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Bowled Over

The Financial Times reviews a new book.

… The excesses of college football have hit new levels of absurdity since the 1990s, writes Michael Oriard in his new book Bowled Over. Colleges throw money they don’t have into football. “From any reasonably objective perspective,” says Oriard, “the case for reform seems overwhelming. For a football coach to make several times as much as the university president is obviously crazy.” Oriard knows his stuff. He played football for Notre Dame University and in the NFL before becoming an English professor at Oregon State University…

He excels at identifying the sport’s abuses. Some players leave university illiterate, having played football nonstop. They are unpaid, and yet colleges still manage to blow fortunes on tuition centres, airfares around America, and sometimes on “recruiting hostesses” who entice promising youths to the right college. The great majority of colleges lose money on athletics, yet most football teams overshadow their universities. And the craziness worsens each year.

The boosters’ arguments for college football are probably bogus. Football doesn’t seem to persuade alumni to give to a university’s academic work, and doesn’t attract better students. Indeed, donors have recently given “to athletics at the expense of academics”, says Oriard….

Margaret Soltan, December 13, 2009 10:47AM
Posted in: sport

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2 Responses to “Bowled Over”

  1. david foster Says:

    Off-topic: UD, since you are such a PowerPoint fan, I thought you’d want to see how P/P is contributing to victory in Afghanistan…

    http://www.neptunuslex.com/2009/12/12/the-enemy-within/

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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