March Madness really is madness

It is nearly March Madness time and if there ever was a sports tournament appropriately named madness, it is the Men’s College Basketball Tournament. Somehow people have been conned into believing that the 65-team event is a seminal moment in sports and that the excitement of the games transcends sports.

But a closer look at the tournament reveals something else. It is not just a sports event, it is a business, a huge business that is nothing more than a television series funded by CBS and that the people behind the tournament are guided far more by money than an athletic event. How else do you explain the constant stories for the past three months that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) members are thinking about expanding the tournament from the present 65 teams to 96 and with an expansion of the tournament would come more television money from some source, whether it is Sumner Redstone’s CBS or from merger of Comcast and NBC (which will include the Versus network), or Disney’s ESPN-ABC or Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp/FOX.

The expansion of the tournament to 96 teams talk coincides with an escape clause in the 11-year, $6 billion agreement between Redstone and the college basketball governing body. CBS will pay the NCAA more than two billion dollars over the final three years of the contract in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Money talks in college basketball where everyone seems to be making money but the game’s performers—-the players. CBS is doing rather well selling advertisements for this year’s March Madness matches, the big name coaches seem to be doing rather well financially and the successful coaches at midsize schools will be showing off their wares and possibly get a chance to move up to a school looking to turn around a mediocre or losing program and make a pile of cash from various sources including the school, the school’s cable TV partner, a sneaker company who outfits the coach with clothing attire, the school with uniforms and sneakers and from boosters along with marketing and advertising partners.

Coaches can break contracts and move on while the players….well the players could transfer to another school and have to sit out a season. The players get a scholarship but catch players at the right time away from the team environment that might tell you it is almost impossible to be a student and a player at the same time because of the commitment that the coach requires from that player because of practices, travel and the actual game.

Sure the players have tutors available but graduation rates among college basketball players as a whole are terrible and the NCAA can deride studies showing poor graduation rates but even the colleges know they are shortchanging the players. A player is a slave to the scholarship and the games come first.

College and university presidents and chancellors will look the other way when coaches commit violations in an effort to build a tournament team.

CBS will have the pom poms waiving and with the sports writing community extolling the virtue of some coach and the greatness of college sports. The people buying tickets in the arena will ignore the business aspect of college sports. Journalists become Sgt. Hans Schultz, the guard who watched over Stalag 13 in the old television show Hogan’s Heroes. Schultz reported to Colonel Klink and when asked about the prisoner’s activities, he would tell Klink, “I know nothing.”

The NCAA requires cities to bid for each round of the tournament and that means that the college body is getting big money guarantees from someone in those cities and the Final Four is now played in domed football stadiums with huge seating capacities and tickets are very expensive. The performers—the players—may be amateurs and not getting compensated but there is nothing amateur about the Men’s Basketball Tournament. There are coaches making millions, there are advertisers paying millions for marketing partnerships and big rollers buying club seats and luxury boxes.

This is the big leagues even though the performers who are the real stars of the show are not getting a check.

But all of the major league trappings are not enough for the NCAA. Getting bigger seems to be the formula needed to get more cash into the coffers.