Dustin Snipes for The New York Times  SOLO PROJECT Perry Jonesâs team doesnât want him to fit in but to dominate â even as the team struggles.  Perry Jones III is 19 years old and one inch short of seven feet tall. He has a shy smile, a sweet nature and the manners of a young man who has attended church almost every Sunday of his life. A tattoo, inked above his left biceps three years ago at a parlor in Plano, Tex., features his mother’s name, Terri Jones, and the words “My blessing from God.” She was moved to tears when he showed it to her, then told him, “That’s the last one; no more tattoos.” (Nonetheless, he later added a passage from Scripture on his chest.)  Jones grew up just south of Dallas, and as is the case for many boys from Texas, football was the first organized sport he played. He was a quarterback and so superior to his peers that grade-school videos show him taking snaps from center and just running by everyone for multiple touchdowns a game. When it became apparent that he was going to grow taller than even the tallest N.F.L. players, basketball became his sport. He is what scouts sometimes refer to as a physical freak — not just tall but also endowed with uncommon speed, explosive jumping ability and soft hands that allow him to hold onto even errant bounce passes that come skittering in at knee level.  In eighth grade, Jones was invited to attend a Baylor University basketball game on the campus in Waco, Tex. He was still a raw player, not widely known and in some ways perfect for the Baylor program, which was not attracting the best of the seasoned prospects. Baylor’s coaches, who saw Jones play in youth tournaments, talked to him after their game, and the players made a fuss over him, particularly a big, gregarious kid from Senegal, Mamadou Diene, who just sort of naturally took on the role of team ambassador. “Mamadou embraced my baby,” is how Terri Jones recalls that visit.  Jones declared on the ride home that he had found his school, and soon after, he committed to Baylor, meaning that the team’s coach, Scott Drew, offered him a scholarship and he accepted. It was only a verbal bond, one that could not be officially sealed until he reached his senior year of high school and signed an N.C.A.A. letter of intent, but he never wavered, even as coaches from more-traditional college-basketball powers, including Kansas and U.C.L.A., sent letters to his home. At a basketball tournament at Texas A&M, when the elite players were offered a tour of the campus, Jones chose to stay in the gym and shoot baskets by himself. As his national profile grew, it seemed to him that people expected him to change his mind. “I didn’t feel like anybody was happy for me to be going to Baylor,” he told me. “They weren’t congratulating me. It seemed like people thought I should go somewhere else. But [Baylor] offered me a scholarship before I was a good player and stayed loyal to me, so I was going to be loyal to them.”  The first time I saw Jones play was in a pickup game in September with his new Baylor teammates, before the team began its official preseason practices. He was the freshman, the “young fella,” as one teammate called him. With rap music blaring from the gym’s sound system, the players were showboating, having fun and busting out moves they would never attempt under the supervision of their coaches. As is typical in such settings, almost no defense was being played, with one exception: every time Jones touched the ball, he was closely guarded, and if he broke free of his defender, someone usually stepped in and gave him a hard foul before he could get to the hoop. It was obvious what was happening. The upperclassmen were trying to toughen him up.  Quincy Acy, a 6-foot-7 junior known for his ceaseless effort and spectacular dunks, told me that he took on the schooling of Jones as a personal mission. “I’m scratching at him every day,” he said. “I’m tugging at him. I’m hitting him. I tell him even before we play: ‘I’m going to foul you, O.K.? You understand what I’m saying? I’m trying to help you and help our team.’ ”  I returned about a month later, after Baylor began practices. Three N.B.A. scouts watched from courtside as Drew and his assistant coaches put the team through drills. It was no mystery whom they were there to watch.  “Take the point, Perry,” Drew said during an intrasquad scrimmage. The scouts looked as if they were going to pop right out of their folding chairs. A near-seven-footer playing point guard? But Jones has the ballhandling skills and court vision to do it, along with the size and explosiveness to play inside and overwhelm most college big men. At certain moments, he looks like a young Magic Johnson, only a little bigger and a lot faster.  Baylor has a drill that requires players to dribble a basketball in each hand from one end of the court to the other and back. They’re supposed to do it in 22 seconds or less — Jones does so in 16 seconds, faster than any of the team’s guards. An assistant coach told me that Jones can dribble the ball from the end line, cross half court with a full head of steam, take one more dribble and get to the rim for a dunk. He is, foundationally, a runner, and sometimes when I watched him, it struck me that if he had taken a different path and trained, say, for the 400 meters, he might have become an abnormally tall Olympic medalist.  Even while he was still at Duncanville High School in suburban Dallas, the Web sites that track such things had already projected Jones as a lottery pick — one of the first 14 players selected — in the 2011 N.B.A. draft. A couple of the more authoritative ones predicted that he could be the No. 1 pick in the entire draft — the best player available from the college ranks and from the ever-deeper pools of international basketball talent. “Devastating first step . . . ability to beat most big men off the dribble with ease,” is how the Web site DraftExpress described him in a recent evaluation. “Potential superstar,” the Hoop Doctors said, speculating that he could be “the next Tracy McGrady.” HoopsHype said that the “upside he possesses is unparalleled at the college level.” The respected ESPN.com analyst Chad Ford has had him at or near the top of his mock draft from the start of the season.  The paradoxical thing, though, about Jones’s status is that he was never a truly great high-school player, certainly not a dominant one or one who scored a lot of points. But just about everyone assumes that he will be a one-and-done player at Baylor, a pure rental who stays for a single season. That has become the norm for top college players. In fact, in some projections, as many as six of the top 10 picks in this spring’s N.B.A. draft are college freshmen. The trend has changed the college game: teams with top talent do not stay together long enough to cohere, sometimes leaving opportunities for less-talented but more-experienced teams, like Butler last season and George Mason in 2006, to advance to the Final Four. And it has changed the N.B.A., making it, at times, utterly unwatchable, because the rosters are stocked with too many players who were never fully taught the game and are learning on the job. (Players can no longer enter the N.B.A. straight out of high school, as Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and many others did.)  Michael Sokolove (mysoko@hotmail.com) is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of âWarrior Girls,â about the injury epidemic among young female athletes.Story editor: Dean Robinson (d.robinson-MagGroup@nytimes.com  The cover article on Page 26 this weekend profiles the Baylor basketball player Perry Jones III and cites him as an example of a player who might jump to the N.B.A. after one college season. After the article had gone to press, Jones was declared ineligible by the N.C.A.A. for the beginning of the Big 12 tournament, for âpre-enrollment amateurismâ and âpreferential treatment violationâ having to do with three loans from Jonesâs A.A.U. coach to his mother, which were said to have been repaid in a âtimelyâ manner. Baylor is contesting the N.C.A.A. decision and is seeking to have Jonesâs eligibility restored. For developments on his status, check the magazineâs blog, The 6th Floor, at nytimes.com/magazine or reports at nytimes.com/sports.  The cover article on Page 26 this weekend profiles the Baylor basketball player Perry Jones III and cites him as an example of a player who might jump to the N.B.A. after one college season. After the article had gone to press, Jones was declared ineligible by the N.C.A.A. for the beginning of the Big 12 tournament, for âpre-enrollment amateurismâ and âpreferential treatment violationâ having to do with three loans from Jonesâs A.A.U. coach to his mother, which were said to have been repaid in a âtimelyâ manner. Baylor is contesting the N.C.A.A. decision and is seeking to have Jonesâs eligibility restored. For developments on his status, check the magazineâs blog, The 6th Floor, at nytimes.com/magazine or reports at nytimes.com/sports.
When the most-gifted players, like Baylorâs phenom, stay for only one season, itâs hard not to wonder how much college basketball matters.