How much of a NCAA March Madness basketball fan am I? Well, I took this week - the first week of the 68-team tournament - off from work so I can watch as much first and second round action as possible. Unbeknownst to most, I take off the Thursday and Friday of the first week of the tournament every year. So, I figure since the tournament expanded from 64 teams last year, my time off should expand also.
There is just something about seeing a team like Norfolk State or South Dakota State with just as much of a chance to win the national championship as North Carolina or Kentucky. Well, sort of, anyway.
Honestly, I'm not stuck in some pollyanish state of mind to think that the former teams REALLY have as much of a chance to win the NCAA title as the latter two. The way college athletics are shaped today is that the biggest, most ridiculously rich schools will nearly always get the nation's best athletes, win the most the games and appear on television the most. That means they will continue to get the most money and continue that unfair cycle. It's a neat and tidy professional monopoly that major college and major conference leaders want you to believe is just about a little game, but is instead about billions of dollars for their coffers.
But in college basketball, at least schools like Mississippi Valley State and Belmont College get an opportunity to win, albeit a small opportunity. And what makes this billion dollar industry, March Madness - which is even a trademarked slogan - so great and so well watched is that sometimes the little guys actually do win.
No so for college football. The Bowl Championship Series - which I call the BS Championship Series - is nothing but a small cartel of big schools and big conferences shutting out other schools who just happen to be so not as rich as the others are. The way that works is only a few schools in major college football have ANY chance of playing for the national championship and the millions of dollars that come with it. There is no playoff like there is in March Madness. Why? The NCAA itself runs the college basketball championship and lets nearly everybody have a chance to play in it. In college football, the large and rich schools run the Bowl Championship Series and keep a tight lid on who gets to play for the winning spoils. So unless Middle Tennessee State University or Marshall University somehow find millions to afford athletes, facilities and everything else it takes to make a smaller school competitive, they will be as close to playing the college football championship game as I am.
Either way, the system is completely unfair. But why should you, a non-sports fan who'd rather watch a Tyler Perry play or listen to some philharmonic do Bach, care?
Because colleges, which make billions of dollars each year from the ESPNs, EA Sports, Gatorades and Nikes of the world, are considered non-profit organizations. Yep, those same schools who raked in as much as an estimated $80 million each last year for college sports and pay coaches millions of dollars a year and build gazillion-dollar facilities have to pay little, if any, in taxes on that money because college athletics is supposed to support the charitable mission of education.
Now you see why Alabama doesn't want the University of Central Florida to see any part of the BCS Championship Series? They want to keep all that nearly tax free money to themselves. It makes rich schools richer and little schools little. All in the name of the charitable mission of athletics. RIGHT!
That completely unfair situation is hardly just about a little game, as those who make billions from those same games like to defensively say. This is about reigning in a completely unfair system that makes a mockery of the nation's laws for non-profit organizations. Major college athletics barely supports the educational system they are supposed to represent and is completely out of control. College athletics has become a professional entity that exploits athletes and is more concerned with television dollars and keeping those television dollars in the pockets of a few instead of promoting the ideals of amateurism, sportsmanship and education.
That has got to change. Congress has got to quit kow-towing to partisan interests and actually do something about this sham perpetuated by what is now the minor leagues for professional football and basketball.
If nothing else, give Long Island University-Brooklyn a chance to win a title. Well, at least college basketball gives them a sliver of a chance.
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