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The Economics of Intercollegiate Sports By Randy R. Grant, John Leadley, and Zenon Zygmont World Scientific Press (2008), 535 pp.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the most dominant institution organizing collegiate and amateur athletics in the United States and potentially the world. The NCAA, founded in 1906, is composed of more than 1,000 schools, organizes competition for 40 sports, and coordinates the athletic competitions of more than 90 championships. As the commercial shown during the men's Division I postseason basketball tournament (March Madness) states, the NCAA organizes competitions for more than 300,000 student athletes, most of which will be going pro in something other than sports.
While this institution is important and central to the study of sport, the authors of this book are correct in their assertion that there are no existing textbooks that could be used for a course focused on understanding the NCAA. The authors' goal, in addition to satisfying their "own desire for a textbook covering the economics of intercollegiate sports" was to write a book that would provide professors and students with "new information and insights" about the economics of intercollegiate sports. The desired audience for the textbook is a stand-alone course in the economics of intercollegiate sports, or as a text representing the collegiate portion of a "broader sports economics class." It is with this goal in mind, that I review this textbook.
First the good: the book is extremely comprehensive with more than 530 pages of material divided among nine chapters. The first chapter, on the history of the NCAA, covers a lot of ground-starting with...