BILLION DOLLAR BALL: AN ANALYSIS
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An Analysis of Billion-dollar ball:
A journey through the big-money culture of college football
Jessica Wilkins
SPMT 5325
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It is no secret that money has, for a great deal of America’s history, been a driving factor
in many decisions. This financial motivation has led innovation and demise in many industries
and has now found its place in intercollegiate athletics, becoming particularly apparent in college
football. Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football by
Gilbert M. Gaul takes a look at the growing industry of college football to see where this big-
money epidemic began and how the industry is adapting. However, with a changing culture in
college football comes a new set of ethical challenges to be addressed including the continued
and growing inequity under Title IX, the academic advantages offered to academically inferior
students, and the management of collegiate football programs as independent, big-money
businesses rather than as functions of an educational institution.
Many of the ethical issues presented in this book are caused by increasing athletic
budgets and many athletic departments’ desires to reinvest these growing revenue streams into
its highest generating sports. Unfortunately for the majority of athletes on a collegiate campus,
they are not football or men’s basketball players and do not receive the attention and financial
support seen by these revenue-generating athletes. Luckily for these athletes, women in specific,
Title IX was established to create equity in the opportunity provided across collegiate athletic
programs. This law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in order to give women the
opportunity that men have been given since the beginning of intercollegiate athletics.
Unfortunately, this law has loopholes, which have been manipulated by universities since its
establishment. The ever-growing popularity of women’s rowing teams across the country is a
prime example of these loopholes in action.
Women’s rowing is a fairly inexpensive sport that can be used to account for the large
number of men’s football players. All it costs a university to begin a rowing program is a body of
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water, a few rowboats, a boathouse, a hand full of scholarships – 20 as mentioned by Kansas
State University, and a coaching staff. Women’s rowing coaches only make $60,000-$100,000
annually which is another benefit to adding a rowing team; it was a small price to pay for
remaining eligible according to Title IX standards.
These new women’s rowing teams were brought to universities for a large number of
female athletes to account for large football teams, at a low cost, as previously mentioned.
Rowing coaches were given a quota to meet and were forced to complete this task by any means
necessary. These high demands by athletic departments caused coaches to search their campuses
high and low for any tall, athletic females that they believed might fit the bill. These coaches
could not recruit high school rowers due to limited scholarships and the novice level at which
many of their teams were competing. In the end, these teams were not created to attract athletes,
boost the reputation of the athletic department, or to provide opportunity for women who were
looking for such a sport, but rather to help balance the number of athletes on the female end and
they were successful in doing just that. These new women’s rowing teams were reporting roaster
numbers as large as 150-250 members to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA),
which Gaul found later to be misleading. When it came time to compete in the spring, many of
the athletes that had been reported to the NCAA had quit due to the high physical and time
demands that were met with little to no reward. Although the number of participating athletes is
much lower in reality, Gaul was informed that these teams are told to report their numbers just
after fall tryouts when their numbers are highest. The low cost for such an easy way to ease the
discrepancy between male and female athletes has created a high demand for women’s rowing
across the nation and has created an easy out for athletic departments who care more about Title
IX eligibility than they do the care of non-revenue generating, female athletes.
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This solution is so popular due to the financial inequity that is allowed between men and
women’s sports thanks to an amendment created by New York Senator Jacob Javits. This
amendment recognizes the cost of some sports, mainly football, and blocks the comparison to
these high costs to other sports in Title IX investigations. This amendment to the Title IX law
creates an even higher sense of inequity from a financial standpoint and allows athletic
departments to exploit the law, as seen though implementation of women’s rowing teams. This is
one flaw that is mentioned by Gaul, but one that might be even more surprising is the negative
impact that it has had on many male athletes. If a school does not wish to add a high number
women’s sport, they are likely to cut existing men’s teams to account for the inequity in
opportunity. This is a tactic that is popular in the South Eastern Conference (SEC) and the Big 12
Conference where they would rather maintain current football budgets than cut into them for new
