Fill Out the Bracket...If You Are Able

The NCAA Tournament is ready to begin, and boosters, coaches, players and fans are all agog over the fact that their team a) got in b) got in but got screwed on their seed c) din't get in and has to play in the NIT or WNIT or d) sucked.
It is, of course, all about money: money for conferences, money for extravagant locker room facilities, bonus money for coaches and money for the university in terms of booster ducats.
"Amateur" athletics, it isn't, with the possible exception of the players. They get shafted twice--one by not getting money and two by not getting educated. Consider this fact: only one school among the top seeds in the men's tournament this year graduated 50% of its eligible players over a six-year period ending in 2001, according to a study just released by Rich Lapchick of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. The University of North Carolina graduated 86% of its eligible men's basketball players over those six years, while the University of Kansas graduated 45% and UCLA and Memphis graduated a paltry 40% of all men's players during that six-year period. To be fair, players who transfer or who go to the NBA are counted against the schools they left so the numbers might be deceiving. In addition, we don't know what the graduation rates are for the regular students. I would think this might make a fair comparison. What we do know, though, is that black players still lag far behind white players in achieving that diploma.
Thirty-three of the schools in this year's tournament graduated at least 70% of their white players over the period in question, while only 19 schools managed the same percentage for black athletes. While the improvements in black graduation rates among athletes has gone up 14% since 1984, still there are only 36 schools among the 65-team field who have graduated at least 50% of their black basketball players. A total of 45 schools graduated at least that many of their white players.
It's also interesting to look at the #2 seeds from this year's tournament. For the same period, the University of Texas and the University of Tennessee graduated a mere 33% of their eligible players. Georgetown and Duke, the other #2 seeds, did better, averaging 82% and 67% respectively. So I'm picking the smart schools this year in my bracket:
Western Kentucky graduated 100% of its men's basketball players during the six years studied. Butler University graduated 92% while both Notre Dame and Purdue graduated 91%. What does this all mean? Send your kid to Indiana for school: three of the top four are Indiana schools.
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay did not make the tournament field again this year but continues to graduate men's basketball players at a 100% rate. It must be the tutors.