Major College Football

• 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.

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year NCAA football is big business. Every Saturday millions of people file into massive stadiums or tune in on television as "athlete-students" give everything they've got to make their team a success. Billions of dollars now flow into the game. But what is the true cost? The players have no share in the oceans of money. And once the lights go down, the glitter doesn't shine so brightly. Filled with mind-blowing details of major NCAA football scandals, with stops at Ohio State, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, BYU, LSU, Texas A&M and many more, The System explores and exposes the complex, and perhaps broken, machine that churns behind the glamour of college football. With a New Afterword.

Ultimately, however, Watterson concludes that the history of college football is one in which the rules of the game have changed, but those of human nature have not.

Mrs. Coach is a true story about the life of a college football coach and his family. The excitement of meeting celebrities, dealing with the media, and the highs and lows of winning and losing, are all covered in this book. If you have ever played any sport, attended any games, or realized the hardships of frequent moving to a new home, you will enjoy the drama and the humor contained in Mrs. Coach. Every avenue of the college athletic world is covered in this cant put it down book.

Called the "definitive history of the rivalry" by the Chicago Tribune, this updated history of the classic tilt is much more than just the recounting of old games. The fates of Michigan and Notre Dame have been intertwined since that cold November day in 1877 when the Wolverines literally taught the game of football to an eager group of Notre Dame students. Richly illustrated and now including games through the 2006 season, Natural Enemies weaves these two chronologies together to produce a college rivalry book like no other.

"One of the most insightful books ever written about college football." —The New York Times Now revised and updated by the author, MEAT MARKET proves that in college football, the game off the field is more brutal than the one on the field. In this shattering expose, Bruce Feldman goes into the war rooms to show who stands to profit when champions get built, and at what cost. A college football program can become a multi-million dollar industry for its school, but only if that program wins. The quest for excellence goes beyond the guts and the glory of the gridiron—it goes into the war rooms where recruiters size up every metric to determine which high-school phenom they want to recruit to the university. Bruce Feldman—FOX Sports College Football Insider—rips the cover off the game’s frenzied pursuit of raw talent, taking you deep inside the SEC war room of recruiting legend Ed Orgeron, the combustible Cajun who helped build national championship teams at the University of Miami and at USC. In a stunning, blow-by-blow account of the year leading up to National Signing Day 2007, the award-winning journalist shadows Orgeron and his Ole Miss assistants as they set about hunting high school students, pleading, plotting, and inventing ways to lure them to their sleepy Oxford campus. Packed with candid confessions and outrageous off-the-field action, Meat Market makes what happens on the field seem almost tame by comparison. MEAT MARKET is a must-read for all college football fans, an eye-opening discovery of what it takes to put their favorite team on the field.

In Game Time, you'll meet a Big Ten walk-on who is the son of Harvard graduates, a former Heisman Trophy winner working in the inner city of New Orleans, an All-American dealing with the loss of his brother, and a running back who put the future of a program on his broad shoulders. You'll meet the winningest quarterback in college football history, a linebacker who played in the Game of the Century, and a recruiter with ethics.You'll meet coaches struggling to stay afloat, a draft guru, and a handicapper who literally eats, sleeps, and breathes college football. And you'll get an inside look at events like the Senior Bowl and an NFL Pro Day, which literally make or break the futures of college players.What started as a collection of interviews ended as a journey through many of the good people who still make their living in college football. It's not an exhaustive history, nor is it a survey of college football's biggest stars, but, like our author, it just might help you love the game again.In addition to writing for ESPN Magazine and Sports Spectrum, Kluck will get broadcast media coverage during game season, adding his refreshing color commentary to game days. No fan can be without this up-to-date insider's look at the nation's favorite sport.

One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football. Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault. In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.