The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Audiobook (Free)

AN EXPLOSIVE AND REVELATORY PORTRAIT REPORTED FROM DEEP BEHIND THE Moments OF BIG-TIME NCAA University Soccer: THE Interest, THE THRILLING ACTION-AND THE SHOCKING REALITIES THAT Lay BENEATH THIS COLOSSAL, MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESS

COLLEGE FOOTBALL has never been more popular-or more chaotic. Large numbers fill up 100,000-seat stadiums every Saturday; tens of hundreds of thousands more view on tv every weekend. The 2013 Discover BCS Country wide Championship video game between Notre Dame and Alabama experienced a about THE MACHINE: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time University Football viewership of 26.4 million people, second and then the Super Bowl. Vast amounts of dollars from television deals now flow into the game; the average cover a top-ten group can be $80 million; best coaches make a lot more than $3 million a yr; the highest paid, more than $5 million.

But behind this glittering success are darker truths: “athlete-students” working essentially full-time careers with no talk about in the oceans of cash; players who frequently don’t graduate and end their careers with broken bodies; “janitors” who tidy up player misconduct; soccer “hostesses” ready to do whatever needs doing to land a high recruit; seven-figure dark box recruiting slush money. Which: Regardless of the huge amount of money pouring into the game, 90 percent of major athletic departments still lose cash. Yet schools remain caught up within an ever-escalating “arms race”-at the trouble of academic scholarships, services and faculty.

Celebrated investigative journalists Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian had been granted unprecedented access during the 2012 time of year to programs at the highest levels across the country at a time of convulsive switch in college football. Through dogged confirming, they explored every nook and cranny of this high-powered machine, and reveal how it operates from the inside out. The result: the machine through the eyes of athletic directors and coaches, high-flying boosters and high-profile TV celebrities, five-star recruits and tireless NCAA researchers and the youngsters on whom the whole vast enterprise depends.

Both a special event of the power and pageantry of NCAA soccer and a groundbreaking, thought-provoking critique of its excesses, THE MACHINE may be the definitive publication on the faculty game.