¿Quién ganará el torneo de la NCAA? La NCAA.

Justo después del mediodía Jueves, Ohio State y Dayton inclinarán off en la primera (real) juego del torneo de la NCAA, y 64 equipos comenzarán su búsqueda para levantar el trofeo más prestigioso del baloncesto de la universidad. La belleza de este torneo es que no importa lo que pensamos que va a ganar - Elegí Arizona - es todo en el aire para las próximas tres semanas, y casi cualquier cosa puede suceder. Especialmente hoy y mañana. Preguntar Lehigh. O Costa del Golfo de la Florida. O cualquiera de los otros Cinderellas o campeones nacionales improbables que han capturado los corazones de América en desfila.

El verdadero ganador de este torneo, aunque, está predeterminada: es la NCAA, la organización que va a traer a cientos de millones de dólares en ingresos en este período de tres semanas a solas. And compared to other sports organizations or business enterprises in America, it will distribute a minimal amount of that money back to the players who make it all happen.

En 2010, the NCAA signed a 14-year contract with CBS and Turner Sports (TNT, TBS, and truTV), giving those networks the right to broadcast the tournament for the measly sum of $10.8 billón. For this tournament alone, the NCAA will haul in somewhere around $770 millones en ingresos. That doesn’t include revenue from ticket and concession sales or from corporate sponsorships, which together add tens of millions more to the NCAA’s coffers.

The NCAA isn’t the only winner. CBS and Turner wouldn’t pay this much money for the broadcast rights if it didn’t earn that much and more back, and the same goes for the tournament’s other sponsors and advertisers. Las Vegas experts say the first four days of the NCAA Tournament generate a betting handle similar to the Super Bowl, which brought in $119.4 millones de this year alone. The coaches — of both tournament teams and non — earn salaries stretching from hundreds of thousands of dollars to, in the case of Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, más que $7 millones al año.

The only group that doesn’t seem to get their fair share is, por supuesto,, the players.

The NCAA loves to say that it redistributes money to players through athletic scholarships — you’ll see an endless stream of commercials touting the fact that its athletes “go pro in something other than sports” over the next three weeks — but does that actually cover it? En su sitio web, la NCAA señala que el valor anual de una beca deportiva beca completa oscila entre $15,000 en una típica escuela pública en el estado para $35,000 en una universidad privada. "El valor real de becas deportivas,"El sitio Web de la NCAA nos dice, "Es intangible. Sin ellos, muchos estudiantes-atletas no podrían perseguir sus sueños académicos y el atletismo ".

Esa es una manera conveniente para ponerlo, porque el costo de la beca media no se acercan a los jugadores de baloncesto de dinero que recibiría si compartían en la NCAA Tournament ingresos el camino atletas no cuasi-profesional de las ligas deportivas participación en los ingresos que generan. En algún lugar entre 45 y 50 por ciento de los ingresos se dedican a los salarios en las cuatro principales ligas deportivas de América, where players have the right to collectively bargain. If NCAA Tournament revenues were divided among all Division I basketball players (not just those in the tournament), each scholarship player on D-I’s 351 teams would earn some $73,000 in revenue just from the NCAA Tournament’s television deal, Slate’s Josh Levin calculated. That’s somewhere between two and five times the tangible value of the average athletic scholarship, which still leave athletes with a funding shortfall that averages alrededor $3,200 un año, according to a recent study.

Some former athletes are trying to change all of this. Ed O’Bannon, who won the 1995 NCAA Tournament title at UCLA, and a host of other former college athletes sued the NCAA, arguing that the organization violated antitrust laws regarding the use of their names, imágenes, and likenesses. O’Bannon’s suit argues that players should share in the broadcast revenue they create because it is their names and their images that the NCAA is using the sell the tournament. O’Bannon’s case, a class action, could upend the NCAA model. It is set to go to court in June if a settlement isn’t reached first.

Former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston, mientras tanto, es suing the NCAA on different antitrust grounds, arguing that it unlawfully caps the value of athletic scholarships in a way that leaves athletes like him with thousands of dollars in uncovered costs. If the NCAA and its power conferences didn’t collude to cap those scholarship values, Alston’s suit argues, schools would offer players more money that would cover those costs and others. Prominent labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler filed a similar antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA this week — his suit also argues that the NCAA unlawfully prohibits players from seeking more money from individual schools.

And at Northwestern University, football players led by former quarterback Kain Colter are trying to form the first collegiate players union, which would give them the right to bargain over scholarship amounts and a bevy of other non-financial issues.

There are legitimate questions about how cutting athletes a larger piece of the pie should work. NCAA and school revenues do, después de todo, help subsidize other sports and athletes that don’t generate this sort of money. But there’s no question here that while everyone else involved in the NCAA Tournament and college sports writ large is allowed to cash in, the players themselves are left out in the cold without even a say in how all of it is divvied up. And that is what’s lost in all of this, because the true question isn’t how much college athletes are worth but whether they have the right to have a say the business they help create. Give them that right, and they might choose that they like the idea of an full-cost athletic scholarship just fine. But they might also decide that they want something more, something that cuts into the money everyone else is already making. And that’s what scares the NCAA, the same way it scared Major League Baseball and the International Olympic Committee and other leagues before (fears of impending doom in those leagues proved unfounded).

La NCAA, por supuesto,, is fighting to preserve the status quo, pledging to take these cases all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States if it has to. And why wouldn’t it? The current system works for the people in power, y until they are compelled to change it, they’ll work to protect the money they have. So while you let the NCAA Tournament thrill you again this year the way it always has, at least keep this in mind: the game is rigged, and it’s done so in a way that ensures such a blowout win for the NCAA that it makes even the worst 1-vs.-16 match-up look competitive.