Washington — As the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament gets under way today, March Madness appears alive and well in the nation’s capital.
All the talk about brackets has inspired one group, the Center for Responsive Politics, to create a challenge of its own that it is calling “The K Street College Classic,” named for the street here where many lobbying firms have their offices.
The nonprofit center took the matchups in the real NCAA tournament and determined winners in each round based on which college spent the most money in 2008 on lobbying the federal government.
Under that scenario, one game of the Final Four would pit the University of Southern California (which spent $880,000) against the University of California at Berkeley (whose performance in the K Street Classic was significantly bolstered by the center’s decision to count all lobbying by the university system of which Berkeley is a part, for a total of $810,000). In the second game, the University of Michigan (which spent $575,000) would go up against the State University of New York at Binghamton (whose lobbying total of $1.82-million also counts spending by the entire university system of which the campus is a part).
The championship game, then, would come down to Southern Cal versus Binghamton, with the New York campus winning.
“The colleges and universities competing in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament aren’t just powerhouses on the court,” the center said. “Some of them are influential in Washington, too.”
Meanwhile, for those of you who may have missed it, President Obama got into the basketball-tournament action himself by filling out his own bracket yesterday. His picks (including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the winner) didn’t sit well with the coach of the Duke Blue Devils (the archrival of North Carolina).
“Somebody said that we’re not in President Obama’s Final Four, and as much as I respect what he’s doing, really, the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets,” the coach, Mike Krzyzewski, told the Associated Press. —Sara Hebel
