These are some of the types of evidence that he uses to enforce his message: statistics, anecdotes, facts, as well as expert and personal testimonials from various people involved in the college sporting environment.
Right in the beginning he gives us his first anecdote. The author takes us back to a simpler time when he was but a young, pre teen boy. He talks of manual score boards and athletes who played sports, in a true amateur era, for the love of the game. Williamson recollects, " from a courtside perch as an operator of UNC's old manual scoreboard" (601). This is, according to him, when his own "love affair" with these sports began, a time of innocence for both. This is a great tactic employed by Williamson. The reader is drawn to a different time and is given a vivid image of a late fifties game of basketball, a far cry from any modern day college ball game. This helps the reader to become close to the writer and view him in an almost favorable light. This is great as the urges us to take action about the current financial state of college sports.
Williamson uses statistics at regular intervals in the paper. He has some incredible and mind-blowing large numbers with regards to the sums of money that is generated by the major college sports, Williamson says, "the NCAA's lucrative television contracts-an eight-year, $1.7 billion deal with CBS for broadcast rights to the Men's Division I basketball" (602). Some of his figures are equally as startling, such as the number of college athletes that ever end up graduating from their respective colleges. I personally have a few problems with some of the figures that Williamson quotes so regularly in the piece. Not once in the entire article does he give one source of his numbers, nor does he give a date for which financial year when any of these numbers were recorded. One can only assume that these are figures that the author has merely heard and in now repeating.
