The NCAA men’s college basketball tournament is going to generate a lot of money for a lot of people in the next three weeks, from the NCAA, to schools and conferences, to CBS, and to coaches. Seems like everyone will share in the money largess except for one group: the players who perform for fans in the arenas and in front of televisions.

The CBS executives sitting at Black Rock on West 51st Street are extremely happy with their multi-billion dollar investment in the NCAA tourney. CBS has sold about 95% of its commercial inventory for the three-week college basketball affair, which translates into about $450 million in sales; the channel may get as much as another $25 million from commercials that will run on Web casts of the games across a variety of Web sites. Sixty-three games, from the first round through the Final Four, will be available through cable’s NCAA March Madness On Demand.

Most of the games will be played at publicly-funded arenas complete with luxury boxes, club seats, in-arena restaurants, and valet parking. Corporate partners will be out in full force as well. The NCAA men’s tournament is more than an athletic competition: It is an event focusing on big-name coaches and maybe even a player or two.

So, the coaches get well compensated for coaching. What about the players?

They get a scholarship. The players are amateurs, and college officials and fans like the fact that a bunch of college kids are playing for the love of the game — unlike the pros. There is nothing amateur about the March Madness tournament, except for the fact that the players don’t get paid. They, after all, should be grateful to get an opportunity to perform for free in front of millions. So what if their coaches have opportunities to make millions, and the NCAA gets a ton of cash, and CBS is raking in advertising dollars — the players are getting free educations.

But just what do the players have to do in order to maintain that scholarship? Back in January, the NCAA explored that question at its annual convention in Nashville, Tenn., and some of the findings were troubling.

In 2006, the NCAA surveyed 21,000 student-athletes and found out that playing college sports had become a full-time occupation. College football players spend an average of 44.8 hours a week practicing, playing, or training — in addition to the hours they are supposed to spend in a classroom. Of course, the president of the NCAA, Myles Brand, had an explanation for this, pointing out that high school seniors who sign a contract allowing them to go to a school to play sports know there is a lot of work going in.

There were additional interesting results to the survey: Golfers put in about 40.8 hours a week; baseball players log the same amount of time, and men’s hockey and basketball players also clock in at about 40 hours. Women’s softball players put in about 37.1 hours a week, while women basketball players use up about 36.1 hours a week.

The survey knocked down some myths about the “student-athlete,” as two-thirds of Division I athletes said they felt that their grade-point averages would be higher if they did not participate in sports. The majority of the respondents replied that they viewed themselves more as athletes than students, and those who found the balance between sports and the classroom thought they did better in school. The survey did not ask student-athletes if they felt pressured to work out more hours weekly, but more than half of the male athletes that were asked wanted to train more hours, and about a third of the women athletes wanted to put in more time than they did.

The problem that the NCAA and Brand is facing is pretty simple: Brand and the schools want the athletes in the classroom and performing better, and yet the survey comes back with the athletes saying they consider themselves athletes, not students. There is also another problem: Just what majors are the athletes taking? Are they being pushed into certain majors that don’t require as much classroom work or studying than others? To counteract this, the NCAA is demanding more of the “student” athlete, and has set up graduation benchmarks that schools need to hit if they don’t want to face certain consequences — including loss of scholarships.

The president of the University of Hartford, Walter Harrison, told the Chronicle of Higher Education after the Nashville convention that “We’ve all heard examples of athletes taking majors with more electives or not studying things like chemistry because of how much time students must spend in the laboratory. We just want to know if athletes are being channeled away from, say, psychology, and into sports management.”

There is no talk of paying players for their time and effort. NCAA officials, along with member-school presidents and chancellors, will not address those issues, and they will always rely on the old argument that students are getting a scholarship and getting their education. Of course, the students have to want an education, and they certainly have a lot of resources at hand, including tutors who make sure they keep their grade point average high enough to allow them to continue to play.

But the students also sign a deal that gives the schools total leverage over them if they want to play. Even though the NCAA claims that the college sports governing body limits mandatory practice and playing time to 20 hours a week (excluding traveling to games or rehabbing an injury), athletes know they have to attend “voluntary practices” if they want to keep a spot on the team. Players can spend their free time doing whatever they please in theory. But it certainly improves their standing in the eyes of their coaches to spend time in the weight room or studying an opponent. For a number of athletes, they are simply pros-in-training, and colleges provide that proving ground.

Tiger Woods spent two years at Stanford before turning pro, and did not graduate. Much focus is put on the graduation rates of college basketball and football players, but Woods and others, such as John McEnroe (who also attended Stanford), left school early to turn pro and left their education behind. Woods and McEnroe are extreme examples — but would be part of the NCAA survey of student-athlete trends.

March Madness is here, but the real madness is how the big-time sports schools treat their most valuable product: the athletes. The performers should get a cut of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being made off of their difficult labor.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com