ESPN College Sports

It's a funny thing about the high moral ground. Sometimes, it turns out to be soft, marshy and very uneven, hardly worth the trouble to put the ladder on.

Take, for example, those charming folks at the NCAA, who on the one hand are making a grand show of making college athletics safer for academics by pitching rules tying scholarships to diplomas ...

APThe price of admission is costly, whether you get a seat to the Final Four or just want one.

The Frozen Four begins today, and with it the latest episode of what can only be called a shakedown-for-sweat.

Say you want tickets to see hockey's version of the Final Four. You know you're not walking up on game day and scoring at the window, and you're uncomfortable with the idea of supporting your neighborhood scalp jockey by paying three times face for an obstructed view seat in the upper deck.

So what do you do? You put your name into a lottery with something like a 20/80 shot at getting a seat. You pay up front, plus you pay a handling fee, because ticket handlers don't come cheap, thanks to the devoted work and negotiating skills of The Amalgamated Brotherhood Of Ticket Handlers Local 355.

Now the nice folks at the NCAA keep your money and, unless their finance department has been replaced by the contents of a kennel, they put it into a nice, kryptonite-powered, interest-bearing account. That's your money, working for them. Whether you ultimately get the tickets or not.

But hey, you're OK with that, because it's just the way things work in high finance.

Now the handling fee, on the other hand, they keep that, too, as they do with the handling fees for the Final Four tickets for both the men's and women's basketball tournaments.

But the handling fee, they don't just keep it and apply it to the cost of your ticket. They apply it to the same bank account as the ticket money itself, and slap it either into a nice, kryptonite-powered, interest-bearing account, or a category that pays even better.

Now if you get tickets, well, they had to handle the tickets to get them to you, right?

But if you don't get tickets, you get your ticket money back. But you don't get the handling fee back, ever. They keep it, forever.

Works out pretty good for them, doesn't it?

That's money you pay to give them the right to handle the money you just paid them to handle the money you gave them that you're not getting back, capisce?

Now I don't know about you, but at our house, we handle our own money for free. Oh, we will waste it on nonsense like food, clothing, shelter and the indoor lacrosse satellite package, but we don't keep it in any kryptonite-powered, interest-bearing account, because we don't hold it long enough for the kryptonite to do its stuff.

So why does the NCAA get to?

Simple. Because you are powerless to stop them, unless you decide you'd rather watch on TV. Thus, it's a profoundly uneven yet legally binding deal. There's probably some clever fiduciary reason why the NCAA shouldn't camouflage the handling fee, but we'd be eternally grateful if we weren't told what it is. They don't give it back, is the point.

Which brings us back to the high moral ground the NCAA likes to perch on when the mood suits it. In its ongoing attempt to look more like educators and less like shakedown artists, the NCAA works hard to appear as if it stands foursquare on the side of education rather than for cash payouts to its athletes, for raising academic standards so that its fields aren't filled with alleged unworthies, and for doing good works for all of society.

That is, when nobody notices the $6 billion it takes in from television for the Final Four, or the face value of the tickets, or the all-beverages-must-be-consumed-in-a-Dasani-cup-because-we-charge-more-for-exclusive-signage-on-your-drinks. Or the disappearing handling fee.

Now maybe the NCAA does do some good work (I mean, they say they do, and in this religious season let's just say they actually do as they say). But most folks see things like the nonrefundable handling fee and decide that, no, this is the sort of thing Paulie Walnuts negotiated with the lawn guy on "The Sopranos."

The NCAA ends up looking cheap, small, brutish, and did we mention cheap? It undoes all its attempts at P.R., and Myles Brand ends up looking like the guy who is always trying to get you to give him two tens for a five. And then charging you for his having to hold the two tens you just gave him.

At least with loan sharks, they call it what it is -- paying the enforcer to make sure you keep up with your payments.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com