Why do universities place so much emphasis on athletics? Are the salaries of head coaches excessive? Should student-athletes be paid? Why is there so much cheating in college sports? Should athletic departments be subsidized by the university? Does Title IX unfairly discriminate against men's sports? This textbook is designed to help teach students about the business of college sports, particularly the big-money sports of football and basketball, allowing them to answer these and other important questions. The book provides undergraduate students with the information and economic tools to analyze the behavior of the NCAA, athletic conferences, and individual colleges and universities in the market for college sports. Specific topics include the markets for athletes and coaches, the importance of athletics for colleges and universities, the finances of athletic departments, the influence of the media in commercializing college sports, issues of race and gender, and the possibilities for reforming college sports.

Operating behind a veil of amateurism, the NCAA and collegiate athletic departments oversee big business sports programs. These entities generate revenues comparable to professional sports, practice and play in facilities that rival those found in professional sports, and pay their top coaches salaries comparable to the salaries paid to coaches of professional sports teams. Athletes are courted with lavish stadiums, training facilities, and locker rooms. Customers are wooed with branded apparel, videos, logos, and advertisements. Business interests are captured with stadium billboards, electronic ads on scoreboards, sponsorship of bowl games, logos on uniforms, and exclusive apparel and equipment contracts. Where do, or should, these lucrative athletic ventures fit in the mission of higher education? To what extent is the central mission of creating an environment for learning and extending the frontiers of knowledge enhanced or limited by college sports? Are declarations by the NCAA to promote amateurism and competitive balance supportive of the university mission? Does the NCAA even follow its purported objectives? The Economics of College Sports contains both empirical and theoretical research to address these and related issues. Perhaps the most unique contributions focus on the interactions between legal and institutional aspects of the NCAA and their impact on the objectives and goals of university education; all of the contributions provide insights that will generate significant discussion about the policies necessary to sustain the vitality and integrity of the university education-sports coalition.

The Business of Sports, Second Edition is a comprehensive collection of readings that focus on the multibillion-dollar sports industry and the dilemmas faced by todays sports business leaders. It contains a dynamic set of readings to provide a complete overview of major sports business issues. The Second Edition covers professional, Olympic, and collegiate sports, and highlights the major issues that impact each of these broad categories. The Second Edition continue to provide insight from a variety of stakeholders in the industry and cover the major business disciplines of management, marketing, finance, information technology, accounting, ethics and law. In addition, it features concise introductions, targeted discussion questions, and graphs and tables to convey relevant financial data and other statistics discussed. This book is designed for current and future sports business leaders as well as those interested in the inner-workings of the industry.

This book expands on the argument that spectator sports, despite their problems, have become a central function of American universities.

In The Miseducation of the Student Athlete: How to Fix College Sports, Kenneth L. Shropshire and Collin D. Williams, Jr., introduce The Student-Athlete Manifesto, a roadmap to increase the likelihood that student-athletes can succeed both on and off the field. They also offer a Meaningful Degree Model, which ensures education pays for everyone.

For undergraduate courses in sports economics, this book introduces core economic concepts developed through examples from the sports industry. The sports industry provides a seemingly endless set of examples from every area of microeconomics, giving students the opportunity to study economics in a context that holds their interest. The Economics of Sports explores economic concepts and theory of industrial organization, public finance, and labor economics in the context of applications and examples from American and international sports.

Thomas Sowell “both surprises and overturns received wisdom” in this indispensable examination of widespread economic fallacies (The Economist) Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries. One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous. Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author's Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.