Mediaboss Marketing

BY JEFF GORDON stltoday.com | Posted: Monday, March 19, 2012 6:36 am | (Loading) comments.

Mizzou fans are still reeling today. SLU fans are a bit disappointed, too, after the Billikens failed to wrestle a victory from Michigan State on Sunday.

But the college basketball industry got just what it wanted from the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament.

Stunning upsets reinforced the March Madness theme. Norfolk State, Lehigh and The Ohio University played the Cinderella role and joined college basketball lore.

They wrecked brackets, engaged casual fans and justified the expansion of Division I basketball to three times its appropriate size.

Several power programs advanced to the Sweet 16, including Kentucky, Syracuse, North Carolina, Ohio State, Kansas and Michigan State. Those schools fill arenas and stadiums and pay the bills.

Double-digit seeds Ohio, North Carolina State and Xavier also survived the second round to add some variety to the proceedings and keep the storylines fresh.

(Downtown St. Louis merchants probably arent thrilled to get two of the surprise teams visiting this weekend, but the roving horde of Jayhawk fans ought to cover most of that gap. They will be pulling for KU big time Friday night.)

Here is what the experts had to say about what happened the past four days:

Eamonn Brennan, ESPN.com: Combined, Duke and Missouri wield well over 100 million in their combined athletic budgets; their overall university endowments dwarf that of Lehigh and Norfolk State and any other No. 15 seed you'll ever see. The Blue Devils and Tigers are members of the entrenched college sports aristocracy, the dominion of top-100 recruiting and charter jets and shoe-company contracts and greed-laden conference realignment and billion-dollar television deals. Lehigh and Norfolk State don't exist in this universe. These schools' recruits aren't elite AAU prospects. Oftentimes, they aren't really prospects at all.

Read more here:
Tipsheet: March Madness marketing bonanza