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Billion-Dollar Ball : A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football by Gilbert M. Gaul (2015, Hardcover)
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Written by Gilbert M. Gaul, this book delves into the sociology of sports, specifically focusing on the higher education and football industries.
- Buy It NowBillion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
ISBN-10067001673X
ISBN-139780670016730
eBay Product ID (ePID)28038789534
Product Key Features
Book TitleBillion-Dollar Ball : a Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football
Number of Pages272 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2015
TopicSociology of Sports, Higher, Football
IllustratorYes
GenreSports & Recreation, Education
AuthorGilbert M. Gaul
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.1 in
Item Weight18 Oz
Item Length9.3 in
Item Width6.2 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2015-473475
Dewey Edition23
Reviews"With the depth and clarity that have defined his distinguished investigative reporting career, Gilbert Gaul takes readers on an enlightening if sobering tour of modern college football. What does a 'walker' do for players at Kansas? Why does Princeton have nearly twice as many varsity athletes as Texas? Billion-Dollar Ball not only has the answers, it raises the right questions." --David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi " Billion-Dollar Ball is really a book about piracy. Two time Pulitzer prize winner Gil Gaul exposes the schemes by which a small group of honchos have hijacked universities and diverted the profits of college sports which equal those of large corporations, into their own pockets without answering to anyone. It's a ground-breaking work of reporting that cries out for a federal investigation." --Sally Jenkins, Washington Post columnist and author of The Real All Americans and The State of Jones "With an uncanny combination of tenacious investigative reporting and effervescent prose, Gilbert Gaul has written an urgently important and immensely readable book. Even for a college football fan like me, Billion-Dollar Ball raises painfully disquieting questions." --Samuel G. Freedman, author of Breaking the Line and Letters to a Young Journalist "This book is timely and important. Gil Gaul paints a devastating picture of the transformation of what once at least resembled a college sport into 'an elaborately rich entertainment.' The forces that have driven this evolution cannot be reversed by reforms from within. It is going to take some combination of the courts and federal legislators to force real change--and probably the dismemberment of the NCAA as we know it today. Things probably have to get worse before they can get better." --William G. Bowen, President emeritus of Princeton University and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, "This book is timely and important. Gil Gaul paints a devastating picture of the transformation of what once at least resembled a college sport into 'an elaborately rich entertainment.' The forces that have driven this evolution cannot be reversed by reforms from within. It is going to take some combination of the courts and federal legislators to force real change--and probably the dismemberment of the NCAA as we know it today. Things probably have to get worse before they can get better." --William G. Bowen, President emeritus of Princeton University and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Grade FromTwelfth Grade
Dewey Decimal796.332/63
SynopsisOver 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. 'A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become 'a giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.'' Mark Kram , The New York Times, - 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.
LC Classification NumberGV959.G385 2015
