Hot Dog Money Quotes

“He was my ticket into the Alabama gold mine, reeking with corruption but also overflowing with riches. It was yet another of the worst-kept secrets of college football, how massive the corruption was in Alabama. Not only were players taking money from boosters and financial advisers and agents, but they were doing so in many instances with the blessing of the university and the football program.”
― Guy Lawson, Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports

“Many scholars understand the NCAA as a cartel,” court of appeals judge Frank Easterbrook wrote, allowing that Walters was a “nasty and untrustworthy fellow” but pointing out that reality didn’t exempt college sports from legal scrutiny. “The NCAA depresses athletes’ income—restricting payments to the value of tuition, room, and board, while receiving services of substantially greater worth. The NCAA treats this as desirable preservation of amateur sports; a more jaundiced eye would see it as the use of monopsony power to obtain athletes’ services for less than their competitive value.” The word monopsony said it all: the term describes monopoly powers on the buyer side of the market. In this case, the NCAA was the lone competitor for the purchase of the players’ services, contriving to leave young athletes—many of them Black—like sharecroppers on a plantation, only able to sell their yields to the landowner and compensated in goods sold at the landowner’s store in the form of scholarships.”
― Guy Lawson, Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports

“Consciously harming others and giving himself the moral permission to do so tested Blazer’s interior monologue; he wasn’t a sociopath, and his mother hadn’t raised a liar and a cheat, but he’d developed a toxic unwillingness to admit failure. The blend of arrogance and ease of deception, coupled with Blazer’s knowledge of his players’ lack of financial sophistication, proved too much to resist.”
― Guy Lawson, Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports