He Should Break Legal Tackle

If Maurice Clarett wants his sophomore year at Ohio State to have any value at all, he should announce he’s making himself available for the 2004 NFL draft right now.

With a potential NCAA suspension that could keep him out for half the season, what would be the point of playing? He wouldn’t win the Heisman Trophy and if the Buckeyes repeated as national champions he couldn’t claim a prominent role. Meanwhile, we’d all be subjected to more skipping and dancing with NCAA issues that have dominated the headlines (at least on those days the coaches weren’t misbehaving).

So just go on, head for the pros and get it over with. Don’t be just another player; be the trailblazer who brought the NFL in line with the rest of the professional sports world by breaking through the league rule that forces players to wait until three years after their high school graduation to be drafted.

The courts would be on his side.

“All he would have to do is say, ‘I’m using the Spencer Haywood Rule,’ ” Spencer Haywood said. “You can’t stop a person from making money in America.”

It was Haywood’s case and subsequent Supreme Court ruling more than 30 years ago that paved the way for high school graduates and college underclassmen to enter the NBA. The heaviest weight in Haywood’s favor was the ruling that the NBA four-year requirement was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

That’s much more compelling than any argument that Clarett should be in school. He won’t be of much use to Ohio State if his punishment for exaggerating the value of items stolen in his car theft report to the campus police keeps him off the field for two months. And he won’t get the full value of his classroom time, based on a New York Times story that said Clarett walked out of a midterm exam and later took an oral exam to pass the class and maintain eligibility for Ohio State’s Fiesta Bowl run.

It’s not worth all of the legal hassles. He already has an attorney; he should put him to work against the NFL.

There’s only one good reason that the NFL rule is still in the books.

“No one’s challenged it,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said.

After allowing players to enter the draft after their junior season on a case-by-case basis, the league adopted the current standards in 1990.

He said the lack of litigation since then “suggests that the rule makes sense and is working in everybody’s best interests.”

Well, it serves the NFL’s interest because it can maintain its free farm system through the NCAA. And it serves the colleges’ interest because they can rake in television and ticket money to watch star players who don’t require paychecks. But it doesn’t do a thing for the player who is ready to cash in on his skills.

Its continued existence might be more of a reflection on the legal system than the law itself. Even a successful lawsuit could take a year or two to win -- that’s precious time in a field where the average career lasts three years.

“The process is fraught with the risk of the unknown,” longtime football agent Leigh Steinberg said. “Most players didn’t want to spend their time being a guinea pig.”

Steinberg said several undergraduate players have approached him with the idea of challenging the rule, but when he told them what it would entail, “They backed away.”

They don’t understand that the battle already was fought in 1971, that a guy who had to make court appearances between games and was served subpoenas on the bench has already made the sacrifice.

“I don’t know why no one has ever challenged it,” Haywood said. “To me, it makes no sense. The precedent is already set in another professional sport.

“You’ve got tennis, hockey, baseball, tiddly-winks ... everything else, you name the sport, you can come in when you are ready.”

Aiello said the physical and mental demands of pro football make it different. And David Cornwell, a former legal counsel for the NFL and then for Steinberg’s agency, said the NFL’s rule might hold up in court.

“It’s not obvious to me that there’s a slam-dunk claim that anyone can bring,” said Cornwell, who now is president of his own firm, DNK Cornwell. “There are reasons for what is otherwise perceived to be an arbitrary rule.”

While an 18-year-old, for example, can get a license to box in Nevada, Cornwell said that’s different. “You have weight classifications within boxing. That ensures that you’re going to be fighting against somebody that at least has objectively the same characteristics as you.”

Cornwell’s best argument might be better suited for the field than a court of law: “Bring a high schooler in and let him run through the line and let him get hit by Ray Lewis.”

I wouldn’t recommend that treatment for most people, let alone those under 20. But I’d give the ball to Clarett and take my chances. He looks as ready as anyone in a while.

Did Michael Vick improve that much from his second to his third seasons at Virginia Tech? Wouldn’t his NFL learning have been accelerated if he spent an extra year watching the pro game from the sidelines (instead of the television) while his body filled out?

It will have to be a dynamic player such as that to challenge the status quo, because the union isn’t on this case. The NFL Players Assn. Web site contains data that shows that since 1990, almost one in four early entrants never received an NFL contract.

As with every sport, some people won’t be ready. That shouldn’t be used to penalize the ones who are. Clarett’s career should have ended at the Fiesta Bowl, instead of getting dragged through this mess.

And please, let’s not pretend this has anything to do with higher education.

“While I venerate a college education and think that it’s pretty important,” Steinberg said, “no one’s really ever proven that mastering the Pythagorean theorem or Middle Eastern languages is a prerequisite to cut off-tackle for four yards.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at ja.adande@latimes.com