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I think that the reason you don't see many of the big-name college guys get hired has less to do with their jobs (although that factor should be considered) than with the fact that many of them don't have what the NBA is looking for.
Think about your twenty-five year veterans who have worked multiple Final Fours. These guys are in their fifties, at least. Even if they were courted by the NBA and wanted to go, think about what that would mean. Can you imagine Jim Burr being a rookie on a crew whose chief was somebody in their forties? That's just an impossible situation for everybody concerned, and the NBA is not going to promote conditions that are going to make partnering harder than it has to be.
Implicit in this reasoning is that the NBA picks 'targets' who are pretty young. That way they can send them to their camps and pro leagues, so they can begin to model the type of work that is expected by the referees at that level. The NBA then gets to bring in people who have the habits they want, rather than having to break people of what they consider to be bad habits. It's no coincidence that the conference that is sending the NBA almost all of its new guys is the conference that most closely models what the NBA is doing.
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