Gilbert Gaul is a two time Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist who has now turned his eye toward the business of college football. Now that the new season is underway, we thought it time to bring him on to discuss his fantastic new work, Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football. It is a truly eye-opening account--some say indictment--of the strange intersection of academics, athletics, money, and amateur sports.

Rick Telander is a legend in his own right. A former college football player at Northwestern University, he is also an acclaimed sportswriter and senior sports columnist at the Chicago Sun Times. He, too, wrote a fine book about the business of college football in The Hundred Yard Lie.

These are three great minds that have come together to tackle an issue of terrific cultural importance. As the political season rolls into the fourth quarter, education is surely a great topic of debate. Perhaps the blurring of education and money, employment and amateurism is as much a mirror of where we are as a society as is the carnival that our political process has become.