Wendell Carter’s mom is contradicting her own viewpoint.

The mother of Duke’s latest one-and-done star has defused her own argument when she claims that her son got nothing for the year he played college basketball. The trade-off is on-campus experience, before it becomes all about the money.

Kylia Carter’s beef is that her son wasn’t paid in cash for his one season at Duke while a lot of other people got rich off him. Is that why Wendell Jr. turned pro after one year with the Blue Devils – to give up on a college degree and get rich as quickly as the rules allow?

What she said in front of the Knight Commission this week does not make much sense. If the NBA Players Association hadn’t raised the minimum age to 19 years old, Carter would have been one of many to jump to the NBA right from high school. But it is not the NCAA that created that rule, it’s the NBAPA.

How can she say that playing for Mike Krzyzewski doesn’t compute? Or spending part a year on a college campus is no better than going right to the NBA and being a misfit who can’t even hang with the older players off the court. Most of the one-and-dones give the money to their families and sit in their hotel rooms and play video games. Does that sound like much of a life?

Mrs. Carter should be chastising the NBAPA for reducing the value of a college degree to one year. She calls it slavery for working to make other people money. While going to college for one year has less value than going for four, earning a degree and becoming a man – like UNC’s Joel Berry said recently in his moving piece on the The Players’ Tribune — is arguably equal to a big paycheck in the currency of life.

Wendell Carter could have stayed in school for two or three or four years and probably been a better pro when he got out. But his mother hated the system, so her son entered the draft. Will he be better off sitting on an NBA bench, where most of the one-and-dones wind up, than learning his craft in college to help him succeed in the NBA? Or a degree if he doesn’t?

Yes, the system is flawed, and those who want to get paid should be allowed to go pro out of high school. But doing that says it is all about money over any amount of time in college. Carter got to play on national TV and in the NCAA tournament and maybe even learned something. That’s hardly worthless.