Even as the new Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City opened its doors to John Wooden, Dean Smith, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson and Dr. James Naismith himself, I still wonder why everything has changed so much in the last generation at the Naismith Basketball Memorial Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

While I think the new hall is an idea whose time has clearly come, I still wonder why it has come to that. When and why did college basketball become so irrelevant in Springfield that a separate Hall needed to be started to honor the great college players and coaches?

What would have happened today to players such as La Salle’s Tom Gola and Princeton’s Bill Bradley, truly great college players who were never great NBA players?

The answer is rather simple. There would be no place for them in Springfield. That they are there is a tribute to what they did in college and the times in which they did it.

Approximately 20 years ago, at the precise time the NBA became the major player in Springfield, the great college player who did not also have a great NBA career began to get shut out. There is no longer any place for La Salle’s Lionel Simmons, the third-leading scorer in Division I history whose quite promising NBA career was cut short by injury. Or Danny Manning of Kansas, who put on what I will always consider the greatest one-man show in NCAA Tournament history when Kansas won the 1988 title. Can anybody name one other player from that team? How good a pro would Manning have been if he did not tear his ACL twice?

“I think most of the people involved in the process just have come to feel that the NBA is a lot more significant part of the game for players than it was 30, 40 years ago,” said Russ Granik, recently retired as NBA deputy commissioner and the Basketball Hall of Fame’s chairman of the board. “That’s just the way it is. In the modern age, it’s going to be hard for someone who had a fairly middle-range NBA career to get in. It’s not impossible. It still could be done.”

In fact, no men’s player fitting Granik’s description has made the Hall of Fame in years. Yet, during the same time, eight college women players have been elected. Yes, they had no place to play professionally until recent years, but if female players with great college careers are in, why not male college players with equally great careers?

The ultimate test case is going to be Duke’s Christian Laettner. Nobody reading this needs to be told what Laettner did during his college career. His NBA numbers were similar to Gola and Bradley’s.

“Nobody had a more powerful college career than him,” said Notre Dame coach Mike Brey, an assistant on those Duke teams. “There couldn’t have been a more clutch college player. He should be in there for what he meant to college basketball. He was the face of it for a long, long time."

What about Virginia’s Ralph Sampson, the three-time national player of the year? He’s not in the Hall of Fame.

Granik argues that the NBA simply was not that significant back in the day. He’s right, of course.

“It’s really what's happened to the NBA,” Granik said. “That was in a day when the NBA was not as significant to the game as it is now.”

But that doesn’t help the modern college player who played four years, put up great numbers, won championships, made big shots and, for whatever reason, was not a great NBA success.

Going forward, the argument is likely to be moot, because the truly great player won’t be staying in college long enough to put up numbers like Laettner, Manning, Sampson and Simmons. But there will be some. And there are many from the 1980s and 1990s that should not be overlooked.

“It’s hard to know the criteria for the Hall of Fame,” Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said. “I’m in it, and I don’t know it. It seems being a three-time player of the year in college basketball isn’t the criteria that gets you in the Hall of Fame. Whether that’s right or wrong, I’m not here to say, but that’s the way it is.”

Boeheim is not particularly thrilled with how the criteria has changed over the years.

“Does a pretty good NBA player get in over a guy that was player of the year three times in college?” Boeheim said. “That’s really the debate.”

Taken that way, the debate does not seem all that complicated. It is complicated, however, because the debate apparently is over. Which brings us back to the original question. Why did this happen?

One could make lots of arguments as to the why, but the reality is that it has happened. Today, the pretty good or near great NBA player is deemed more Hall worthy than the truly great college player. There is no debate about that. It is just the reality.