Billion-Dollar Ball
A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
• A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 •
“A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York Times
Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges and universities.
Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments.
College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns—Gaul examines in depth the extraordinary financial model that supports college football and the effect it has had not only on other athletic programs but on academic ones as well.
What are the consequences when college football coaches are the highest paid public employees in over half the states in an economically troubled country, or when football players at some schools receive ten times the amount of scholarship awards that academically gifted students do? Billion-Dollar Ball considers these and many other issues in a compelling account of how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities.
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A commercial entertainment juggernaut has conquered academe, argues this incisive, acerbic expos of Division I college football. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gaul (Free Ride: The Tax-Exempt Economy) surveys the powerhouse football programs that are essentially independent, hugely profitable companies and virtual "extensions of ESPN"; the multi-million dollar salaries and severance packages for superstar coaches with lackluster records; the barely literate players pampered with lavish tutoring (including nannies who make sure they go to class); sky-high (but tax-deductible) "donations" for choice stadium seats; and the cutthroat marketing jihads (the University of Alabama threatened legal action against a baker who decorated cookies with team colors, mascots, and the letter A). The hypocrisy of this grubby business masquerading as education is clear in Gaul's telling, though it appears less harmful at powerhouse schools where football funds not only itself but the many women's rowing teams that provide Title IX balance (visiting one, he discovers the true spirit of collegiate athletics). Gaul's mix of shrewd financial analysis and colorful reportage makes for an engrossing account of America's most sentimental yet mercenary sports culture.
Customer Reviews
Illuminating
Probably few know the extent of big money in college football
Great book!
I've been waiting on a book like this to come out and expose the absurdities of the big money culture in college football. Sports are important to help students become more well rounded. However, the amount of money that we, the fans and society at large, pour into football and these coaches is so obscene and disturbing. I hope that my generation (millennials) does reverse this trend. Until then, it's best to just not watch any games on tv or in person. Go read a book instead, like this one.