Think new rules have screwed up college sports? Satiric ‘Big Time’ shows their effect on schools

In an age when name, image and likeness (NIL) deals for college athletes have turned rosters into revolving doors, so that you barely know who’ll be the quarterback next season, fans may be wondering what’s next.

Rus Bradburd’s novel “Big Time” may contain the satirical answer.

Welcome to Coors State University in Colorado, where the English department has been eliminated, agriculture professors reseed and groom the stadium’s turf and Criminal Justice profs provide security on game days.

Coors State has just become the first school to accept a lucrative naming-rights deal to not only change the name of the stadium, but of the entire university.

The aptly named Silver Bullets rule the school, and professors must run any football players’ homework assignments by the coaches first. The head coach will select the new university president, who, while the football budget balloons, will be forced to act as his own receptionist, due to cuts in the department.

History professors Eugene Mooney and Peter Braverman are reduced to selling popcorn (alongside their academic books) on game days at the stadium, from where our two heroes concoct ideas to subvert athletics and get academics back in good standing. Problem is, they have to play by football’s rules all while leading an at-times hilarious rebellion involving a popular new poetry professor, Layla Sillimon, and two football players, quarterback Trevor Knight and his hulking center from Croatia, Sasha Dimitrievic.

Bradburd seems well-suited to write this parody turning higher education upside-down. He spent 14 seasons as a Division I men’s basketball coach at University of Texas El Paso and New Mexico State University before becoming a creative writing instructor and English professor at the latter. “Big Time” is his fifth book and first novel. So he’s seen both the academic and athletic worlds from inside-out.

In “Big Time,” he’s turned to humor and satire to make a statement on the growing power athletics has obtained in the college universe, especially football. At rebranded Coors State, non-revenue sports have been cut, leaving just football and men’s basketball.

“I’m professor Eugene Mooney and I can no longer in good conscience allow our fine university to be a sports factory whose sole purpose is to entertain us with winning teams,” Mooney says at halftime of a basketball game after a plot to get him a microphone and a spotlight to turn the tide against athletics quickly goes awry.

The pep band strikes up the blaring fight song, drowning him out, the players emerge from their locker rooms for second-half warmups and before you know it Mooney is dunked on and knocked out underneath the basket, catching a knee to his forehead and quickly ending the protest. Everywhere Mooney and Braverman turn, Football with a capital “F” is their foil.

After the poet Sillimon is put on probation by football coach Tom Maniscalco for instigating a riot with a subversive slam poetry reading, she emails the coach to protest, but it’s quickly bounced back.

“Due to the high volume of fan mail directed to the coaches, please be patient in awaiting your response. Don’t forget Coors State memorabilia is available in every building on campus.”

Satire bites hardest when it’s seemingly inappropriate and Bradburd takes big chunks out of the upside-down situation at Coors State. “Big Time” poses questions of allegiance, loyalty and integrity in academics and athletics, ultimately asking: Are you a team player?

Eddie Chuculate is a multiplatform editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune. He’s the author of two books, the young adult memoir, “This Indian Kid,” and story collection, “Cheyenne Madonna.”

Big Time

By: Rus Bradburd.

Publisher: Etruscan Press, 292 pages, $17.