As if the NCAA collegiate athletic operation wasn’t raking in enough dollars with its annual basketball tournament, now it is engaging in a form of ticket-scalping that it previously condemned. The issue is discussed in Wednesday’s issue of USA Today.

The March Madness tournament is a direct result of the efforts of Kansas University basketball legend Phog Allen in the late 1930s. Yet for all his talents and his eminence as a visionary, Allen would be absolutely astounded at how his brainchild has developed into a seedy financial cash cow.

The NCAA is having its official ticket package provider, RazorGator, move large blocks of prime Final Four tournament tickets online at markups of hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The association, through official Greg Shaheen, says it is doing so to protect its financial interests and also to protect fans from being hit by counterfeits. The NCAA and RazorGator are splitting the profits.

Officially, the tickets for the Final Four gathering in April in San Antonio cost from $140 to $220 each. Many fans are having to pay far, far more with RazorGator officially orchestrating the rip-offs with the NCAA’s blessing. Does the controversial agency need the ill will this is creating – just for a few more dollars in a treasury that already is bulging?

In 1999, the NCAA and CBS Broadcasting lined up an 11-year, $6.1 BILLION deal that reaches through 2014 and may be further fattened before then. In addition, the NCAA gets money from merchandise and sales of the videos; the loot just keeps rolling in.

The teams entered in the 65-school tournament each get paid for each victory they achieve, now about $250,000 for each appearance. There is evidence the Big 12 Conference will realize about $30 million from this year’s tourney. Ah, what a drastic change from a modest beginning!

In 1939, Phog Allen of Kansas and Dutch Lonborg, another Jayhawk then coaching at Northwestern, managed to put together a college tournament. The finalists, Oregon and Ohio State, each took home $100 even though the NCAA lost about $5,000 on the venture.

The next year the innovative Allen and Lonborg arranged for the national coaches meeting to coincide with the NCAA Final Four in Kansas City. As fate would have it, Allen’s Jayhawks were finalists with Indiana. The teams took home $750 each and the NCAA made $10,000, mainly because KU was such a big draw in its home area.

In 1942, Stanford won in Kansas City and was handed $90. Fifty-six years later, Stanford was paid $250,000 for each of its five appearances in the meet. Most teams have to share their winnings with their conference. Many schools’ total athletic budgets depend on NCAA-conference sharing plans.

Momentum continued to grow for the NCAA tournament after World War II. In 1957 when Kansas fell to North Carolina in triple-overtime in Kansas City, the largest media gathering in college basketball history was on hand. KU’s Wilt Chamberlain was a focal point.

So now the NCAA is favored with a $6.1-billion-and-counting nest egg and decides it needs to leap into the ticket-scalping business – which may further fill its cash drawer but which certainly makes it difficult for someone like modest-income Kansas fans to follow their Jayhawks.

Even sadder is the fact that the young men who populate the teams, in effect geese laying golden eggs, don’t get any extra remuneration beyond their usual scholarship benefits.

It’s bad enough that the players have their seasons lengthened with no added funding. It takes on an even grimmer aura of ugliness when the college agency they are benefiting winds up looking like some sleazy scalper.