Real March Madness: Rewarding Schools for Low GSRs

摘要

Every March four regions of the country (representing 31 conferences and 315 schools) send 65 teams to the NCAA men's Division I basketball tournament. Each conference's share of NCAA basketball fund revenues is based on the participation and cumulative performance of their member teams over the six previous tournaments. In 2010, for example, based on the 2004 through 2009 tournaments, the Big East conference was projected to receive over $23.1 million while six other less successful conferences were slated to receive slightly more than $1.3 million each. In this brief research note, we compare for all schools in the annual men's NCAA college basketball tournament their basketball fund distribution (under the assumption that the conference money is split evenly among all member institutions) and their basketball program graduation success rate (hereafter GSR).