David Shields Quotes

If the NFL can keep getting away with forcing players to wait three years out of high school before they're drafted - three! - the NCAA should be made to do away with its rules against paying players beyond room, board and tuition. I'm not talking about some token, $2,000-a-year 'spending money' stipend for every player.

It is time for everyone to sit down - the NCAA, the NBA, the players union and the coaching fraternity - and come up with suitable solutions to these problems.

I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.

The league, is doing well. It is just a matter of trying to sort some things out with my contract.

The only thing wrong with the NBA - or any other professional sport, for that matter - is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.

Rather than saying that the commissioner is hired by the owners and therefore is subservient to them, you have to look at whether or not the players are getting a fair shake.

Baseball and the players association have rules. If you stay within the rules - which say that you can play while you're appealing - I don't see what anyone would be in arms about.

The NFL, and I've played a lot of years for them, and they have a lot of restrictions on their players, they have restrictions on their licensees, they have restrictions on everything.

A lot of players know I've been around 13 years and this is my second lockout. I got a lot of respect. I know what's going on both for the league and the union.

And historically the owners have used loyalty to a team or a city to hold players as opposed to always paying their worth.

The NCAA model is outdated. If Steve Serby's a great player in high school, and an agent wants to represent you and wants to advance you money as a loan based on the fact that you're gonna be a high draft choice, so be it.

We should not go to a baseball rule. If a kid goes to college and, after a year or two, wants to go to the NBA and is good enough - and he grew, he got bigger, he got more confidence - let him go. Why would you now force a kid to go two years?

Obviously, in the NBA, there's a lot of different decisions that people make. The whole thing in the NBA is that people sometimes have an opportunity to go where they want.

I got some cash from agents. I've talked to the NCAA. I think that should be legal. I want some money, too; everybody else is making money. I want to go on dates. I want to go buy myself some new suits. I want to buy myself some new sneakers, and I paid the agents back.

I don't understand the NBA in that, each time they bring in a one-and-done kid, they have to release a veteran player on a roster. I don't understand why their players association condones that.

From my standpoint, I would make it very difficult on the NBA to even have any association with college basketball. I think it's ludicrous the way they take kids away that are certainly not prepared to play.

The difference between the National Football League and college is this: In college, you are a broke college student.

If a franchise wants me, they'll take me.

Guys are coming into the league a little more mature when they take the three or four years in college.

Free agency is free agency. I love when NBA players get paid.

The baseball draft is very different from the NBA or the NFL.

My workout routine changed pretty dramatically in the NFL. Workout programs from college to the NFL are significantly different.

The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.

I love Coach Koetter.

I was in Atlanta for nine years and we never got to play on Christmas Day.