Big Time

Rus Bradburd was a coach of Division I basketball for 12 years and spent 16 years in the English Department at New Mexico State University. This experience informs the subject of Big Time, a biting satirical account of life at a university dedicated to big time sports, primarily football.

Big Time, the novel, explores what happens when a major university, this one in Colorado, rebrands itself as Coors State University and turns its governance over to Big Time Football and corporate sponsorship. The result is not difficult to imagine given how far down that road many American universities have already traveled.

What Rus Bradburd has produced is a satire and farce built on the extremes of the current state of the athletic/academic relationship. Within this larger critique, Bradburd skewers academic life and its trappings, the hypocrisy surrounding college athletics, and the importance given to college football. The beauty of it all is that Bradburd seldom has to push much beyond the current state of affairs.

Once the rebranding has taken place at Coors State University, the faculty and staff are seldom without an ample supply of the corporate product or any authentic academic integrity. The University President is in service to football, the faculty must maintain a friendly academic relationship with the players, while standards are set by the athletic department.

Uncooperative faculty will not be able to gain tenure, and uncooperative departments will lose faculty positions, budgets will be slashed, and, in the end, at Coors State these departments will be eliminated. Departments are expected to raise their own revenue by performing services related to football.

The result at Coors State is that departments will be assigned to duties surrounding football, and these duties might generate department revenue. The History Department, once it moved from cleaning restrooms to manning the concession stands, is able to bring in as much as $100,000 per game. In addition, some faculty were able to supplement their personal income by offering their books for sale at the concessions stands.

For their uncooperative nature the English Department is eliminated. When several of the English faculty tried to mount a protest by creating a tent encampment on the edge of campus called “The Hamlet,” it was basically ignored.

Other departments do cooperate and come to enjoy some power. The Department of Criminal Justice for example moved naturally into the control of the campus police. The Agriculture Department took over campus lawn and garden maintenance.

Several of Bradburd’s subplots spin around a number of campus characters. Two History professors lead a plot to overturn the corporate identity of Coors State. Eugene Mooney is a quiet but determined opponent to the changes that have taken place. Peter Braverman is a self-proclaimed Sixties radical with experience in The Movement of that decade. Both identify with the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. It was said of Braverman that he could do “righteous indignation better than anyone.” He had an intense hatred of football.

Three other characters play significant roles in the story. The starting quarterback, Trevor Knighton, and a massive lineman from Croatia, Sasha Dimitrievic, ultimately join the revolt. Sasha is an aspiring poet and seeks that major. Layla Sillimon is a new faculty member at Coors State and a poet, one of two making up the rudderless Poetry Department. She too plays an important role in the revolt and in the lives of the two professors and the two football players. She is a bit of a celebrity due to a brief connection to Taylor Swift.  

The plot surrounding the revolt against football goes off the rails, both in terms of the narrative and the revolt. There are some deep dives into absurdity that detract from the story. In the end, Braverman and Layla betray Mooney, and Braverman is made President of Coors State.

Nonetheless, this story does work as satire and many smaller moments in the novel ring true to anyone familiar with college football in America and/or the inner culture of academic life.  Bradburd effectively uses Football Speak, University President Speak, Dean Speak, as well as the languages spoken in departments and committees across the university universe. He has a great ear for these languages and reproduces authentic sounding conversations and proclamations.  

In the end, Bradburd seems to have found no clear conclusion for the story, and he does what is needed to end the novel. After Mooney dies of a heart attack, the others mount one more protest at a football game by disrupting the local version of the wave known as the Groundswell. This protest and the novel end in chaos as Layla and Braverman escape the mob and ride off together into the figurative sunset.