In Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football, Gilbert Gaul shed slight on the $2.5 billion (and growing) entertainment business — a business that was once part of academia, but has now outgrown it.
It’s a story of haves (schools in the big 5 football conferences) and have-nots (everyone else), questionable tax-exempt status granted by Congress, and schools that favor revenue-generating athletic programs over the their academic goals (how else can you explain pay football coaches over a hundred times more than what you pay a full professor?).
So much for the notion of the “student-athlete,” or advancing educational goals through athletics and competition.
Read reviews from the New York Times and the Washington Post.