Billion-Dollar Ball

In 2013 the highest paid public employees in 27 states were college football coaches, and the ten biggest football programs took in $800 million, with profit margins far surpassing those of Fortune 500 companies. The corporatization of college football is shocking, but thanks to generous federal tax breaks, lavish TV deals, corporate sponsorship, and the legions of boosters and donors with deep pockets, the money being profited from college football is higher than ever and jeopardizing the amateurism of collegiate athletics. In BILLION-DOLLAR BALL: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football (Viking; On-sale August 25, 2015; ISBN: 978-0-670-01673-0; $27.95), two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a surprising, incendiary examination of how college football has come to dominate some of our best, most prestigious universities, reframing campus values, distorting academic missions, and transforming athletic departments into astonishingly rich entertainment factories.

By turns jaw-dropping, outrageously funny, and often times irrational beyond all measure, BILLION-DOLLAR BALL is an indefatigably researched book that raises serious questions about the balance between sports and academics in today’s universities. Quite simply, Gaul argues that America’s largest and most prestigious universities are spending ten times more on their football players than on their smartest, most ambitious students. The profit margins from some of the nation’s top football programs have spiked, in some cases upwards of 600%. Take, for example, the University of Texas: from 1999 to 2012, profits earned by the school’s football program increased from $10,393,333 to $77,917,481, or 650%.

The University of Texas football program is not only a microcosm of the current collegiate football system, but an indictment against it. Little of this money goes to academics. At Penn State, an Honors College scholarship of $4,500 pales in comparison to that of a $50,000 football scholarship. The money made from college football programs sustains a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of athletic department bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. Never mind the scandals surrounding NCAA football, the academic cheating, and the argument that players should be financially compensated. Here, Gaul argues these abuses are mere symbols of something much larger and problematic: the business model that schools have created using football to brand their school, monetizing every aspect of the game.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Gilbert M. Gaul twice won the Pulitzer Prize and has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer four other times. For more than thirty-five years, he worked as an investigative journalist for The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers. He has reported on non-profit organizations, the business of college sports, homeland security, the black market for prescription drugs and problems in the Medicare program. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Ferris Fellow at Princeton University.