When dealing with the NCAA, you can be certain that there will never be a shortage of hypocrisy. As March Madness gives way to April Sadness, two wonderful examples came flying out of the NCAA cupboard.

The NCAA has, over the years, condemned the practice of scalping tickets at their events. Now the folks at the NCAA have found that they, too, can be scalpers, while still pretending they are not in such an unsavory business. But make no mistake about it — there is no difference between scalping online and street hustling at the arena.

The NCAA has an exclusive agreement with RazorGator, as its official “ticket reseller,” to handle the online resale of its tickets to high-demand NCAA events. Final Four ticket strips with a face value of $140 to $220 were selling online for $2,500 and up. There is also an official NCAA travel agency, which offered Final Four packages, including game tickets, for as much as $4,495 per person, according to the Los Angeles Times. Oh, those beautiful revenue streams!

The NCAA also has a long standing policy against the sale or advertising of alcoholic beverages at NCAA sponsored events, with one loophole: Alcoholic beverages of less than 6-percent-by-volume can be advertised on telecasts of NCAA events. There is a time limit of 120 seconds per telecast, but that limit was exceeded by 150 seconds during the recent NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game.

Drew Faust, president of Harvard, and 100 other university presidents, signed a letter calling on the NCAA to revise its policies and initiate a ban on all alcoholic beverage advertising. According to industry reports, beer companies rank second in advertising at the NCAA tournament.

None of this is particularly surprising, as we have come to expect these forms of avarice from the NCAA. What is surprising is a change that was made at West Point in what has been described as a desperate attempt to resurrect its football program.

Until recently, the long-standing policy meant that such star athletes — such as Roger Staubach and David Robinson — served for five years before joining the ranks of professional sports. Now, however, the star athlete at West Point has a very different career path to follow.

As reported in SI and the Dallas Morning News, the new “alternative service option” implemented in 2005 for cadets blessed with “unique talents and abilities” means that the five-year commitment that cadets make to the Army will no longer be equally applied to all cadets.

The first two years of the five-year obligation will now be spent recruiting and working in public affairs. Cadets playing professional sports can then buy out the remaining three years with six years in a reserve unit. While classmates go off to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, star athletes will avoid the front lines and be able to take up their professional sports careers three years earlier than under the previous policy.

It is believed that this change will enhance the recruiting appeal of West Point for blue chip athletes and contribute to an upgrade of the football program. This is certainly a reassuring step by the powers that be at West Point, and it bookends nicely with an admissions policy that has a special track for recruited athletes.

The power of intercollegiate athletics has become irresistible and the need to win on the field grows stronger with each passing day, even at the service academies. In some ways it is reminiscent of the sports powerhouses that were created at army and navy bases during World War II.

David Zang, in his brilliant analysis of sport in the ’60s, saw a link between the overemphasis on winning in sport and the growing awareness that the nation was not winning the war in Vietnam. It was Vince Lombardi who offered the antidote to the war protesters and the long hairs. It was the football teams on many campuses who were encouraged by their coaches to attack the war protesters — their fellow students.

Could it be that we are faced with a similar situation as the nation stumbles on in the Iraq morass, seemingly far from what anyone could call victory? Is the Army itself being seduced into the pursuit of victory on the gridiron, while being frustrated in the conduct of Bush’s Folly?

Or is it a more simple matter than that? Could it be that the powers that be at West Point are still steeped in the traditions of the “Playing Fields of Eaton,” and Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s faith in the lessons of football? The vocabulary of football might also suggest the persistence of such a linkage in the hearts and minds of those who train leaders at West Point. One can only wonder how Gen. MacArthur, who was so fond of the West Point Motto “Duty, Honor, Country,” would feel about the new policy.

In a world in which athletes are routinely described as warriors, in which an athletic event becomes a war, where sides clash and teams do battle, and where “whose number one” is a national obsession, nothing should surprise anyone. Intercollegiate athletics is in danger of truly becoming a mirror of our world in which there seems to be no bottom.