Commercialization Of College Football Michael Oriard Sparknotes

The book by Michael Oriard that I am analyzing is an in-depth analysis itself of college football from the 1960’s to today’s landscape. Oriard has an introduction, and two parts that separate the books different ideas that he is tying together throughout the book. Oriard uses the introduction to explain how college football became commercialized, the first part of the book to explain the race relations of the sport, and the second part of the book to look at its commercialization specifically after 1973. The introduction of the book breaks up college football’s commercialization into two causes. The first being something that Oriard referred to as the revolt of the black athlete in the 1960’s. Oriard specifically mentions a time in America

He mentions reasons such as coaches going on to earn multi-million dollar salaries at the top programs, as opposed to the meager salaries that the were earning in the 60’s. Things such as merchandising, and television rights and others have led to college football becoming a huge market all to its own. The amount of merchandise that universities sell marketing their football programs have increased exponentially since the modest days of the 60’s. Oriard dives into how this commercializing of the college football game has almost entirely wiped out the athlete aspect of the student-athlete. He mentions how college football players are generally just using it as a way to the NFL for them and days with great salaries. The great contradiction is that everyone sees and complains about these issues that plague college football and take away its amateur status, but nobody does anything about it as long as the benefits are still there for their team or program. Oriard makes the biggest turning point for big time college football being the enacting of the one-year scholarship In 1973. The one-year scholarship came at the discretion of the coach, and it gave the coach complete power of the athlete. “The one-year scholarship, backed by the mindset that it represents, exposed so-called student-athletes to the mounting pressures of an increasingly commercialize sport while denying them a share in its new bounty,” (Oriard,