Connecticut beats Butler, 53-41. Not a very pretty game, with underdog Butler shooting 19% from the floor. Ouch.

And, because I like nothing more than to spoil everyone’s fun, have a look at Frontline’s recent story, Money and March Madness, a fairly eye-opening look at the billion-dollar industry that is March Madness, and how the people at the center of it all—the players—don’t get shit (and also graduate from college in ridiculously low numbers). Sometimes their families can’t even come watch them play in the Final Four because they can’t afford it.

Anyway.. Sports!

Anthony Hecht is The Stranger's Chief Technology Officer. He owns no monkeys.

16 replies on “U-Conn Wins National Championship”

  2. Well, there’s one. I’m predicting record low ratings for the Women’s game tomorrow.

    It’ll still probably be better than the crapfest tonight was.

  8. The NCAA, I’m pretty sure, subsidizes lots of programs and tournaments for the non-revenue generating sports. And the athletes don’t get paid, they just get a free education, sometimes at awesome schools. Yeah, they get taken advantage of. Big time.

  9. I’m thinking that ‘the players don’t get shit’ is a dubious claim; remember SMU football? Probably not across the table, but someone’s paying for all those tattoos on these guys.

  11. That Frontline episode reveals how ex-UW president, Mark Emmert, got his job as president of the NCAA: He comes across as an incredulous dick.

    Fuck the Huskies. All of them.

  12. @9 – Is that you Mark Emmert, former UW President now NCAA president, always a douche? That Frontline pretty much kills the “subsidizes” everybody else argument. March Madness subsidizes the salaries of Emmert and his staff.

    (The other two segments about Ai WeiWei and Bradley Manning were fantastic too.)

  13. @9: A small number of players go on to play professionally and do well. Another small group takes advantage of the educational opportunity offered and gets a degree. The rest? Their unrealistic dreams of riches and glory fade quickly, they never come close to graduating and they’re back home with no future while NCAA execs (as well as college presidents, coaches and athletic directors) are living large.

  14. @13, @14, you’re doing my work for me. Douchus has always been big-time college sports’ biggest apologist here. The NCAA is a wholly corrupt enterprise and should be abolished. The fact that its president ran the UW during it’s “ethical” phase, moving away from the horrors of the Neuheisel-Hedges era, speaks ill of an institution that has always had a little trouble figuring out why it exists. No, the answer to that question is not “football”.

    Scholarship athletes very rarely get real educations. They exist under a separate-but-equal system where they pretend to be students in exchange for the chimera of pro salaries that rarely come. They will, in actuality, leave the school with no education at all, unchecked cases of entitlement and anger-management problems, and the inability to climb a set of stairs. If they play football, they will have damaged brains as well. Emmert & Co. live like Renaissance princes in the meantime. We KNOW this but do nothing about it. What does that make us?

    This system is completely broken.

  15. I remember the occasional class with star athletes during my undergrad days at UW. I was plainly amazed at how much class they were excused from and how much work they seemed to be excused from during their season. Someone explain to me how those kids get a quality education when their sports demands require them to miss half of their class time and class work at least one quarter out of every academic year (and they still pass, of course)? It doesn’t add up, and it’s ridiculously unfair to them. I love college athletics, but there has to be a better way.

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