King, I agree completely with your big lie principle, but I think you made an unintentional lie in your article. The NCAA did not make that completely ridiculous ad with the girl scoring a goal morphing into raising her hand in class, it was an ad for Enterprise Rent-a-Car.

As it stands, I'm just about over college sports entirely. The Final Four is the second most ridiculously over-hyped, overblown, overrated sporting event, trailing only the Masters.

So where is Salon's regular column on wicked smart English and chem majors?

Sorry, King: The first ad you described, the one in which the goal-scoring soccer player morphs into a hand-raising student, is an ad for Enterprise Rent-a-Car, not the NCAA. They've shown it enough times, it's burned in my memory.

How about a column on what a waste of TV pixels Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis are?

You can go to college, or you can play big-time college sport with a shot at going pro. You can do both, but NOT AT THE SAME TIME.

All athletic scholarships would be paid off on a "come back after you retire from the pros and are ready to be a serious student" basis. Then you take the real courses and you perform -- or not. Yes, it's a full-ride scholarship but you only keep it by keeping your GPA up. You know, like a scholarship. This is part of your compensation package you get from the college for having played on their minor-league sport team. In addition to the modest salary you lived on then. (Somebody pick Miles Brand up off the floor, I think he fainted, the poor dear.)

That's pretty much all it would take to end the mockery.

See _The_Hundred_Yard_Lie_. The only book anyone needs to read about college sports.

I refuse to donate money to my alma mater because I believe they spend too much money on the sports teams there, to the detriment of academic programs. I have told them so in a lengthy letter that highlighted the cuts in educational programs and staffing that have been made since I graduated, along with the massive spending for scholarships and construction projects for sports arenas over the same time period.

I received a reply that basically said "we need good sports teams to make the big donors happy" to which I responded that if they have so many happy big donors then they don't little ol' me and my chump change.

I have received no further solicitations.

all us sports fans are just overjoyed that the 2 games featuring teams from our state are both going to run at basically the same time. Thank's CBS (you jerks).

About the common theory about the sub-par free throw teams being suspect to advance or win a big game for that reason. Announcers single out teams for this throughout the regular season as a chink in their tourney armor.

All teams have some stat that isn't that impressive. If that surfaces in a game combined with not doing well in a couple other stats that they are normally good in, then they are in trouble.

Even in a game that a team loses 75-70 in which they went 10-22 from the line it's faulty logic to just chalk the loss up to bad free throw shooting. The winning team could single out some team stat that they could have done better in too.

If you're talking about the one game situation where you have to make a couple one-plus-ones in the last 20 seconds to keep a lead, in that small a pool of reference, the 75 percent team and the 63 percent team are not very different. It's almost a crap shoot on what either would do.

They put up a chart in some game of the national champions for the last 10 years and their team FT percentage and most of them were not highly ranked free throw shooting teams. Some very low.

One of Pitino's monster teams at Kentucky beat Crum and Louisville by 20. They were up 30 and called off the dogs. For the game Louisville was something like 20 for 40 for the line, and in the post-game show Crum kept using the free throw shooting excuse, and the Louisville fans repeated it for days.....Yeah right Denny, as long as Pitino takes out his stars with 10 minutes left, and if your team had gone 40-40 from the line then it would have been tied.....And of course no one mentions that UK missed 12 free throws in the game too.

College (at the Bachelor’s level) has changed from a place to learn to a place to gain the prerequisites to get a decent job. College athletes in big time sports are there to showcase their skills for scouts in the hopes of going “pro”. So the atheletes are just using college in the role that it now plays.

The point of the commercials - that the vast majority of NCAA student-athletes don't go pro in sports - is undoubtedly true. To most athletes, sports are actually an extracurricular activity. Not too many players on the swimming, track, or tennis teams are expecting to go pro and make their living playing sports. Those players are actually student-athletes - they use their scholarship to get a degree that they'll use in the real world. Plus, they're expected to put in all the work to be an athlete and a student. It's not an easy job.

And, that's why the NCAA can't pay its players in the big revenue sports. It uses the revenue from the big revenue sports, like football and basketball, to support other sports that lose money. The licensing fee for CBS, the ads in the stadiums, the rising ticket prices, the merchandise sales, etc., all go to the athletic department as a whole. Most athletic departments use the profits from football and basketball to bankroll all of those other sports that student-athletes play.

Paying basketball and football players might remove the hypocrisy that exists from having "amateur" players essentially treated like pros by the media and fans. It would also eliminate the unfairness inherent in having athletes that aren't paid be at the center of a multi-million dollar industry.

With that said, it would also cause schools to have to cancel tons of other sports because of financial concerns, and those student-athletes deserve the chance to play.