“A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York Times Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges and universities. Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments. College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns—Gaul examines in depth the extraordinary financial model that supports college football and the effect it has had not only on other athletic programs but on academic ones as well. What are the consequences when college football coaches are the highest paid public employees in over half the states in an economically troubled country, or when football players at some schools receive ten times the amount of scholarship awards that academically gifted students do? Billion-Dollar Ball considers these and many other issues in a compelling account of how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities.

Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football

Sports & Outdoors

Gaul, Gilbert M.

Football (American)

Penguin??Books

An account of the struggles of Cary, a child stricken with spina bifida, describes the joy and difficulties of raising such a child, how society treats disabled children as victims or tokens of tragedy, and the everyday obstacles Cary faced.

Giant Steps: The Story of One Boy's Struggle to Walk

Parenting & Relationships

St Martins Pr

This century has seen the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history―but who bears the brunt of these monster storms?
Consider this: Five of the most expensive hurricanes in history have made landfall since 2005: Katrina ($160 billion), Ike ($40 billion), Sandy ($72 billion), Harvey ($125 billion), and Maria ($90 billion). With more property than ever in harm’s way, and the planet and oceans warming dangerously, it won’t be long before we see a $250 billion hurricane. Why? Because Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some of the riskiest places on earth: barrier islands and coastal floodplains. And they have been encouraged to do so by what Gilbert M. Gaul reveals in The Geography of Risk to be a confounding array of federal subsidies, tax breaks, low-interest loans, grants, and government flood insurance that shift the risk of life at the beach from private investors to public taxpayers, radically distorting common notions of risk.
These federal incentives, Gaul argues, have resulted in one of the worst planning failures in American history, and the costs to taxpayers are reaching unsustainable levels. We have become responsible for a shocking array of coastal amenities: new roads, bridges, buildings, streetlights, tennis courts, marinas, gazebos, and even spoiled food after hurricanes. The Geography of Risk will forever change the way you think about the coasts, from the clash between economic interests and nature, to the heated politics of regulators and developers.

The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts

Business & Money

Economics

Sarah Crichton Books

• A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 • “A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York Times Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges and universities. Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments. College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns—Gaul examines in depth the extraordinary financial model that supports college football and the effect it has had not only on other athletic programs but on academic ones as well. What are the consequences when college football coaches are the highest paid public employees in over half the states in an economically troubled country, or when football players at some schools receive ten times the amount of scholarship awards that academically gifted students do? Billion-Dollar Ball considers these and many other issues in a compelling account of how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities.

Industries

VIKING

The National Football League, that bastion of free enterprise and million-dollar quarterbacks, is not what you normally think of when someone says non-profit organization. Or the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, which puts on the dazzling $6 million Oscars show each spring. But thanks to the largesse of Washington lawmakers, these and 1.2 million other groups qualify as tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations. And you make up for the taxes they don't pay. A major but little-noticed change has taken place in the American economy in the last twenty years: the dramatic growth of nonprofit businesses. These businesses had an estimated $500 billion in revenues in 1990 - nearly six times the income of farms, five times that of utilities, and twice as much as the construction industry - virtually all of it off the tax rolls. This startling analysis exposes some major abuses by tax-exempt organizations - nonprofit hospitals, private colleges and universities, and foundations. Based on the series in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gilbert M. Gaul and business reporter Neill A. Borowski, a skilled database journalist, this book is a must read for every taxpayer.

Free Ride: The Tax-Exempt Economy

Borowski, Neill A.

Accounting

ANDREWS MCMEEL PUB.

Geography of Risk

Picador Paper

The authors, both award-winning reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer, shared a fascination with the great Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 that slammed into the Atlantic Coast, devastating sections of the New Jersey Shore. They set out in April of 1998 to examine the history and impact of that storm. It soon became clear that the storm was a pivotal event in the development of the coast. Instead of retreating to higher ground, speculators and builders rushed to rebuild on the waters' edge, driving up land values. Now, billions of dollars in developments line the nations beaches, built on sand, awaiting the wrath of nature.

Crisis on the Coast: The Risky Development of America's Shores

Wood, Anthony R.

Philadelphia Inquirer

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Books by Gaul, Gilbert M.