SELECTION SUNDAY

Each year, there is no sporting event that delivers upon its promise more than the NCAA Basketball Tournament. For anyone who loves basketball, they are treated to a kaleidoscope of offensive and defensive styles, spectactular individual performances, and exceptional displays of teams performing as far more than the sum of their individual parts.


Yet, there is simply not a more cynical, more venal and more corrupt sporting enterprise than big-time college basketball (with the possible exception of big-time college football). Our insitutions of higher learning in effect rent out disposable, itinerant hoopsters at bargain prices, reaping millions in TV revenues in the process. For the gifted few who go on the play professional basketball, it is fair deal - they receive training and exposure that will present them with a deferred, but generous pay-day. For the rest, however, those whose dreams of NBA stardom (or even journeydom) are illusory and delusional, they receive little of any value. Their scholarships are rendered meaningless by a system that places little to no emphasis on actually providing them with an actual college education. Yet, despite the ever-growing number of wrecked lives and cheated promises by the system, the monitors of the systems focus rather on the whether any of the largesse has somehow slipped down to these so-called student-athletes. And thus, Villanova players' illicit use of university long-distance codes is a scandal - and yet Oklahoma's failure to graduate a single player in the past four years does not prevent them from being labled a "clean" program.


The simple fact is that I, and the other lovers of March Madness, are complicit. It is our viewing that permits the TV revenues that drive the whole system. Therefore, I have come to the following compromise between my love of college basketball as a game, and my loathing of college basketball as a system. I will boycott any game in the tournament that does not include at least one team that has graduated at least 50% of its players over the past four years. This of course eliminates at least 2/3 of the teams that will be playing in this year's tournament. Of the top teams, only Kansas, Duke, Stanford, Notre Dame and Marquette meet this modest goal. It is most likely that I will be forced to miss a stirring finals matchup between Kentucky & Arizona, or Pittsburgh & Texas final. If so, so be it - at least I'll be able to look myself in the mirror.