Academics: Which Teams Come Out on Top?

Just in time for March Madness, a University of Central Florida study on academic performance among the NCAA basketball tournament teams has been updated, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. What does the study tell us? Black athletes are still graduating at lower rates than white athletes, but that gap is much smaller on women's basketball teams than men's.

Comparing white and black graduation rates on men's teams, 58 percent of the teams graduated 70 percent or more of their white players, compared with 32 percent of their black players.

Comparing graduation rates between the sexes, 97 percent of women's tournament teams graduated at least 60 percent of their players, compared with only 48 percent of the men's teams.

Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed has picked a bracket based solely on academics. They use the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate and broke ties with the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate. Typically, teams that have little or no chance to win the actual tournament win this bracket (Bucknell and the College of Holy Cross are examples from years past), and Davidson, which had the closest thing to a Cinderella story in the NCAA tournament last year, was the 2008 academic bracket winner. This year, the academic bracket winner actually has a decent chance to win the whole thing: Way to be, Tar Heels.

And let's not forget to promote U.S. News's own college rankings by athletic conference, or our trivia organized by the tourney's East, West, Midwest, and South regions.