NCAA '09: No Cinderellas but Plenty of Fairy Tales

The Big Dance this year was marked by all kinds of wackiness, from an absence of perfect brackets to strained relations in the Obama family

By Rick Horrow and Karla Swatek

1. NCAA 2009: Gentlemen, Cover Your Privates!

While there are no real Cinderellas left in the 2009 NCAA men's basketball tournament—you can't really count an Arizona team formed under the tutelage of Lute Olsen—there are plenty of fairy tales and wacky stories. Here are a few of our favorites that have emerged in the past week:

• After the first weekend, not a single perfect bracket still exists among the 5 million entries submitted to ESPN.com's annual bracket challenge; the four people tied for the lead each have two losses.

• Nor will Dell Sports have to pay out the $100 million it offered for a perfect bracket: The four brackets still in contention Saturday hit the hardwood on Sunday.

• The dozen MGM Mirage (MGM) properties in Las Vegas, usually booked to the rafters, still had rooms available the Wednesday before the tourney tip off. The casinos reportedly took a bath when Gonzaga beat Western Kentucky by two.

• Domestic relations in the White House have apparently chilled after President Obama failed to place Duke, alma mater of his personal assistant Reggie Love, among his Final Four picks. (Obama's Final Four comprises the University of North Carolina, Louisville, Memphis, and Pitt.) The Secret Service is mum on all side-bet rumors.

• Much like the NFL before Super Bowl Sunday, the NCAA is mailing off a raft of cease-and-desist letters to violators who use its "March Madness" and "Final Four" trademarks without permission. Among the wrongdoers: NASA, which has been asked to stop advertising its "Mission Madness" promotion, asking fans to vote on its greatest-ever space mission, and an adult Web site running a bracket game featuring porn stars and naughty puns.

• March Madness followers are apparently dirty in a different way—Scarborough Sports Marketing reports that the most popular personal activity among college basketball fans is gardening. Over 48% said they'd gardened in the last year.

• Porn stars aside, it's no coincidence that the Cleveland Clinic Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute is busier at this time of the year that any other. Dr. J. Stephen Jones confirms that his surgery schedule for vasectomies is booked up for March. If men are going to be laid up on the couch for a day, the scalpel-wielding doctor declares, "It might as well be on a day when they would be watching basketball as opposed to 'Oprah.'"

2. March Madness: Graduate School

Varied efforts have been made over the years to tie NCAA tournament seedings to school's academic records, citing the horrible graduation rates most schools post as a factor in the argument. The NCAA itself reaps $6 billion from the tournament from its current TV deal alone—the breakdown for 2008 included $548 million for a portion of those rights and an additional $40 million from sponsorships and ticket sales—and the tournament represents 96% of all NCAA revenue. Except for the very top-tier programs, the schools, however, lose out. According to The Wall Street Journal, a median Division I men's basketball team generates $480,000 in revenue, has operating expenses of $1.33 million, and thus yields an annual operating loss of $850,000.

Many students lose out even more. Largely thanks to the NBA age limits, basketball's "one and done" situation has resulted in dismal graduation rates: 37% at USC, slightly more than half at Duke.

But in 2009 we do appear to have taken a baby step toward progress. Based on a recent NCAA graduation success rate survey, fully seven tournament teams this year announced 100% graduation rates: Binghamton, Florida State, Marquette, Robert Morris, Utah State, Wake Forest, and Western Kentucky. What do these kids major in? The Journal unearthed the majors of 636 players, and unsurprisingly, business majors commanded the majority, with 145 student athletes thusly declared. 112 are undecided, 64 each major in communications and sports management. Criminal justice drew a dozen; agricultural leadership, a quartet.