It is a sad reality that many colleges do not treat their athletes as students, but rather as semi-professionals, for four years before dropping them into the real world without a meaningful degree or workforce-ready skills. Particularly at Division I basketball and football schools, colleges use their athletes to win championships and gain national prominence but too often leave them woefully unprepared for life away from the gridiron and hoops.

With all of the talk about the commercialization of college sports, there is a common assumption that university athletics programs pay for themselves. A new report from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reveals, however, that most Division I schools are actually footing a significant part of the bill for their sports teams. The report also shows the amount colleges are spending on athletics has been rising rapidly, raising questions for students, faculty members, and taxpayers about colleges' priorities (hint, hint: we're talking about extravagant athletics facilities and sky-rocketing coaching salaries here).

Thw world of college sports is being rocked by Sen. Hillary Clinton's challenge to the NCAA Board of Directors regarding the Kansas' win over Memphis on Monday.

Breaking details after the fold:  

(Cross-posted at MyDD.)

Just in over the wire...

Calipari suggests new rule be applied retroactively, giving Memphis win

(Sportswire, San Antonio)   John Calipari, head coach of the Memphis men's basketball team which lost the NCCA title game last night to Kansas, has called for a change in rules on three point shots to allow one foot of a shooter to be on or inside the three-point line at the time of the shot.

As everybody already knows Obama has failed the commander-in-chief test.   On the other hand John McCain & Hillary Clinton have passed that test with flying colors.   Voters agree.

Also, Obama cannot pass the steward-of-the-economy test, nor the Keystone Test.  But Mr. Obama ignores all of the these important tests and continues on with his doomed candidacy.

More news is coming out today that Mr. Obama has failed another key test that all candidates must pass .

Last week, we published our annual "Academic Sweet Sixteen" bracket, which ranks the teams in the NCAA tournament based on their basketball team graduation rates. While it's important to consider how many players leave school with degrees in their hands, there's a significant flaw in the comparison. We have no way to determine whether players who graduated actually learned anything or obtained the skills necessary to enter the workforce.

Just hours after finishing regulation with an 88-78 lead over Western Kentucky, UCLA fans were shocked to learn that NCAA tournament officials had selected the Hilltoppers instead of the Bruins to face the Xavier Musketeers in an Elite 8 match up on Saturday.

A disgusted UCLA Coach Ben Howland refused to speak with reporters, but sources close to the team say that he found the convoluted logic with which Western Kentucky came from behind AFTER the game to defeat his team "an absolute disgrace."

What was that convoluted logic, you might ask?

Amid the flashy, commercialized spectacle of March Madness, it's time to bring some sanity to the national debate about which team deserves to be crowned the NCAA champion. Here is a different take on how to calculate basketball team success. It's not about RPI, or victory margin, or strength of schedule. We're interested in how the Sweet Sixteen basketball teams are performing in the classroom.

On the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blog, Nick Timiraos reports that Barack Obama has released his NCAA tournament bracket:

While the media digests thousands of pages of schedules from Hillary Clinton’s time as first lady, Barack Obama made public a politically sensitive document of his own on Thursday: his NCAA tournament bracket.

And it appears the Illinois senator and presidential hopeful kept political calculations in mind when picking his teams. In the final round, Obama has UNC Chapel Hill knocking out UCLA. He also chose Pittsburgh for his final four. North Carolina and Pennsylvania voters both head to the polls in the next two months.

Call it a PR stunt, but I say Obama's decision to release the bracket is a great campaign tactic. It gives him a repport with voters that his opponent certainly lacks.

For the rest of his bracket, click here.

I hope, gosh I hope I am not the only person reading stuff online and following a little college basketball. It is an off year for me. My LSU Tigers .... well the men didn't have much game this year. Now the Lady Tigers, that is another story. So lets talk a little basketball.

From First Read comes an account of Barack Obama connecting with "beer drinking" voters in West Virginia. This a place that will be tough for him to break through in, but he may have found a way:

Per NBC/NJ’s Aswini Anburajan, Obama often has been billed as the wine-drinking candidate, who’s unable to attract the working-class, beer-track voters that are the staple of the Democratic Party. It's no exaggeration to say that in a sports bar in Beckley, West Virginia yesterday Obama found the answer to winning over those regular Joes. Plopping down at a table with a group of men, he sat, talked, ate two chicken wings, and dissected the NCAA tournament. Why didn't Mississippi State make his final four pick? "They don't have good free throws," he explained. "Pittsburgh is hot," he declared, insisting that it had nothing to do with politics. He told the assembled crowd that he watched ESPN’s Sports Center to unwind. By the end of the visit, the bar patrons -- who had appeared more interested in the games playing on the multiple TV screens when he walked in -- applauded when he walked out.

I think we need a distraction from the political March Madness that has gripped Daily Kos. So, as this site's self proclaimed college basketball expert, I figured I'd open up the discussion by using my picks for the up coming 1st round games.

It's March, and for any basketball fan, this means three glorious weeks of watching the premier teams in the nation battle it out in a single-elimination, high-stakes, high-pressure tournament. March also means big-time money for the NCAA, which cashed in on the popularity of March Madness by giving CBS the rights to broadcast the tournament for $6 billion over 11 years.

One team you aren't going to hear anything about during the tournament is Alcorn State, a small, historically black college that finished the season 7-24, at the bottom of the Southwestern Conference (SWAC). There is a growing college sports spending gap between schools like Alcorn State that are struggling to sustain athletics programs and elite sports schools that are rolling in millions of dollars of revenue.

It been a great long while since I've done one of these sports diaries, but I thought it might be a nice break for those sick of the candidate ones & it was "Selection Sunday" for NCAA basketball.

Indicative of the volatile nature of college basketball, the teams that played for the national title last season — Florida and Ohio State — were not included in this year’s field of 65. Among the 34 at-large teams selected, only 6 came from outside college basketball’s power conferences for the second consecutive season.

Also, I thought I would ponder the most controversial/memorable moments in sports. But just like with my "TIC" diaries, where practically anything entertainment/gossip related can be discussed, the same goes for sports. Just because I'm too lazy to bring it up, doesn't mean you can't talk about it.....

It's off topic, yes, but we all need a distraction from the primary race and candidate diaries.

Some shocking results today, including Georgia winning the SEC.

Discuss the brackets here.

#1 Overall Seed (East): North Carolina.
(South): Memphis
(West): UCLA
(Midwest): Kansas

Brackets are being unveiled on CBS right now.

Hey everyone, We have set up a Yahoo Bracket called "Daily Kos Tourney Bracket"Group ID# 69123  Please use your Blog Names so we know who is winning.  I'm inviting MyDD to join in too!  I still like some folks over there.

To Join in you will need to set up a Yahoo sports account.  It takes all of 20 seconds to do, and the link to do so is on the Bracket page by 'Log in.'  Yahoo is also offering some form of money prize, if you choose to get junk mail in your inbox.

We have no means by which to gamble for anything other than recs... so, how about when all is said and done we have a thread where 1st place gets three tip-jars, second, two tip-jars, and third gets a tip-jar - form everyone who joins in.  Not to mention eternal fame on Kos.  Unless somebody has a better idea.

News is circulating about the growing wealth gap between a few elite, well-endowed colleges and the rest of higher education. A Congressional investigation into endowment growth and hoarding, the fears of budget cuts at state universities as the economy declines, and the new, expensive financial aid plans at many elite schools have added fuel to the story and brought focus to a worrisome picture that has been developing for some time.

The widening wealth gap is also a stark reality in the world of college sports.

This originally started out as a diary about sports, but while writing it something struck me about the similarity of human behavior when it comes to fans of sports & politics. In psychology & philosophy, there's the concept of the "other", when dealing with how humans define themselves & their existence.

"What appear to be cultural units — human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations — are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or 'other' through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is 'privileged' or favored, and the other is devalued in some way."

With this in mind, Sports Illustrated has a story detailing the behavior of some fans of College Basketball who've taken support of their alma mater a bit too far. "You suck!" and "My team is better than yours!" Somehow, it all seems too familiar.....