Resources of the Week: March Madness
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Basketball is really not my sport, but millions of other people feel differently. According to a press release (Word; 52 KB) from the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.:

As millions of American workers come down with March Madness, an annual affliction resulting from excitement over the NCAA men’s college basketball championship tournament, the cost to employers in lost productivity could exceed $1.2 billion over the course of the 19-day event that begins March 15. The championship game will be played on April 2 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies — friend of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker — identified several interesting resources in his “Morning Meeting” column Wednesday. For example, this new report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at University of Central Florida “takes a look at Federal Graduation Rates, Graduation Success Rates, and the Academic Progress Rates (APR) for the tournament teams, as reported by the NCAA.” If statistics like this are useful and/or interesting to you, you’ll find a number of other reports about race and gender diversity, graduation rates, etc., for both college and professional sports here.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association itself issues a variety of similar statistical reports, although they do not seem to be as up-to-date as those mentioned above. There is, however, a wealth of other statistical information here, including a Championship Results database. Click on the Library tab for even more data.

We’ve posted direct links to full text record books and rule books from the media section on DocuTicker, ResourceShelf’s sister site. They include:
+ 2007 NCAA Men’s and Women’s College Basketball Record Book
+ 2007 Men’s and Women’s Final Four Records Book
+ 2007 Men’s and Women’s Basketball Rules
+ Men’s and Women’s Illustrated Basketball Rules
+ Database of Direct Links to All School and Conference Web Sites
and many more documents including archived editions of the ones listed above.

Also worth some attention while you’re here:
+ 2007 NCAA Backgrounder — Sports Wagering (”The NCAA opposes all forms of legal and illegal sports wagering on college sports. Sports wagering has become a serious problem that threatens the well-being of the student-athlete and the integrity of college sports.”)
+ NCAA’s Double-A Zone weblog, which is currently focused on tournament coverage.
+ NCAAsports.com is “the official web site for NCAA sports,” and you’ll find complete tournament coverage here, as well as stories about other NCAA sports, including multimedia.
+ Background information on the controversial “Native American Mascot” issue.
+ If you want to follow NCAA news on an ongoing bases, an RSS feed is available.

Tompkins clues us in to the fact that the U.S. Department of Education collects statistics about college sports expenses and revenues. Its Office of Postsecondary Education makes this information available via its Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool Website. Here you’ll find a searchable database as well as a series of tools that easily allow you to generate specific reports.

One of your editor’s favorite time sinks, the Deadspin weblog (”sports news without access, favor, or discretion”), offers lots of witty NCAA coverage, including a downloadable 2007 NCAA Men’s Bracket (PDF; 860 KB), that prints out nicely.

The blog is also running its own pool, via ESPN. (Free registration required.) Not that we would ever encourage sports wagering here on ResourceShelf, but helpful statistics are widely available, as are tips for winning your office pool. Or take advantage of this java applet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 and is filed under Resource of the Week, Resources, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.