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Billion-Dollar Ball
- A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
A hard-hitting examination of the many ways college football has been transformed into a moneymaking spectacle that is hurting higher education.
In the spring of 2013, a study showed that despite huge economic problems, 27 states were awarding their highest salaries to college football coaches. College football has doubled in size in the last decade thanks to generous tax breaks, lavish TV deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. In one recent year, the 10 biggest programs took in $800 million from football, with profit margins far surpassing those of Fortune 500 companies. Little of this money goes to academics. Instead it sustains a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, tutors, and a growing cadre of athletic department bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play.
In Billion-Dollar Ball, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a surprising, incendiary examination of how college football has come to dominate some of our best, most prestigious universities, reframing campus values, distorting academic missions, and transforming athletic departments into astonishingly rich entertainment factories.
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You Herd Me!
- I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will
- By: Colin Cowherd
- Narrated by: Colin Cowherd
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In this age of billion dollar athletic marketing campaigns, “feel good” philosophy with no connection to reality, and a Sports Media echo chamber that’s all too eager swallow whatever idiotic notion happens to be in vogue at the moment, it’s tough to find people who aren’t afraid to say what they’re really thinking.
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Great book, Repeats majority of themes from radio
- By Troy on 01-20-14
By: Colin Cowherd
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War Room
- The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team
- By: Michael Holley
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Bill Belichick is one of the titans of today's game of football. Now, sports commentator and best-selling author Michael Holley follows three NFL teams - the New England Patriots, Kansas City Chiefs, and Atlanta Falcons - from training camp 2010 through the Super Bowl and into the April draft, opening a new window into Belichick's influence on the game. This one-of-a-kind exploration takes football fans behind the scenes of the most popular sport in America, with unprecedented insider access to the head coaches, scouts, trainers, and players.
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Narrator choice - HUH?
- By Ryan Mullaney on 03-25-18
By: Michael Holley
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Saban
- The Making of a Coach
- By: Monte Burke
- Narrated by: Barry Abrams
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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As the head coach of the University of Alabama's football team, Nick Saban is perhaps the most influential - and controversial - man in the sport. Unpredictable in his professional loyalties, uncompromising in his vision, and unyielding in his pursuit of perfection, the highest-paid coach in college football has changed the face of the game. His program-building vision has delivered packed stadiums, rabid fans, legions of detractors, countless NFL draft picks, and a total of four championships.
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Narrator is awful.
- By kenneth on 08-12-15
By: Monte Burke
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The Billionaires Club
- By: James Montague
- Narrated by: Damian Lynch
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time football was run by modest local businessmen. Today it is the plaything of billionaire oligarchs, staggeringly wealthy from oil and gas, from royalty, or from murkier sources. But who are these new masters of the universe? Where did all their money come from? And what do they want with our beautiful game? In The Billionaires Club James Montague delves deeper than anyone else has dared, to tell this story for the first time.
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So boring! There is no cohesive story
- By Patrick Johnson on 02-15-22
By: James Montague
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Football for a Buck
- The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL
- By: Jeff Pearlman
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States Football League was the last football league to not merely challenge the mighty NFL but also to cause it to collectively shudder. It spanned three seasons, featured as many as 18 teams, secured multiple television deals, drew millions of fans, and launched the careers of legends - but then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic owner, a New York businessman named Donald Trump. Jeff Pearlman draws on more than 400 interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America.
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Ahhh the USFL
- By Film Lover on 10-11-18
By: Jeff Pearlman
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The League
- How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched a Sports Empire
- By: John Eisenberg
- Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The National Football League's current dominance has obscured how professional football got its start. In The League, John Eisenberg reveals that Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell took an immense risk by investing in the professional game. At that time, the sport barely registered on the national scene. The five owners succeeded only because at critical junctures in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, each sacrificed the short-term success of his team for the longer-term good of the League.
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what a great book. loved it completely.
- By Daniel Mosca on 11-08-18
By: John Eisenberg
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The National Team (Updated and Expanded Edition)
- The Inside Story of the Women Who Dreamed Big, Defied the Odds, and Changed Soccer
- By: Caitlin Murray
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The US Women’s National Soccer Team has won three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals, set record TV ratings, drawn massive crowds, earned huge revenues for FIFA and US Soccer, and helped to redefine the place of women in sports. But despite their dominance, and their rosters of superstar players, they’ve endured striking inequality: low pay, poor playing conditions, and limited opportunities to play in professional leagues.
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Too much swearing
- By Rebecca Sheldon on 01-23-20
By: Caitlin Murray
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Ahead of the Curve
- Two Years at Harvard Business School
- By: Philip Delves Broughton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2004 Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join 900 other would-be tycoons on the Harvard Business School's plush campus. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, and work/life balance.
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On one breath.
- By Atkins on 05-17-22
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Boys Among Men
- How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution
- By: Jonathan Abrams
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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When Kevin Garnett shocked the world by announcing that he would not be attending college - as young basketball prodigies were expected to do - but instead would enter the 1995 NBA draft directly from high school, he blazed a trail for a generation of teenage basketball players to head straight for the pros. That trend would continue until the NBA instituted an age limit in 2005, requiring all players to attend college or another developmental program for at least one year.
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Bad pronunciation
- By K. Spearman on 07-03-16
By: Jonathan Abrams
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Class Warfare
- Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
- By: Steven Brill
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.
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Unions are Evil
- By Elton on 09-16-11
By: Steven Brill
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Better Off Without 'Em
- A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession
- By: Chuck Thompson
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Let’s talk about secession. Not exactly the most suitable cocktail party conversation starter anywhere in the country, but take that notion deep into the heart of Dixie and you might find yourself running from the possum-hunting conservatives, trailer-park lifers, and prayer warriors Chuck Thompson encountered during the two years he spent traveling the American South asking the question: Would we be better off without ’em?
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What can I say? I loved it.
- By Blake on 03-02-14
By: Chuck Thompson
What listeners say about Billion-Dollar Ball
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kyle Walter
- 02-14-18
A good story that loses focus
The first 2/3 of the book are great, and provided insights into the college juggernaut that I never knew about. However, late in the book the author gets bogged down in title 9 nonsense. He spends a good hour just on women’s rowing, which really slowed the pacing of the narrative. This whole section is rather boring, and is just a place for the author to fawn over women’s athletics and to suggest that it is more important than men’s. Other than that, I really enjoyed the book.
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Overall
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- Andrew N Dobson
- 01-19-16
Much Better Books Out There On This Subject
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
You will like this book if you are consuming every text you can on the topic. It's worth a listen, but you need to put it at the bottom of your list because there are much better books out there.
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
Most Interesting: Great anecdotal evidence/stories were presented. Many of which I had not heard previously. There are some pretty good interviews with college ADs too.
Least Interesting: The author's ridiculous bias is apparent throughout the entire text and I found his opinions pretty uninformed and uninteresting if we're being honest here.
What didn’t you like about Tom Stechschulte’s performance?
I could not stand his sarcastic tone; I found his inflection to be irritating too. To be fair, I am not sure if this is how he typically reads, or if he did this because he was asked to by the author. Either way, the bias of the author was apparent enough in the content of the book and I could have done without the artistic interpretation.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
There was good information in there for sure, some anecdotal things I haven't heard before, but there are many other books that address the same issues and they do a much better job of objectively submitting their findings.
Any additional comments?
Full disclosure: I got this book because of how hungry I have been for information on the topic, and it had good info, but I found it really irritating. If you are of the mindset that the NCAA and college athletic departments are evil, with no redeeming qualities, who have theirs coming to them, then you will love it. The author makes no attempt to hide his bias and I found it really hard to take his perspective to heart when he clearly has an agenda. If you are looking for a more objective and thorough examination of the subject, then you would be better off purchasing "The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football" it was hands down the best book I've ever listened to on Intercollegiate Athletics. However, If you are a fiend for the "sausage making" of college athletics like I am, and do not care about biases, you will definitely get something out of this book.
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