From our Late to the Party desk:
Sometimes it’s good to be behind the curve.
The hardreading staff has just started digging into Taylor Branch’s monumental October 2011 Atlantic piece The Shame of College Sports (described by Frank Deford in an NPR commentary as “the most important article ever written about college sports”).
Excerpt:
With so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries. When you combine so much money with such high, almost tribal, stakes—football boosters are famously rabid in their zeal to have their alma mater win—corruption is likely to follow.
Joe Paterno, come on down!
Read Branch’s piece with Michael Sokolove’s New York Times Magazine feature last March on Baylor University basketball phenom Perry Jones.
And weep for the lost promise of so many college athletes.
Campaign Outsider 
I’d also recommend Mike Benedict’s “Public Heroes Private Felons” from the later 1990s. He goes into Tom Osbourne’s history of covering up student-athlete violence at Nebraska. That opened my eyes to a lot of things. I think Benedict is still affiliated with Northeastern University’s Center for Sport and Society too.
Thanks, Christian.
That Atlantic article was great. I can’t believe I even read it–not the kind of thing that I would normally crack open. When the whole Sandusky thing broke I was glad I had read it and it has been a great way to put this into a framework that explains, really explains, why this was allowed to happen. Everyone who cares about University education in this country should read this article–including maybe a couple of journalists such as, for example, Costa, before he got on the tube and interviewed old Sandusky and had nothing to say about it because he didn’t want to unsuck himself from the NCAA teat or b/c it had never crossed his mind to think of the corrupt and disgusting culture that surrounds “amateur” sports in this country.