Kentucky Gets Good Return on Highest Recruiting Budget

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.

New March Madness Scores Big Hit

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.

Last year, the NCAA opted out of the last three seasons of its landmark 11-year, $6 billion deal with CBS and wound up with a new 14-year, $10.8 billion deal with CBS and Turner.  The new deal resulted in games being broadcast on four networks: CBS and three Turner cable networks, TBS, TBT and TruTV.  To provide additional product for the new agreement, the NCAA expanded the tournament to 68, with four first round games in Dayton, ahead of the round of 64.  Two of those games involve the last four at-large bids with the other two involving the lowest seeded teams in the field, helping to somewhat remove the stigma of the First Four, as the games are now called.

There was some initial concern over the reception of the cablecasts but such concern proved to be unfounded.  Fans of the tournament are thrilled that all games are available on TV for the first time and ratings for the first weekend across all networks are up between 14% over last year.

With so many upsets and double-digit seeds making it into the Sweet Sixteen, expect television ratings to continue to exceed expectations.  I don't know about your bracket, but mine got blown up fairly early on.  I should have gone to NCAA Basketball Predictions at BetUS and maybe I would still be alive in at least one of the pools I entered.  Of course, I don't think even experts would have helped in the case of the Southwest Region's three double-digit seeds (Richmond, Florida State and VCU) making it past the weekend.  In any event, good luck with your picks this weekend.  For what it's worth, I like Butler and VCU's chances in their next games and I look for Marquette to give UNC all it can handle with potentially an upset there too.

March Money Madness

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:

Iran Sees Jews Under London Olympics Logo

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. 

However, for all the vitriol expended toward the design, it took the lunatics running the asylum that is the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to find Jews running around under the logo.  The secretary-general of the Iranian Olympic Committee sent a letter to the IOC threatening to boycott the London Games as the logo resembles the word "Zion", condemns the logo as racist and calls on all Muslims to join the protest.

"There is no doubt that negligence of the issue from your side may affect the presence of some countries in the games, especially Iran which abides by commitment to the values and principles," the letter said.  That is rather rich coming from a country that for three decades refused to compete against any athletes from Israel.

If you look at the logo from the left bottom and sort of counter-clockwise, you might make out "Izzo" which could make some Big Ten fans unhappy, but getting to "Zion" is a real stretch.

The IOC, predictably, dismissed the complaint:  "Our response is as follows: The London 2012 logo represents the figure 2012, nothing else."