The National Collegiate Athletic Association has banned a record eight teams from postseason play because of their athletes’ poor academic performance — the most since the academic penalty system was first used two years ago. But, in a sign of the widening gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in college sport, four of those punished teams are from historically black colleges and universities, and a fifth is from an institution designated by the federal government as predominantly black.

Tuesday, the NCAA released its annual set of Academic Progress Rates — scores for each Division I sports team based on the academic eligibility and retention of each scholarship athlete. Teams scoring below certain APR thresholds can face penalties ranging from scholarship losses and practice time reductions to postseason bans and, ultimately, suspension of their institution’s NCAA membership. The longer a team scores below a certain threshold, the more severe its penalty. Each teams is judged on the four-year average of its APR. The latest scores are from the 2006-7, 2007-8, 2008-9 and 2009-10 academic years. (A searchable database is available showing complete APR scores and penalties per institution and team.) This year, of the 6,400 teams in Division I, 103 teams from 67 institutions were punished. Sixty teams lost scholarships, 16 received public warnings, 19 lost practice time and 8 have postseason bans.

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HOUSTON — The rims were tight, the shots weren’t falling and points were at a premium — surely one of the ugliest championships played on college basketball’s biggest stage.

Ah, but for Kemba Walker and UConn, the final score was a thing of beauty.In a game that featured 40 minutes of guts and grit, Connecticut made Butler look like the underdog it really was, winning the NCAA men’s title Monday night with an old-fashioned, grinding, 53-41 beatdown of the Bulldogs.

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More from ESPN.com

UConn capped an unlikely run in claiming the national crown but it was an ugly win in more ways than one, writes Pat Forde. Column

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At the start of the season, Kemba Walker cooked for his teammates. By the end, he had all the ingredients to make a champion, writes Dana O’Neil. Column

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The inept shooting by Butler was among the worst displays in NCAA tourney history, but it shouldn’t negate the impact this program has made, writes Andy Katz. Column

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Jim Calhoun’s personality remains unchanged — and so does his knack for winning, writes Eamonn Brennan. Column

• Rapid reaction | Hoops Nation blog

Walker finished with 16 points for the Huskies (32-9), whose amazing late-season streak could be stopped only by the final buzzer. They won their 11th straight game since closing the regular season with a 9-9 Big East record that foreshadowed none of this.”Every time we play hard, great things always happen to us,” Walker said.

INDIANAPOLIS — It’s not often Maya Moore meets her match. Skylar Diggins was up to the task, and Notre Dame will play for a national championship because of it.

The sensational sophomore guard scored 28 points and hot-shooting Notre Dame upset UConn 72-63 on Sunday night, ending the brilliant career of Moore and the Huskies’ quest for a third straight national championship.Ten years after their last title, the Irish will be playing for another one Tuesday night against Texas A&M, which beat Stanford 63-62 in the first semifinal. The Aggies scored with 3 seconds left in a back-and-forth game to set up the improbable championship game that features no top seeds for the first time since 1994.Connecticut and Stanford had each been to the Final Four the last four seasons and were expected to meet for the title on Tuesday night in a rematch of last year’s title game.

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Despite the Rams’ semifinal loss Saturday night, VCU fans spilled into the streets of Richmond to continue celebrating their team’s remarkable run to the Final Four. Despite the celebration, some took out their frustration with the end of the Cinderella story by burning furniture and tipping over trash cans.

It was mostly a celebratory crowd on Broad Street between Laurel and Shafer streets, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

Police kept the crowds mostly under control, but violence flared. A police-car window was broken out, a street sign was pulled up and thrown in front of the police, and wooden pallets were set ablaze.

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NEW YORK — An NBA spokesman confirms that the league is investigating Jay-Z’s presence in Kentucky’s locker room after the Wildcats clinched a Final Four berth.

The rapper visited the players after their victory over North Carolina on Sunday at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J, home of the Nets. Jay-Z is a part-owner of the team and attended the Nets’ 120-116 loss at New York on Wednesday.

NBA rules prohibit team personnel from having contact with players who are not yet draft eligible, and spokesman Tim Frank told the Associated Press the league is looking into it.

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You’ve now seen the bracket, with three more teams but even less certainty. If you thought last year’s games were tough to call, this year promises to make it an even more agonizing process.

But it’s a process all of us college basketball fans embrace, even if most of our time spent breaking down the field can be viewed, in retrospect, as a waste once the first weekend of play is complete.

While hindsight may be 20/20, you know that trying to handicap the NCAA tournament — including looking at that bracket for hours on end — only makes things blurry. The uncertainty of how things will play out seems to be increasing in recent years, as parity rules, so how do you make sense of it all?

Do you just go with your gut, fill out your bracket quickly and never look back? Do you number-crunch using a spreadsheet and utilize specific metrics to determine winners for each game? Or do you let your fanhood make decisions for you?

No matter your rationale in making your selections, one thing that can’t be changed is history. You can choose to use it in your analysis, or simply ignore it and decide that each NCAA tournament stands on its own. As many of the trends below will suggest, history can be quite telling at this time of year. But the Big Dance is a funny thing, and you have to decide which trends will continue and which ones simply don’t apply to this year’s field.

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Not many people noticed a slight change on the George Washington University website earlier this year. It concerned a player on the school’s women’s basketball team named Kay-Kay Allums. Just a couple letters were taken away, a Y was moved and an E was added to form the player’s new name: Kye Allums. To most people it was meaningless, but to Allums the change was the most significant of his lifetime.

“A name is just a bunch of letters, but the letters make up a word and the words that make up my name have so many more emotions behind them,” Allums said. “My old name, that’s just not me. When I hear Kye, everything feels okay, everything is right.”

For the last 20 years, Kay-Kay Allums had appeared to the world as female. She was born with the anatomy that other women have. Her mom tried to dress her in only the most feminine clothes. But inside was a man waiting to burst out of the female body he was born in.

On Nov. 13, Kye Allums will introduce himself to the NCAA basketball world at the Best Buy Classic in Minneapolis in a game against the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. When he steps foot on the court, Allums will be the first publicly transgender person to play NCAA Div. 1 college basketball.

Allums grew up in the small town of Hugo, Minn., a half hour north of Minneapolis. Head coach Mike Bozeman scheduled the tournament appearance as a homecoming for him, long before he transitioned to male. The junior guard’s inaugural game identifying as a man will also be the first time he has played in front of his hometown crowd. While Allums is making a change now, most of his family and friends will recognize him as the same old Kye.

Growing up, Allums was a tomboy. The oldest of four kids, he would often say he was a boy despite being born a biological girl. Around age 12, he realized that no other girls behaved or dressed the way he did, so he adopted some of the trappings of other girls his age: Putting on make-up, wearing skirts and dresses. After just a year of putting up a feminine front, it was back to the tomboy clothes and wondering why he just didn’t fit in.

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There was no panic in the locker room. No pep talk, either. Maya Moore and her Connecticut Huskies knew the score.”It couldn’t get any worse,” she said. And it was all slipping away — the streak, the perfect season, the championship.

Leave it to Moore. The tournament’s most outstanding player took over the NCAA title game Tuesday night, rallying the Huskies from a horrible first half to a 53-47 victory over Stanford.”We knew a run was coming,” she said. “We settled down and hit some big shots.”Suddenly, a team that was stagnant on offense and trailing 20-12 at the break was moving and scoring.”Just no fear,” said Moore.That could be a motto for coach Geno Auriemma’s Huskies. UConn (39-0) is the first team ever to have consecutive unbeaten seasons, but that doesn’t cover it.

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