There was a time when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Mass avoided all things that smacked of sports page sports. Oh they went to fencing matches and the tiddlywinks finals in London, sailed and crewed and did a lot of dorm and club and Intramural sports (51 sports – more than any other school in my day) – but never cracked the sports page.

But a revolution was begun 20 years ago by accepting a real quarterback who wanted out of the Air Force Academy but wanted to play football, even with random 120 pound linemen wearing even more random begged from closed programs at other schools equipment – who then had a winning season against junior college teams. It forced the first serious Football program budget the next year – $5,000. And now this distraction from study has metastasized into Basketball.

MIT’s first Final Four appearance in the athletic program’s 112-year history (school was founded in 1857) has the men Friday at 8:00pm at the Salem (Virginia) Civic Center matched-up in the semi-finals with the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, a Division III school with a strong basketball tradition making their 5th trip to the Final Four, winner to play the winner of Cabrini vs. Illinois Wesleyan for the championship on Saturday at 7:00pm.

Naturally the view the game electronics are taken care of with a free “on-campus” network viewing at http://mit.imodules.com/redirect.aspx?linkID=3890&eid=36377.

Heck the team finally has a name – “the Engineers” – I didn’t say it was creative.

When the University of Chicago, a founding member of the Big Ten conference and from 1892 to 1939 a major college football power, after a long losing streak during the depression finally won a game, only to have the student body rise up and protest the waste of resources on such nonsense – proof of the waste being the game just won, forcing the closing of the football program, they still many years later restarted the program as a Division III activity.

So I guess I should not complain about wasted tuition money just because MIT is in the FINAL FOUR!

Come on now – one can’t always post about politics! 🙂