First some obligatory hockey content...
 
DIRECTV IS GREAT!!!
 
I got to watch all or significant parts of 7 out of the 8 games this weekend. And so many chew-off-my-nails, sit-on-the-edge-of-my-seat cliff hangers! (Well, except for the ECAC teams -- as an RPI fan, that was pretty depressing.) Can't wait for Thursday.
 
Now for the stuff in the subject line...this morning's Wall Street Journal has an article on their opinion page about the NC$$. Although not specifically about college hockey, I thought there was enough interest / opinion here in matters concerning the NC$$ that it would be worth passing along, so here it is...
 
'Amateur' Athletes Are Worth Millions--to NCAA
 
By Allen Barra, a sports columnist for the Journal's Weekend section and a contributing writer for ESPN magazine.
 
Among its other functions and duties, the National Collegiate Athletic Association represents more than 900 American colleges and universities in marketing matters and does so with breathtaking success. In the past quarter-century, college sports revenues have increased by an estimated 8,000%. As an NCAA business associate, Jim Host of Host Communications, wrote in the association's newsletter: "We've got more assets to sell corporate America than any professional league or professional team will ever have."
 
The biggest of those assets is the NCAA's Men's Basketball Tournament, which concludes tonight. This 64-team tournament produces the bulk of the NCAA's estimated $270 million a year income. That's not the figure for revenues generated by NCAA members, which was calculated last year at nearly $3 billion. That's $270 million in profit for the NCAA executive office alone. Welcome to the wonderful world of American amateur athletics. 
 
The Men's Basketball Tournament is a playoff that includes more teams than the pro football, basketball and baseball postseasons combined. And that's merely the biggest bauble the NCAA dangles in front of prospective buyers. The NCAA offers a vast menu of all major and minor sports year-round in all parts of the country, and they all come with huge, built-in audiences. And unlike pro sports, the NCAA has no labor problems. Without having to answer to unions or agents or courts or even to the Internal Revenue Service, the NCAA has absolute control over millions of college athletes, who are told when they must show up for work and what they can and can't do when they are training or playing.
 
The NCAA is the linchpin of American sports, positioned directly between the millions of high school kids who are fighting for a crack at an NCAA scholarship and the hundreds of thousands of college athletes trying for pro contracts. America's high school athletic programs are miniature versions of their collegiate big brothers, with the overwhelming amount of money and attention going to football and basketball programs geared to the preparation of college-level players. The National Football League and National Basketball Association, in turn, use the colleges as a cost-free minor league where the cream of nearly two million college athletes vie for the 2,000 or so NFL and NBA player contracts. There are many reasons for the boom in NFL and NBA prosperity over the last couple of decades, but a big one, the dirty secret everyone agrees not to discuss, is that pro football and basketball don't pay for the development of their players. 
 
Who does pay? That's the second dirty secret. Chances are you do, assuming you've contributed to a university with a major sports program or paid taxes in a state that supports colleges with major athletic programs. By one estimate, 80% to 90% of American college sports programs lose money, which means that in most cases the football team isn't, as we've been told, paying for the new library wing; the new library wing is delayed because of the new football stadium or training facility.
 
In theory, the NCAA represents America's colleges and universities, trying to keep college athletics in harmony with its members' stated educational objectives. In reality, the NCAA, in the words of federal Judge Juan Burciaga, who presided over a 1981 antitrust lawsuit, is a "classic cartel." More precisely, says NCAA critic Murray Sperber, "the NCAA functions mainly as a trade association for college coaches and athletic directors, implementing their wishes regardless of whether these are in the best interests of the member schools."
 
The organization that would become the NCAA was formed in 1906 as a response to the increasing brutality of college football. Theodore Roosevelt summoned officials from the nation's leading football factories--Harvard, Yale and Princeton--to the White House to urge them to lead the way in creating a more humane style of play. Led by the big three, the nation's colleges joined together in creating rules that stressed finesse rather than brute strength.
 
The modern-day NCAA has its origin in the years immediately after World War II, when concern grew over the infiltration of college sports by gamblers. Fearing the loss of credibility with ticket buyers, the colleges gave the NCAA the power to investigate cheating and to deal with the threat, much as baseball owners gave power to the commissioner's office of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis after the 1919 Black Sox scandal. But the NCAA has never been successful in keeping gamblers out of its sports; as recently as last year, the NCAA's own study revealed that more than a quarter of all Division I basketball and football players had bet on games they played in.
 
The NCAA's real purpose has never been to stop gambling but to manage and make money. In his book, "Unsportsmanlike Conduct," the NCAA's first executive director, Walter Byers, admits to inventing the term "student-athlete" when an injured football player sued his college for workman's comp. Stop calling them "players," Mr. Byers commanded college sports publicists in a widely circulated memo; the term "student-athletes" emphasized their status as "amateurs."
 
And so, for nearly half a century, the NCAA has exercised a vise-like grip on America's college sports and on millions of "student-athletes" who are professionals in all ways but one: They don't get paid. So far, the only form of rebellion college athletes have shown is defection: Blue-chip football and basketball players are skipping years of eligibility, in some cases skipping college altogether, to go straight to the pros. The result has been a dilution of the college game and lower ratings for the NCAA basketball tournament, not to mention a decline in the quality of the pro game as NBA rosters are increasingly filled with unprepared youngsters.
 
The game declines, but the world's largest sports corporation, the last bastion of amateur sports, is booming.
 
HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey;  send information to
[log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.