The College Football Problem

Book excerpt: A detailed expose on the corruption in college football by acclaimed sportswriter Rick Telander, with a foreword by Rick Reilly! In 1989, when Rick Telander first published The Hundred Yard Lie, he proposed that big-time college football should be professionalized. In doing so, Telander was ahead of his time, for the problems that he outlined more than thirty years ago are still relevant today—and in some cases are more severe. In The College Football Problem, a newly revised edition of the 1989 book, Telander reveals that more than thirty years later there still exists the dominance of multimillionaire coaches whose only goal is winning regardless of cost to athletes; the presence of wealthy boosters, board members, and athletic department bigshots who have little regard for the academic side of universities; and, of course, the exploited players themselves—many of whom are impoverished minorities—who too often leave school without degrees or real world working skills but with physical injuries and mental betrayals that often will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Many of these concerns have come to a head in California, where in the Fall of 2019 the governor passed the Fair Pay to Play Act, whereby college athletes can hire agents to help them with business deals. With a new foreword by Rick Reilly, this book frames these longtime issues in a new light and offers solutions from Telander in an attempt to put an end to the corruption once and for all.