NCAA Tournament??

 If colleges and universities held professors and teachers to the same standards as they do for head coaches, your kids might actually learn something while in school. Evidently coaching contracts don't have the same legal longevity as "tenure". Can anyone even name a professor who has been fired?

UNC has fired their basketball coach, Hubert Davis, because they couldn't win in the NCAA tournament with the consistency that the fans/alumni demand. If you guessed that none of the players are jobless, you are correct. 

Why aren't teachers/professors held to the same performance standards as athletic coaches? If your kid can't score, he's off the team. If he can't read, he's on the Dean's List. If the athletes can't perform and win, the coach loses his job. If your kid can't read, nobody at school knows or cares. How many professors get sacked when your kid can't make change for a dollar? Call me if any of this makes sense.

On a personal basis, I have hired and worked with a lot of college students over the last 50 years or so. Put me down as decidedly unimpressed with the accomplishments of higher education. I have had employees who were college grads and didn't know why we celebrate July 4. Don't even get me started on the MBA's! Which Dollar Tree has the most "Gender Studies" majors working for them? By now, even the slow among you get my point.

Just a reminder, normally, you get what you pay for, and public education is ostensibly free. Of course, private colleges and universities are cranking out losers who don't know anything either. So, let's strike cost as a factor. Maybe, the schools and those running them are more into indoctrinating students than educating them. There's not a lot of calculus or American History being taught to people out protesting the arrests of criminals. 

The NCAA tournament starts with 64 teams. and ends with one team winning it all. Aside from the mathematics of the situation, which is that 63 teams are losers, the odds of the situation should teach us that you better have a Plan B in your life. But few "student-athletes" do.

The Final Four is like the World Series, the Super Bowl and the college football championship game. They are always described as the "ultimate game" and yet they are always played again a year later. They are all the same. A bunch of millionaires get together and do something with a ball. It's all going to happen again next year. Why should I even give a shit?

College basketball, baseball and football are just taxpayer funded minor league systems for professional sports. Is this really the best use of our tax money? How will the worship of sports help the United States endure for the ages?

The biggest beneficiary of college sports appears to be the sports gambling industry. It's grown so much that you can now bet on what the next play or score will be. When I worked for Casa Gallardo back in the early 1980's, we had a general manager in Tampa who would watch baseball games in the bar and bet with people on what the next pitch would be. Who knew then that he was setting a model for future sports betting?

This weekend in college basketball starts with the "Sweet Sixteen". That's the survivors of last week's games. Half of the teams will win and survive to briefly be the "Elite Eight." By late Sunday they will be down to the "Final Four". Next weekend will mercifully be the "Final Four." I don't want to tell the NCAA anything but, there's no alliteration in "Elite Eight". Pack it in on that name.  

Since it is "college sports" and all of the participants are "student athletes", let's get the NCAA to stop awarding the trophies until at least all of the starters on the winning teams have graduated. That would enable the NCAA to operate a museum that would probably have at least 99% of the trophies for fans to see all in one location. 

As the legendary broadcaster Charlie Harvill used to say, "That's the best in sports today!"