While the focus of much of the football season being on agent involvement in player's recruitment and the possibility of pay-for-play conspiracies, it's just business as usual.
Sports journalist Mark Yost's latest book, "Varsity Green," delves into the economic and cultural implications of a NCAA system of college athletics he sees as "broken...financially and academically corrupt and morally bankrupt."
He even refers to the NCAA as a "cartel," comparing them to the mafia family depicted in the HBO series, the Sopranos.
It is hardly surprising or revelatory that corruption in college sports is by no means a new phenomenon, as Yost demonstrates through a detailed historical analysis of big money and college sports.
Yost pegs the advent of corruption in college sports to the first organized intercollegiate athletics event, an 1852 rowing contest between Harvard and Yale on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee.
The idea for the contest, Yost writes, was conceived by James Elkins, the superintendent of the Boston-Concord-Montreal Railroad, and even though it was billed as a rowing event, it was actually meant to increase ridership on the railroad.
Yost writes that the players were even provided free alcohol on the train ride and became so drunk that the game had to be delayed for an hour to give them time to sober up.
"Presidential aspirant General Franklin Pierce was in attendance, and presented the Harvard rowers with prizes valued at more than $500, including gold-leafed oars and jeweled trophies from Tiffany & Co.," Yost writes.
Yost's book is not limited to a nostalgic trip down infraction lane: it also deftly covers the economic and cultural impacts of conference television contracts, bowl game and stadium corporate sponsorships, the fluctuations and adjustments in rules covering academic eligibility, shoe and apparel partnerships between universities and corporations, the facilities "arms race," the influence (both good and bad) of boosters, the exorbitant sums paid out to elite college football coaches, and the action taken by the NCAA to protect its monopoly.
Yost also decries how the corruption and commercialism of professional and collegiate athletics has trickled down and infected youth sports, from Pop Warner football to AAU basketball leagues.
Yost doesn't trumpet the bad in college athletics while ignoring good developments, however.
He lauds the universities that divert sports revenue to academic endeavors, but points out that most athletic departments lose money, primarily because of the requirement that non-revenue sports be supported.
If you want to gain a better understanding of the history of culture and corruption in college athletics and their impacts on our economy, youth and society, check out Yost's fact-laced analysis in his book "Varsity Green."
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