DI assistant coach-turned-author releases book satirizing modern college athletics

Rus Bradburd’s Big Time, a hilarious and subversive anti-sports novel that skewers the lofty place of athletics on American college campuses, was released by Etruscan Press today.

At Coors State University, the school’s rebrand changes the campus radically when all billion dollars is ticketed for football and basketball. Soon, the engineering professors are expanding the stadium, criminal justice professors are the campus cops, and the history professors sell popcorn at concession stands—until they decide to organize campus protests, 1960s-style. It’s the world turned upside down—yet not very far from the truth at today’s big state schools. The campus protests that arise after Coors Brewing Company’s billion-dollar bailout are at the heart of the offbeat novel Big Time.

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Big Time's author is none other than Rus Bradburd, a former DI basketball assistant from Chicago who famously recruited Tim Hardaway to UTEP. Long retired from coaching, Bradburd spent 16 years as an English professor at New Mexico State University—where he also serves as a TV analyst for the Aggies—and published multiple books while also running the acclaimed Basketball in the Barrio program in El Paso every June.

Bradburd has a timely story with Big Time, it seems, with Jonathan Eig, the Pulitzer Prize winnng author of King: a Life, calling it "a big-time funny book. Rus Bradburd has chosen the perfect target for satire and delivered a sharp, clean hit."

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