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

COLLEGE FOOTBALL hasn’t been more popular-or more chaotic. A huge number fill up 100,000-chair stadiums every Saturday; tens of hundreds of thousands more view on television every weekend. The 2013 Discover BCS Country wide Championship video game between Notre Dame and Alabama acquired a about The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time University Football viewership of 26.4 million people, second only to the Super Dish. Vast amounts of dollars from tv deals now movement into the game; the average budget for a top-ten group is normally $80 million; top coaches make more than $3 million a calendar year; the highest paid, a lot more than $5 million.

But behind this glittering achievement are darker truths: “athlete-students” functioning essentially full-time jobs with no talk about in the oceans of money; players who frequently don’t graduate and end their professions with broken physiques; “janitors” who tidy up player misconduct; soccer “hostesses” willing to do whatever it takes to land a high recruit; seven-figure black box recruiting slush money. And this: Despite the millions of dollars pouring into the game, 90 percent of main athletic departments still lose cash. Yet schools remain caught up within an ever-escalating “hands race”-at the trouble of academic scholarships, facilities and faculty.

Celebrated investigative journalists Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian were granted unprecedented gain access to during the 2012 time of year to programs at the best levels in the united states at a time of convulsive change in college soccer. Through dogged reporting, 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 instructors, high-flying boosters and high-profile Television celebrities, five-star recruits and tireless NCAA investigators and the youngsters on whom the whole vast enterprise is dependent.

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