guncurug

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 great conference realignment that college athletics has been undergoing over the last five or six years, triggered first by the ACC raid on the Big East and most recently by the Big Ten's decision to expand to twelve, has led to some interesting geographic permutations.  A legacy of earlier conference shuffling left the WAC stretching from Hawai'i to that decidedly western state of Louisiana, home of Louisiana Tech.  Similarly, the Sun Belt includes those noted warm weather locales of Denver and Bowling Green, Kentucky (OK, Kentucky is a southern state but Denver?).

However, some of the latest conference memberships really stretch the idea of geography to its limits.  With TCU's move from the Mountain West (you've seen the mountains in Ft. Worth right) to the Big East, we're now supposed to believe that Texas is in the east.  However, no school more represents the absurdity of certain conference memberships, and how far removed we are from the days when conferences represented regional associations, than the relatively new Division I Great West Conference.

The Great West is basically a collection of schools around the country who recently upgraded their programs to Division I and consists of schools located in California, Texas, Utah, the Dakotas, Chicago and New Jersey.  It began life as a football conference and now has ten members, three of whom are football only members.  All of the schools have relatively small athletic department budgets which are strained by the travel costs associated with playing in a conference that is not only this spread-out but also includes several cities not regularly served by nonstop airline routes.  It's college athletics' version of the high school losers table, and until one of the cool kids takes pity on them, the member schools are stuck with each other, absurd travel costs and all.  Such is the price of admission to the pot of gold associated with March Madness.