How college students are bankrolling the athletics arms race
By Brad Wolverton, Ben Hallman, Shane Shifflett and Sandhya Kambhampati | The Huffington Post
Deep within the stadium, the team gathered for a college football ritual. The marching band gave its cue, and the players bounded through a long tunnel, a blue and white blur, pumping fists and high-fiving students who had gathered to cheer.
For a few moments, it was possible to believe that the team’s enthusiasm would be met by the roar of spectators and the full pageantry of gameday in the deep South. But then the tunnel ended, and the team, the Georgia State Panthers, emerged into the largely empty 70,000-seat Georgia Dome, home of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons.
An announced crowd of 10,252 clustered at midfield clapped politely. But a few minutes after kickoff of this season-opening game, after the home team had fumbled the ball on its opening possession, all the energy had left the building.
