March to Madness.

When it comes to sports, an absurd amount of money is floating around out there in search of glory. Media baron Rupert Murdoch was willing to spend $1 billion for the English soccer team Manchester United. He was thwarted and had to settle for the Los Angeles Dodgers, which cost him a couple of hundred million.

That's pro sports, where big boys are willing to shell it out to own what other Americans dream, sweat, and cry about: a Super Bowl, a World Series, or an NBA title.

Then there's college sports--men's basketball, more specifically--where the NCAA just penned a $6 billion, eleven-year deal with CBS for rights to televise its basketball tournament.

This is a march to madness.

Don't get me wrong. I love college basketball. I'm there, in front of the tube or in the stands, from the preseason to the championship game. Whether it's North Carolina or Northern Iowa, I'll watch because I love the game, the fans, even the pep band.

But the athletes are getting a raw deal. Last year's NCAA tournament winner, University of Connecticut, managed to graduate just 29 percent of its team members between 1994 and 1997.

If you think that's jarring, dig this: Ohio State, Syracuse, Temple, Texas, and Cincinnati--all tournament teams--did not graduate one black player in 1999. Being a black basketball player at the Division I level is as close to being a show horse as you can get. According to Emerge magazine, which posts the bottom fifty graduation rates of NCAA Division I basketball programs, thirty-eight schools did not graduate a black player in 1998. Virginia Commonwealth University has the dubious distinction of graduating 100 percent of its white players--and no blacks.

From 1995 to 1999, Ohio State graduated 100 percent of its female basketball players. From 1994 to 1997, the same school graduated 31 percent of its male basketball players, and none of them were black.

Then there is the University of Minnesota basketball team, which turned a blind eye to some of the most brazen academic fraud imaginable. A tutor for the athletic department says she wrote more than 400 papers for basketball players over the last five years.

Many NCAA teams don't care about educating their athletes. They just want them to perform.

In a piece published last March, the St. Petersburg Times reported that NCAA officials were "greatly distressed by the sport's dismal graduation rates." But what are they doing about it?

In the same story, coaches and athletic directors rated academic performance behind such concerns as preventing gambling, improving recruiting, establishing good terms with pro agents, and bagging endorsements from shoe companies.

You have to wonder where the loyalties of college coaches and athletic directors lie. They claim that if you lower admission standards, you have a wider net to cast when recruiting athletes, especially inner-city hoopsters. With a wider net, you hope to build a winning record. Build a winning record, you keep your job. If you push for tougher standards, the net shrinks. No academically marginal playground gods suiting up for the alma mater and dunking for dollars.

What a load of crap! Look at Duke, a perennial top team. Duke graduated 100 percent of its black athletes and 71 percent of its white ones over a six-year period in the 1990s. If Duke can do it, why can't other schools?

The NCAA has its priorities screwed up. In November, it suspended five players from Central Connecticut State University's men's basketball team--including the team captain--for the high crime of using some of their scholarship money to help nonscholarship teammates buy school books.

Not drugs. Not cars. Not stolen stereos. School books.

Yes, we all have rules to live and abide by, but this is just the sort of overreaction that gets people to wondering what's wrong with college basketball.

And what's wrong with it is simple: A plantation mentality governs the game.

To get at this problem, there is talk of paying players a sum of money upon finishing their eligibility. It's a plan I'm ambivalent about, primarily because Division I basketball would then become a de facto minor league. Still, for schools that are making a fortune off the talents of these kids, a few thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket. And if the schools were truly interested in educating their athletes, they could tie the pay to graduation.

Like millions of fans, I'm more than willing to drink beer and eat bowls of nachos as I watch college ball. It's great entertainment. Maybe it's time to pay the entertainers--and not just the schools that exploit them.

Fred McKissack is a writer based in Milwaukee.