NEW YORK  To get the best seats in the house for the semifinals and finals of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament in Indianapolis this year, you don't have to go looking on the street to scalp some of the prime tickets.

You can just cut a check directly to the NCAA.

For the first time ever, the NCAA, which runs the college basketball postseason, is offering hospitality packages -- which include tickets -- to individuals and non-sponsors of the organization. In the process, it's getting in on the high-priced action usually reserved for ticket brokers and scalpers.

For a $55,000 buy-in, a person or organization will receive 10 lower-level seats in the RCA Dome, 10 seats in a hospitality room dubbed The Tournament Club, five hotel rooms for four nights in downtown Indianapolis and other amenities.

Considering that some opportunists sold Final Four tickets for as much as $7,000 apiece last year in St. Louis, the $55,000 price tag for that package might be deemed reasonable. The NCAA and its marketing partner, rEvolution, are also offering two other packages that include 10 tickets and hospitality. A lower bowl option costs $45,000, and a package that includes upper bowl seating costs $35,000.

"There's a secondary market that was not advantaging the schools or the NCAA," said NCAA president Myles Brand, who was speaking at SportsBusiness Journal's Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Manhattan on Wednesday. "We have the responsibility to recapture those revenues and distribute them to the schools."

One of the rules is that a company that competes with the NCAA partners -- which include Coca-Cola, Pontiac and Cingular Wireless -- is not eligible to purchase the tickets and entertain potential clients in the hospitality suite and at the game.

The program, which puts money into the coffers of the NCAA and then dribbles down to the colleges and universities under its umbrella, comes with the usual amount of critics.

"It's social enterprise for athletes and free enterprise for everyone else," said Dr. Allen Sack, a former Notre Dame football player who is the director of the Management of Sports Industries program at the University of New Haven.

Sack is currently writing a book about what he calls the death of collegiate amateurism.

"There isn't anything morally wrong with capitalism," Sack said, "unless you do it under the fiction that these athletes are merely engaging in extracurricular activity during their free time, which the NCAA would like to have you believe."

Brand said he believes the NCAA should have done this a long time ago. More>>>

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posted by ADMIN @ Wednesday, December 07, 2005