Commercial aspects of college football and basketball during the mid- to late 20th century were dominated by a few "get rich quick" schools. Though the NCAA was responsible for controlling such facets of college sports, the organization was unwilling and unable to control the excesses of the few who opposed the majority opinion. The result was a period of corruption, rules violations, unnecessary injuries and overspending. These events led to the formation of larger conferences, richer bowl games and rules intended to preserve the "money-making" value of college football and basketball. This book explores gambling, academic fraud, illegal booster activity and the single-minded pursuit of television contracts in college sports, as well as the NCAA's involvement--or lack thereof--in such cases.

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year NCAA football is big business. Every Saturday millions of people file into massive stadiums or tune in on television as "athlete-students" give everything they've got to make their team a success. Billions of dollars now flow into the game. But what is the true cost? The players have no share in the oceans of money. And once the lights go down, the glitter doesn't shine so brightly. Filled with mind-blowing details of major NCAA football scandals, with stops at Ohio State, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, BYU, LSU, Texas A&M and many more, The System explores and exposes the complex, and perhaps broken, machine that churns behind the glamour of college football. With a New Afterword.

For fifteen years, sports agent Josh Luchs made illegal deals with numerous college athletes, from top-tier, nationally recognized phenoms to late-round draft picks. Flagrantly flaunting NCAA and NFL Players Association rules, he made no-interest loans to players in exchange for the promise of representation on their lucrative pro contracts. After cleaning up his act in 2003, he moved to a new agency, only to be targeted and pushed out of the business for a new violation-one he arguably did not commit. Then, in October 2010, Luchs wrote a confessional article in Sports Illustrated, telling the truth about what he did and didn't do. Since then he has taken on a new role: whistle-blowing, truth-telling reformer. And in telling his own story, Luchs pulls back the curtain on the real economy of college football: how agents win players legally and otherwise, the staggering sums colleges make from an unpaid workforce, the shortfalls of supposed full-ride scholarships, and the myth of a college education given to scholarship jocks. Including new information about major players and scandalized programs such as USC, Auburn, and Ohio State, this book pulls no punches. It's a stunning and necessary read for anyone who loves the game, and the first step toward fixing a broken system. Praise for Josh Luchs' Sports Illustrated story: "There are no innocents in all this-including Luchs. The difference now is Luchs isn't claiming to be innocent." -John Feinstein, Washington Post "[Luchs pulls] the inner workings of an oily business out of the shadows."-Pat Forde, ESPN "A must-read."-New York Times

From a former college basketball player and Executive at Nike, a "riveting" (Sports Illustrated) insider's account into the business of college basketball exposes the corrupt and racist systems that exploit young athletes and offers a new way forward For Merl Code, basketball was life. In college he played point guard for Clemson before turning pro. Later, when he pivoted to marketing, he found himself thrust into a startling world of profit-driven college basketball programs. He realized that the NCAA's amateurism rules could be used to exploit young athletes, and athletes of color in particular. Now, for the first time, Code will share his side of the explosive story of college basketball's dark reality—a system that begins with young talent in AAU programs and culminates at the highest levels of the NBA. Propulsive, urgent, and eye-opening, Black Market exposes the truth to offer a more just way forward for both colleges and athletes.

A former player for the University of Oklahoma reveals the degeneration of the university's respected football program into one of the country's most corrupt, and examines his own arrest for dealing cocaine.

The adjectives associated with the University of Washington’s 2000 football season—mystical, magical, miraculous—changed when Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry’s four-part exposé of the 2000 Huskies hit the newspaper stands: “explosive . . . chilling” (Sports Illustrated), “blistering” (Baltimore Sun), “shocking . . . appalling” (Tacoma News Tribune), “astounding” (ESPN), “jaw-dropping” (Orlando Sentinel). Now, in Scoreboard, Baby, Armstrong and Perry go behind the scenes of the Huskies’ Cinderella story to reveal a timeless morality tale about the price of obsession, the creep of fanaticism, and the ways in which a community can lose even when its team wins. The authors unearth the true story from firsthand interviews and thousands of pages of documents: the forensic report on a bloody fingerprint; the notes of a detective investigating allegations of rape; confidential memoranda of prosecutors; and the criminal records of the dozen-plus players arrested that year with scant mention in the newspapers and minimal consequences in the courts. The statement of a judge, sentencing one player to thirty days in jail, says it all: “to be served after football season.” Read additional praise.