Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football

"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 ... . 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. ... 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 ... how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities."—From publisher description.