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[QUOTE="Waltdods, post: 2075817, member: 2932"]
Jerami Grant played alongside CJ Fair, who did stick around for four years, improved very significantly (at least between years 1 and 3), and never played an NBA game.  Grant left as a very unpolished player and started 52 games his second year in the NBA.  He got nearly 1,000 shot attempts in his first two years.  He has played as many minutes each year he has been in the NBA as he possibly could have by staying in college.  (Assuming a college team plays 35 games a year, that's 1400 minutes a season.  Grant played 1378 minutes as a rookie, 2063 as a second-year guy, and is on pace for something like 1450 minutes this year.)

Many kids who do all the right things, and stick around for 4 years and turn into great college players never make an impact in the NBA.  Syracuse fans should know this better than anyone - in recent years, we have Mike Gbinje, Rakeem Christmas, CJ Fair, Kris Joseph.  Going back, John Wallace left college as maybe the best player in a very loaded season for the NCAA.  It didn't make him any better of an NBA player.  Hakim stuck around as a role player in the NBA, but being BE POY didn't make him an NBA star either.  (Grant and Warrick are perhaps similarly talented guys, and seem very likely to have similar careers, despite taking opposite approaches on this point.)

The thing is that there just aren't a lot of NBA jobs, and there are even fewer NBA stars.  Almost everyone is going to fail at getting there.  If you take a group of players - in your example, guys who left Syracuse early - you are inevitably going to find that most of that group fails.  But that will be true of any group you pick.
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