The University of Texas men’s basketball team is currently en route to Milwaukee, where it’ll play Arizona State in the second round of the NCAA tournament. But in CRP’s K Street Classic — where we use lobbying expenditures to predict the outcome of March Madness — it has already sewn up the championship.

Public universities, which need political allies to protect their budgets from the axe, have tended to fare well in the K Street bracket. A number of schools, including Texas , lobbied on budget and appropriations issues such as the fight over sequestration cuts. Texas is the third straight state school to win, and six of this year’s Elite Eight were public universities. The exceptions were Harvard, the last member of our Final Four despite a mere 12th seed, and Stanford. (Harvard can take consolation in the fact that it would have won handily had we used campaign contributions to predict the bracket instead.) Second-seeded Villanova, the highest-ranked private school in this year’s tournament, was upset in its opener against the public University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Not all public schools lobby, however; Wichita State, the country’s only undefeated team, has never reported any lobbying spending.

The University of Texas was 2013’s sixth-biggest lobbying spender in the higher education sector . The only Division I school ahead of the Longhorns was its in-state rival Texas A&M University , which will be watching the tourney from home after a disappointing 17-15 season. While March Madness attracts bigger audiences by the year, the competition on K Street is more muted. Higher education spending on lobbying declined in 2013 for the third straight year, to $83.7 million from a high of $109.6M in 2010, which is consistent with the overall decline of disclosed lobbying spending.



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