Rus Bradburd takes a satirical look at the financial divide between college athletics, academics

Coors beer and sports — especially football and men’s basketball — rule at Coors State University, a fictional Colorado school in Rus Bradburd’s new provocative satirical novel “Big Time.”

Besides naming rights, the two sports receive $1 billion. School funding for academics is zero, so departments have to fend for themselves.

The History Department, for example, hustles for income to cover faculty salaries by selling soda, candy, pickles and popcorn at 15 concessions stands during Coors State’s home football games.

In a way, that’s good news for the department faculty. It will no longer have to clean up the stadium bathrooms.

Some other department’s faculty will have to. But not the English Department. It refused to switch with History to take over bathroom cleaning duties. So its existence is in jeopardy.

Rus Bradburd takes a satirical look at the financial divide between college athletics, academics

With its income down precipitously, English is reduced to two professors and renamed the Poetry Department.

Poetry’s stadium job will be “a humble new gig hawking game programs until kickoff.”

One of the poet-professors is Wilson Keats, who, it is rumored, is ready to retire. The other is a new hire, poet Layla Sillimon.

She becomes a lead character along with veteran History professors Eugene Mooney and Peter Braverman, presumed one-time ’60s radicals.

The school’s Computer Science Department operates the stadium’s Jumbotron during football games. The Consumer Science Department’s professors sweep up after games. Environmental Studies Department professors separate out the recyclables from the trash.

Not all academic departments are losing teachers. Enrollment is up in the Criminal Justice Department because many athletes are majoring in Criminal Justice.

Its professors police the campus and work the football and men’s basketball games as ushers in bright yellow vests.

There’s no doubt about the financial health of the Silver Bullets football team. And as you might expect, football’s staff hiring is on the upswing.

Under the head coach are 25 assistant coaches plus eight strength coaches, six directors of football operations, four film coordinators, three dietitians, two steroid counselors, two social media advisors and an academic coordinator. And that’s not counting a dozen graduate assistants.

Coors State’s football team is undefeated as it heads to a post-season Fiesta Bowl game against the University of Southern California.

The novel’s narrative shifts sharply when quarterback Trevor Knighton and monstrous Croatian-born center Sasha Dimitrievic rethink their roles as athletes feted with free food, free beer, free board, free wheels. They’re reconsidering the value of academic pursuits.

Trevor is attracted to the Mexican history class that Mooney teaches because his mother is Mexican. Sasha reveals his attraction to Croatian poetry and his family’s love for it. He signs up for a Sillimon poetry workshop.

With Keats’ death, Sillimon is atop a single-person Poetry Department.

She accepts a handful of men’s basketball players in her class and appreciates their striving to show her their literary abilities.

Unlikely as it may seem, Braverman becomes the interim school president and wonders how long a one-professor Poetry Department can endure. He has an idea: Place Poetry under the Criminal Justice Department.

How does that fit? Braverman tells Mooney he’s designed a new class called Poets in Prison, focusing on the works of Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine and Albuquerque’s Jimmy Santiago Baca.

In “Big Time” the power of football — and the power of the quarterback — extend beyond the playing field. At the urging of football coach Tom Maniscalco, Trevor visits the school president, Martin Cardly.

The president is so lowly regarded that he doubles as his own receptionist.

Trevor tells Cardly that he’s endorsing Maniscalco for the soon-to-be open head football coach job. The president, honored by Trevor’s request, duly takes note and names Maniscalco as the new head coach, with a salary in the millions.

However, Cardly doesn’t last long as president. Maniscalco fires him for remarks Cardly makes to the team the coach thinks is disloyal. Cardly doesn’t give his best booster speech. Criminal Justice professors take Cardly away in handcuffs.

A word about some of Coors State’s other sports. Teams such as baseball, tennis and women’s basketball are considered “hobby sports.”

They get none of the largesse from the Coors branding.

Braverman lends his own ideas to branding. He says he’s meeting with a potential corporate sponsor interested in branding the History Department. It would be renamed the History Channel History Department.

There’s more. He’s going to meet with Crayola crayon company officials to pitch them about being a corporate sponsor of the school’s Art Department.

The novel isn’t all sarcasm. It gives readers plenty of food for thought about what funding for college sports is becoming. Or has it already become?

Bradburd, the author, is a retired professor of creative writing from New Mexico State University. For 14 years, he was an assistant basketball coach at NMSU and at the University of Texas at El Paso. (PS: The NMSU football team makes a cameo appearance in “Big Time.”)