What I’m Reading: ‘Billion-Dollar Ball’

Michael Hudson

I have more than a passing interest in football, which I played at the liberal-arts college where I now teach. Like many fans, I find myself increasingly ambivalent about major college football as challenges to the NCAA’s amateurism rules highlight the sport’s increasing autonomy from the educational enterprise. To learn more, I read Gilbert M. Gaul’s Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football.

Mr. Gaul exposes the extravagance of college-football-as-entertainment. Elite teams, he writes, far outspend many individual academic programs, build lavish facilities, spend an estimated $100 million or more combined just to keep players eligible, and — thanks to broadcasting agreements, seat licenses, and bowl games — have profit margins rivaling those of the most successful businesses. By reinvesting their profits in football, colleges reinforce the sport’s independence from educational goals.

In a chapter on women’s rowing and in an anecdote about a successful football coach at a small college, Mr. Gaul illustrates the values of personal transformation through sports that are largely lost in elite college football.

Billion-Dollar Ball may have a lesson for us all. The book prompts reflection upon what is at risk if students and teaching faculty abandon their ideals for higher education because of the demographic and cultural dynamics that put pressure on academic programs to become, like football, another form of entertainment.

Noah J. Toly is director of the Center for Urban Engagement and an associate professor of urban studies, and politics and international relations, at Wheaton College, in Illinois.

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