NCAA tourney, and other NCAA items

* The Sports Economist is a great blog – here a great post on why the average scoring margins between high seeds and low seeds in March Madness is shrinking… * …and here a great post on betting on the tournament and the unavoidable problems it leads to, in part because we refuse to compensate the players. * Of course the NCAA has its head in the sand when it comes to player compensation – here claiming that we couldn’t possibly pay the players because athletic departments are losing money. OK the $6.2 Billion that CBS is paying to televise NCAA basketball is going in someone’s pocket – it is, at best, stupid to claim that the schools don’t have the money to pay the players. Maybe Myles Brand could give up some of his $738K in salary (2003) to help pay a few players * And another older but great post from the Sports Economist talks about applying multipart tariffs to ticket prices – I’m suprised these ideas haven’t been pushed further both at the high end of ticket prices and at the low end – maybe if the schools managed their yields better, they could afford to pay the players a little.