guncurug

Well, at least you can say Calipari gets a decent return on his money.  Kentucky coach John Calipari has brought a team from a third school to the Final Four, joining former Kentucky and current Louisville coach Rick Pitino as the only men to coach three different schools to the Final Four.  Pitino's Final Fours are still recognized by the NCAA, however, which, of course, Calipari's first two, Massachusetts and Memphis, are not.

What did I mean by a decent return on his money?  It turns out that the UK recruiting budget is the highest in the country, at least among public schools in the Big Six BCS conferences.  His budget edged Kansas $434,095 to $419,228, but the gulf between UK and fellow Final Four member UConn is wide.  Jim Calhoun struggles by on a mere $175,740, the 18th largest in the country and the 3rd largest in the Big East.  As a private school, Butler doesn't have to release information.  VCU, a member of the Colonial Athletic Association, wasn't included in the study but it's safe to assume that its budget is significantly smaller than either UK or UConn.

The NCAA basketball tournament has been a cultural and financial success for years, funding up to 96% of the NCAA's budget for the last few years and generating huge television ratings.  However, there has always been several elements of controversy that have followed the tournament.  The selection of teams has left some schools feeling cheated as they were not invited and left the two schools playing the first game in Dayton feeling a bit like stepchildren having to play a qualifying game.

There are as many ways to fill out March Madness brackets as there are people filling them out.  In fact, according to the Houston Chronicle, there are 147.5 quintillion ways to fill one out. And that's just the office pool variety.

The NCAA bracket lends itself to all sorts of quick analysis or examples of different ways of looking at college athletics or colleges in general.  There are the academic performance brackets (Butler if you're scoring at home) and graduation rates (seven schools with 100% - the highest seed being Notre Dame and Arizona at the bottom with 20%), but the most novel one I found this year revolves around money.  It's not the money that each program makes, although that is an interesting one as well (see, Forbes study of 2009 basketball revenue - Duke, Louisville and North Carolina on top), it's one that is based on the median salary of each school's graduates.

In this bracket, not surprisingly Princeton beat Kentucky.  Actually, the bracket only begins with the Sweet Sixteen but since Princeton is in it, we can assume that win.  It's a fun look and a Final Four of Princeton, Duke, UCLA and Georgetown is not all that surprising,  Neither is Princeton's ultimate victory.  Here's the bracket:

The logo for the London 2012 Olympics has been criticized repeatedly since its release in June, 2007, but always because of its design.  It has been called everything from "bloody crap" to worse and most reaction seemed to lean charitably towards saying that it was a reminder of the 80s, not that this was necessarily a good thing mind you.