Punishingly profitable

The South’s other megachurches

Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football. By Gilbert Gaul. Viking; 272 pages; $27.95.

OUTSIDE the United States, university is where you study. But for thousands of supersized American males, it is where you go to run into other men of similar proportions like particles in the Large Hadron Collider. College football has been a cornerstone of American sports culture for over a century, and inspires nearly religious fervour in the Deep South. In recent years critics have accused American universities, which together earn $10 billion a year in athletic revenue, of exploiting an unpaid labour force. Moreover, numerous players have filed lawsuits demanding a piece of the pie. In “Billion Dollar Ball” Gilbert Gaul, a journalist, eschews these criticisms in favour of a more fundamental angle of attack: that running such large entertainment businesses is incompatible with the core task of universities.

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