EAST LANSING — Tom Izzo isn’t a fan of the NBA’s new Gatorade League commitment to offer a handful of elite high school prospects $125,000 a year to skip college.

“We're constantly making rules that we think gives kids freedom at 18 years old,” the MSU coach said during MSU's media day on Thursday. “And I'm wondering who in the hell needs freedom at 18 years old?”

Um … I did?

Maybe you did.

Certainly, LeBron James did.

OK, he was — and still is — an outlier, having handled his business as well as any professional athlete ever has. Let’s not pretend, though, that he was the only high schooler to jump straight to the NBA to succeed.

But that’s beside the point, right?

This isn’t about who succeeds as much as it is about who chooses. And right now, 18-year-old high school basketball players don’t get to choose, which is neither fair nor right. Nor is it how we’ve set up our society in almost every other career endeavor.

Which means the G-League offer arose from an acknowledgement of hypocrisy.

It was borne out of the FBI investigation that uncovered the grime we all knew was inherent in college basketball, and suggested by the Commission on College Basketball, a reform-minded group led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Commission also recommended the NBA get rid of its 19-year-old age limit, making the G-League offer policy a kind of stop-gap plan until the NBA changes its age limit.

Will $125,000 contracts in the G-League make a difference?

Izzo isn't so sure. Nor are many of his colleagues.

North Carolina’s Roy Williams told the Associated Press this week he wanted to wait and see how it unfolded. His rival, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, said there would always be one-and-done players. And Leonard Hamilton, who coaches Florida State, said chasing G-League cash would be “fool’s gold.”

Maybe so. Tossing 18-year-olds in a pot with older players desperate for one more chance makes for a kind of messy stew.

But, again, if an 18-year-old wants to jump in, shouldn’t he be able to?

This brings us back to Izzo and the question of freedom — and how much high school seniors should get.

I don’t doubt that the Michigan State coach is concerned about kids taking risks without fully understanding them.

“If I were them, I'd want the best chance to make it,” he said, “and I have nothing that gives me the feeling it's the G-league.”

Izzo also pointed to the long odds of developmental leagues:

“I think it's a small number of players, but I worry about are these kids now in ninth grade, tenth grade thinking, I'm going pro — $125,000. All of us here know the government is taking a big part of that. Then they got to pay for their food. They got to pay for their housing … they're not going to have the facilities we have. They're playing against 26-, 27-year-old men who are fighting for their lives. I'm not sure why everyone is so enamored of it.”

Not everyone is so enamored of it. Mostly because we know the elite prospects deserve a shot in the NBA right out of high school if that's what they want. Forcing them into college is exploitative.

This is a way around that, at least temporarily.

Is it perfect?

Of course not. As Izzo argued Thursday, if a kid chooses college over the G-League and never makes it as a pro after he graduates, at least he’s got a degree. And he’s right that $125,000 after taxes is hardly enough to set you up for life.

But, as he also noted, pursuing professional basketball is a crapshoot, anyway.

“Everybody that comes to these colleges, these BCS colleges, think that they're NBA players,” he said. “Well, of the 50 top colleges or 75 top colleges, I mean, there's only so many players. There's only 25, 26 Americans that make (the NBA) a year … everybody's not making it.”

True. Yet this assumes college is the best place for someone who absolutely doesn’t want to be there. It also assumes that we — and by we, I mean society— should have the right to choose for these kids. Which is, in effect, what we are doing.

And that strips away a chance to learn, too.

When I left home at 18 for college, I wasn’t ready. Not for a big school. Not for all that freedom.

Oh, I knew how to cook and to study and to do laundry. I just didn’t know how to do those things consistently. Not at first.

Plenty of my classmates did. And while they thrived with their freedom — and responsibility — I had to learn through failure.

Eventually, I got it right.

James got it right from the start. So did Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady and dozens of other uber-skilled high school seniors that knew they were good enough to forgo college before the NBA installed its 19-year-old age limit.

Did they handle everything perfectly? Of course not. But then that’s life.

What mattered is that they got to choose. Then grow from how they handled their choice.

Rice’s Commission got it right. Basketball players good enough to play in the NBA should be free to do so.

The new G-League offer may not be airtight, but it’s a step in the proper direction.

Toward freedom.

More:How Michigan State's Nick Ward mended his relationship with Tom Izzo

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.