March Madness is well underway as we head into the weekend which will give us a Class AA champion in high school basketball and the collegiate Final Four.

Of the 48 games played in the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament, viewers were able to catch glimses of about 30 courtesy of CBS and ESPN. It’s a good thing I’ll have until tomorrow to recharge for what proves to be another exciting weekend.

Upsets and the possibility of them keep the fans on the edge of their seats. The top team in each high school class—Providence-St. Mel in Class A and Homewood-Flossmoor in Class AA—was knocked out in the early stages of the state playoffs.

And although No. 1 Nevada-Las Vegas has survived the first two rounds of the NCAAs, Illinois, Alabama-Birmingham, Arizona and Missouri lost to teams they were expected to beat. But the biggest upset was defending champion Louisville being shut out of the field.

Many teams in the tourney just do not belong. Let the winner of a conference postseason tournament walk away with a trophy but not an automatic NCAA bid. There are also far too many teams with 20 wins—the suppossed magic number—who were excluded because a couple of teams put together three straight wins in their conference tourney. In my book, 20 wins over the course of an entire season far outweighs three in a weekend.

At least high schools, by letting everyone in the playoffs, don’t exclude good teams while permitting inferior teams to participate beyond the regular season.

But these are only the on-court woes of college athletics. The excitement of the tournament will not eliminate all the other problems facing major-college sports—Southern Methodist University and other rule violators, Big 10 players being accused of accepting money from an agent and Gary McLain revealing he was on cocaine during the 1985 Final Four.

However, the biggest controversy in college athletics in my opinion is yet to come. Seven players on each winning team in the NCAA tournament have been drug tested, but the results are not scheduled to be released until next week. If a player tests positive, he will be ineligible to play in the Final Four.

It should be pointed out here that a player who tests positive has traces of drugs in him. This might seem like a simple concept to you and me, but a player at the University of Florida was asked if he tested positive for drugs and he said yes because he figured positive meant good. Now back to the column.

The NCAA has had many problems with the method used to gather urine samples. For instance, Michigan’s Garde Thompson took nearly three hours to produce a sufficient sample after he scored 33 points in a win over Navy. It seems he fared better at filling the bucket on the basketball court than he did filling a paper cup in the locker room.

But although the above scenario is amusing, the consequences may not be. Most likely there will be one or two starters on Final Four teams forced to sit out. And this is sad, not that they will be punished, but that the tournament will be tainted and a source of scandal.

The NCAA tournament should be all jump shots and rebounds. It should be all fun and games, separated from the “real” world. It should be a source of hopes and dreams. But this will not happen if priorities are not put in line. As long as money plays such a large role and individuals and teams continue to bend and/or break the rules, the tournament will become more like the dog-eat-dog world we live in every day.

This is sad not only for college basketball but for society as a whole.