President Obama Unveils New Scoring System for NCAA Final Four

President Barack Obama kept a campaign promise Tuesday when he revealed that he has picked Louisville, Memphis, Pittsburgh, and North Carolina for the Final Four of this year's NCAA Basketball Tournament. He then announced that "the scoring system in college basketball is broken and unfair" and that he has asked congressional leaders to quickly pass an emergency measure to "restore fairness" to basketball scorekeeping.

Under the proposed legislation, which is modeled on the annual NYC Gay and Lesbian Rodeo's Best All-Around Cowboy/Cowgirl/Cowtransgendered competition, scoring in this year's will be cumulative rather than having a winner determined based on the team with the higher score at the end of a game. In the new scoring, the "winning" team will advance to the next round but the losing team will not be disqualified, but will cease accumulating points, until the final four brackets are determined.

Under the Obama Scoring Plan, once the final four teams have been chosen as in years past, each winning and losing team's scores will be added together and the teams will then be re-ranked according to total points scored during the course of the tournament. After the re-ranking by totals points is completed, the highest scoring 10% of teams will be assessed an "achievement tax" equal to 90% of their cumulative scores. These "tax points" will then be distributed equally among 20% of the lowest-scoring teams and the standings will be redone. The four teams with the highest number of "new" points will then play in the final four.

"Under this plan, which we cannot afford not to adopt, we will succeed in our fight against the greatest crisis to confront the nation since the Great Nike Basketball Shoe Shortage," the President said. "Some will surely complain, but we can ignore these bitter, greedy voices and finally usher in a greater, more fair, America."

The president's plan, as he expected, has set off a heated debate both in the United States and abroad.

In a statement released during a lull in fighting between the National Guard and drug cartels, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said that Obama's actions were a clear violation of the North American Free Access to Roundball Tournaments (NAFART) agreement and that Mexico would "retaliate" if the plan becomes law. Although he declined to name specific responses that Mexico could impose, a reliable source said that one option would be to cut off supplies of Viagra, steroids, tequila, and condoms to American college students during the drunken orgies that traditionally mark the "Spring Break" season in Mexico unless those students were able to prove that they could read and write.

Closer to home, former Head Coach at almost everywhere Bobby Knight blasted the President's plan as "another step on the road to socialized basketball" and predicted that "it's only a matter of time before Washington makes all the rules" before he threw a park bench at reporters.

On Capitol Hill, passage of the Obama Plan was almost derailed when it was discovered that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) had inserted a clause in the Senate version of the bill that would have exempted UConn from the new scoring system. Although Dodd at first denied any knowledge of the amendment, he later reversed his statement but claimed he was pressured into inserting the exemption because of "pressure from the White House."

When asked who was responsible for the alleged pressure, Dodd declined to elaborate but a White House spokesman, who declined to show his face in public, stated that Dodd was "obviously delusional" and that the senator "needed some big-time professional help."

The same spokesman told reporters that President Obama "had not really meant it" when he told Jay Leno that, under the Obama Plan, even "a team from the Special Olympics could make it to the final four."