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opinion

The money pit

Most colleges are playing a losing game with athletic spending

By Derrick Z. Jackson

 |  Globe Columnist  

  December 11, 2011

Big-time college sports is the corpulent monster swallowing itself into fatal collapse. The heart of the enterprise, the amateur student-athlete model, is nearly drained of its last blood, flowing instead with multi-billion-dollar television contracts, multi-million-dollar coaches and an idolatrous culture that cowers the most prestigious of college presidents. Instead of banding together to put a halt to the madness, presidents are gripped with a Vegas mentality that has them losing millions of dollars a year of public funds and student fees, gambling they can leapfrog each other for gridiron glory.

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