In spite of a rough stock market and a bumpy economy there is one business, not a tech company, that has grown revenues from $229 million in 1999 to over 800 million today. That is the business that is the ten largest programs in College football. It’s a business where the CEO’s, the coaches, are mostly part of the one percent. They earn millions annually and even worse than most big businesses, their employees work for almost nothing.
The world of College football specifically and College athletics in general, has grown out of all proportion to its real value. This is the world we begin to watch this weekend and the world that Pulitzer Prize winner Gilbert Gaul writes about in Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football.
My conversation with Gilbert Gaul: