About this item
"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 TimesTwo-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.
About the Author
Gilbert M. Gaul (1951-) grew up in Kearny, New Jersey, and attended St. Benedict's Prep in Newark. For more than 35 years he was a reporter at the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers. In 1979, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (along with Elliot Jaspin) for investigative reporting for a series on the collapse of the Blue Coal Corporation. He won a second Pulitzer in 1990 (Public Service) for a series analyzing safety flaws in the nation's blood supply. He was also short-listed for Pulitzers in 1990, 1994, 2001 and 2007. Gaul was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, concentrating on business and economics, and was a Ferris Professor at Princeton University.
