, millions of dollars and thousands of adoring -- however doltish -- fans are terrible burdens for an 18 year old].
Truth is, the provision is designed to protect the NCAA and its market, plain and simple. The amount of money made on the backs of "amateur" collegiate athletes is staggering these days, and like any multi-billion dollar market, those sums must be protected from any and all potential threats. The threat of losing your top-tier, butts-in-seats superstars is one that College Basketball can't afford to risk. In fact, you might as well call this the LeBron James rule. If LeBron had been a year younger, and forced to attend Ohio State or Duke for a year, think about the millions of dollars those schools would have made off of national television contracts with Disney (which owns ABC and ESPN) and CBS -- just a couple of the monster corporations who employ our narrow-minded sports-reporter friends. Now, let's imagine that, like Greg Oden, LeBron got injured in the year between college-ball sentence and pro-opener. Tore his ACL, let's say, and lost out on a year's worth of game-checks-- which for him, would be more dull-green ducketts than my high school class will see in our collective lifetimes.
He'd have a clear suit against both the NCAA and the NBA, in my opinion, for squashing his 14th Amendment rights and placing undue regulations on his personal rights of contract. Like I said, I'm no lawyer, but it seems pretty damned obvious.
What I'm getting to, I suppose, is that I really don't care whether or not Mayo took money from an agent. Hell, somebody should have been compensating him for the hours he spent filling the arenas he played in and pumping up the TV ratings of a second-rate Pac-10 team. Lord knows USC wasn't.
And I don't wanna hear any horseshit about the value of a college education. How much can one year of a four-year degree be worth? [And I'm not talking retail, here, either. Damn. Talk about a racket] I've sat through freshman year at a massive state school, and I didn't find the forced memorization of roughly 6,000 powerpoint slides and twenty-five mandatory, 150-question Scantron tests to be of much tangible value.
From what I can tell, Mayo is an intelligent young man -- the quotes I've read of his make him sound like a grounded, humble guy. He says he rode his bike to class all year, which is a claim my lazy ass could never make.
The question is, why do the NBA and NCAA think they can so blatantly collude against the constitutional rights of an American citizen? If anybody can clear this up for me, I'm all ears.