Incredible India. Not the ad. But, for the reality there!

Many times I have blogged, talked with friends, and remarked to students, that I have given up on understanding India. 

It is a place of immense complexity, which is way too intense for my abilities.  So, I simply take it the way it comes. No questions asked. If it agrees with me, well, I make sure it shows. When it rubs me the wrong way, which happens a lot, most of the times I prefer to be quiet. 

The latest installment?  Courtesy of a student, who emailed me the link to the video that I have embedded here.  And, the interesting twist?  It is from ESPN; go figure!

Money and March Madness: NCAA basketball on PBS. not ESPN!

I noted here how many of my left-leaning colleagues are ardent college sports nuts fans, who easily set aside the gazillion dollars that drive the NCAA and, even worse, even organize March Madness betting pools!  One heck of contradictory responses; but then perhaps that is consistent with the ultra-left's obsession with "contradictions."

It is simply awful that colleges and universities, whose "non-profit" and public status is related to the commitment to education, have morphed into money-making multinational corporations themselves.  PBS will be airing a program (on March 29th) on the money behind March Madness; check your local listings, and make sure you tune in, think, and act.

the new president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, defends the amateurism of college basketball and rejects any form of payments to players. “I think that it would be utterly unacceptable to convert students into employees,” Emmert tells Bergman. “The point of March Madness, of the men’s basketball tournament, is the fact that it’s being played by students. ... What amateurism really means is that these young men and women are students; they’ve come to our institutions to gain an education and to develop their skills as an athlete and to compete at the very highest level they're capable of. And for them, that’s a very attractive proposition.”

Yeah, right!

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

NCAA Basketball, geography, and ESPN

When the Green Bay Packers started winning a few years ago, I recall chatting with a few people who were all pumped up about the team and their quarterback, but had no idea about the location of Green Bay itself.  It simply did not matter to them.  This indifference to location, even while fanatical about the economic and recreational activity related to that location, fascinated me.  Since then, every once in a while I have quizzed students on the locational aspects of winning sports teams--football, baseball, and basketball.  The results were always the same: even the most interested and serious sports fan was geographically-challenged about the very team he (almost always a "he") was rooting for.

A couple of years ago, I wrote in an essay that:

It appears that only real estate agents and geographers understand the importance of location, location, and location. Otherwise, I suppose both within and outside academia, there are not many who develop a spatial understanding even of the issues that interest them or the cities where they live.

I wonder if we geographers might be partly at fault because we tend to equate maps with the “old school geography” that impressed upon people an (incorrect) idea of geography that it is only about memorizing facts about places. But in getting away from that atrocious caricature of geography, we might have gone to the other extreme where we, too, might be reinforcing the notion that it is not important to understand the actual location of a place, and its relationship with its surroundings.

Students in my introductory class were not completely off the hook though. Given the notoriety of the New England Patriots, I asked them at the final meeting of the term, as a way of wrapping up the course, where New England is and the name of the city where the Patriots play. I had hoped that at least five out of the forty students would know the correct answer.  Only one knew that the team’s home is in Foxborough, though four others had a good enough answer of Boston.  I suppose I did get that five out of forty I was shooting for.☺

Thus, you can then understand why I am excited about the online geography quiz that ESPN has about the NCAA men's basketball tournament teams.
So, hey you sports nuts out there, who filled out the brackets (including the President!) take that quiz and see how well you know the locations of those universities...

BTW, speaking of the President and his bracket, here is the Daily Show commenting on it towards the end of this hilarious segment :)

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College football is a professional sport. Admit it.

When coaches get paid millions of dollars, the following shouldn't surprise us, right?

From the LA Times:
The season opener means more than just a football game for USC. Before the Trojans play Virginia on Saturday, they must fly more than 2,500 miles across country on a charter flight.The airport in Charlottesville, Va., isn't large enough to accommodate the team's normal plane, so the USC entourage -- coaches, players, administrators and boosters -- will leave this afternoon in a pair of Boeing 757s.

How awful that must be for them. What if one plane has more caviar than the other? OMG!

From the IHT:
It used to be when Appalachian State ventured out of its own level of competition to play a major school, it meant only one thing.
"It was a money game," coach Jerry Moore said.
Like most schools playing in Division I college football's second tier, App State would collect a six-figure check to help pay the bills...

Well, the six figure is actually $600,000. Lowly Appalachian State gets that much money to play LSU, which means that LSU gets a lot more than that, right. Want an idea of how much money is involved? This commentary about the ESPN deal will give you a flavah of the moolah:
SEC’s staggering 15-year deal with ESPN that will reportedly pay the league about $2.25 billion. That deal, coupled with the 15-year deal the SEC has signed with CBS will give the league financial security for a long, long time.

BTW, those football players are supposedly students too. As a friend joked the other day, "I had no idea there was a real university--with buildings and classrooms--that has the same name as the football team!" The joke is on us :-(