Friday Interview: Big Money's Impact on College Football | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is CJ Staff, who writes for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    RALEIGH     It's no secret that the world of college football involves huge amounts of money. In the recent book Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gilbert Gaul investigates the impact of that money on schools, teams, and players. During a recent trip to Raleigh, Gaul discussed his findings with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: First of all, why devote a book to this big-money culture surrounding college football?

    Gaul: Well, there are several answers to that. The first one being that I have a longstanding background in history and economics and business, so I tend to view the world through those frameworks and have applied it to a number of unusual subjects in the past. So I have a general interest in that area.

    I have been interested in college sports for a long time. Strangely enough, I actually benefited from an athletic scholarship when I was an undergraduate, so I participated. So I know a little bit about it. And I became curious about - I was watching college football and looking at what I call the "scaling up" of college football, particularly since the mid-'80s and in the last 15 years. It has just exploded in terms of money.

    The economy of college football from 1999 to 2012, for just the top 10 teams that I looked at, grew from $229 million to about $800 million. The profits from those 10 schools alone went from about $149 million to more than a half-billion dollars. Ten schools.

    And then you see the coaches' salaries - [University of Alabama head football coach] Nick Saban now getting $7.1 million. Not to pick on poor Nick: The top 10 coaches in the football schools now average about $5 million a year in salary.

    So there's been this incredible ramping up in the size of college football, and I was interested in how that affected the university - why they did it, the impacts on the school on everything from brand, to the economics, to the front end of who you choose as a recruit, to the coaching salaries, to the facilities. You name it, I looked at it.

    Kokai: One of the things that you found, I understand, is that the biggest schools, the ones that are drawing in the most money, really dwarf everyone else.

    Gaul: Yes.

    Kokai: There's a certain elite, and then everyone else is in another category.

    Gaul: Yeah, it's a story of the haves and have-nots in college football. In the D1 [Division 1] level, you have the 65 schools and the five so-called super conferences or the power conferences. And they account for basically most, if not all, of the money. And then you have 60 schools in D1 that are trying to play at an elite level. Schools like Akron University or Eastern Michigan University or New Mexico State University - all of whom I feature in my book.

    And, simply, the model does not work for them. They don't have the television revenue. They have half-filled stadiums, if that. They have trouble selling tickets. They don't really have much ticket revenue. They can't charge their fans seat donations above and beyond the price of a season ticket in order to come to the stadium. So the model simply doesn't work for them, and they end up making most of their money by offering up their teams as sacrificial lambs to these large elite programs. ...

    Kokai: What sorts of problems does this big money atmosphere create, either for the schools that are among the elite or the ones that are trying to play catch up?

    Gaul: Right, because there's different kinds of problems. It ranges - everything from the question of using football as your major brand. Some might view that as harmless. I think of it as a bit of a distortion of the purpose of a university, which, unbelievably or not, is actually education. So you have issues like that.

    You have [the] whole cost of keeping the football players and the basketball players eligible to play. So one of the things that also has added to the costs of big-time athletics in the last decade or two are these things called academic support centers that are built exclusively for athletes that have the tutors, learning specialists, reading and writing specialists, psychologists, life-skills coaches. They have everything in them. These things can cost [$2 million to $5 million] a year. The cost of tutoring alone can run a half-million dollars a year or more at big schools, where you're having anywhere from, say, 1,500 hours of tutoring classes a week to 2,000 hours a week. So you have that.

    On the flip side, for the have-not schools, there's this opportunity cost of trying to play football, where you're spending all this money, which is largely coming from these games where you offer yourself up as a sacrificial lamb or from the tuition fees that regular students pay to attend that school. They have these athletic fees that total in the millions ... that principally fund the athletic programs.

    Many schools try to build huge, expensive stadiums even though they are half filled. Akron built a $60 million stadium that had opened in 2009. And yet, it has to buy some of its own tickets in order to comply with the NCAA requirements for how many tickets you sell on a three-year average. So there are lots of costs.

    Kokai: Your book is not about the recent scandal that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had, but I think a lot of people who have been following this scandal have said, "This is tied into the athletic department driving the train, rather than the academics."

    Gaul: Yeah.

    Kokai: Does that fit in with what you've seen in looking at other schools?

    Gaul: Yes, absolutely.

    Kokai: That the academics is really playing too small a role, compared to athletics at these big schools?

    Gaul: Well, I'd phrase it a little bit differently. The way I analyzed it, it's this pressure to win and continue to fill up the stadium, the business model where college football drives everything in college sports and it accounts for most of the money.

    So you have all this pressure to get the money. How that affects academics is sort of obvious. On the front end, you know, it affects who you recruit. They all want to recruit five-star athletes. But a lot or some of those five-star athletes aren't actually very good at studies. They may not be that interested in studies. They may have low GPAs. They may have low SATs or ACTs. In fact, I know they do because I've looked.

    And so you bring a student or an athlete into a school who is a couple standard deviations from the mean of the average population. They are already behind. What do you do then? Well, you invest and spend all this money trying to get them up to speed or at least keep them eligible and on that field so the money train can keep running along.

    So, yeah, I mean, there's the pressure, and it's not surprising then that kids cheat, schools cheat, tutors cheat, advisors sometimes cheat, and why you see the number of scandals that you see - why they are so commonplace.