Big-Time Sports in American Universities

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108421121
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Big-Time Sports in American Universities by : Charles T. Clotfelter

Download or read book Big-Time Sports in American Universities written by Charles T. Clotfelter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book expands on the argument that spectator sports, despite their problems, have become a central function of American universities.

Sports and Freedom

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195362187
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (953 download)

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Book Synopsis Sports and Freedom by : Ronald A. Smith

Download or read book Sports and Freedom written by Ronald A. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-12-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps more than any other two colleges, Harvard and Yale gave form to American intercollegiate athletics--a form that was inspired by the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry overseas, and that was imitated by colleges and universities throughout the United States. Focusing on the influence of these prestigious eastern institutions, this fascinating study traces the origins and development of intercollegiate athletics in America from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Smith begins with an historical overview of intercollegiate athletics and details the evolution of individual sports--crew, baseball, track and field, and especially football. Then, skillfully setting various sports events in their broader social and cultural contexts, Smith goes on to discuss many important issues that are still relevant today: student-faculty competition for institutional athletic control; the impact of the professional coach on big-time athletics; the false concept of amateurism in college athletics; and controversies over eligibility rules. He also reveals how the debates over brutality and ethics created the need for a central organizing body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which still runs college sports today. Sprinkled throughout with spicy sports anecdotes, from the Thanksgiving Day Princeton-Yale football game that drew record crowds in the 1890s to a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt on football violence, this lively, in-depth investigation will appeal to serious sports buffs as well as to anyone interested in American social and cultural history.

Beer and Circus

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Author :
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 142993669X
Total Pages : 536 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Beer and Circus by : Murray Sperber

Download or read book Beer and Circus written by Murray Sperber and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beer and Circus presents a no-holds-barred examination of the troubled relationship between college sports and higher education from a leading authority on the subject. Murray Sperber turns common perceptions about big-time college athletics inside out. He shows, for instance, that contrary to popular belief the money coming in to universities from sports programs never makes it to academic departments and rarely even covers the expense of maintaining athletic programs. The bigger and more prominent the sports program, the more money it siphons away from academics. Sperber chronicles the growth of the university system, the development of undergraduate subcultures, and the rising importance of sports. He reveals television's ever more blatant corporate sponsorship conflicts and describes a peculiar phenomenon he calls the "Flutie Factor"--the surge in enrollments that always follows a school's appearance on national television, a response that has little to do with academic concerns. Sperber's profound re-evaluation of college sports comes straight out of today's headlines and opens our eyes to a generation of students caught in a web of greed and corruption, deprived of the education they deserve. Sperber presents a devastating critique, not only of higher education but of national culture and values. Beer and Circus is a must-read for all students and parents, educators and policy makers.

The Rise of Gridiron University

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Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700621393
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The Rise of Gridiron University by : Brian M. Ingrassia

Download or read book The Rise of Gridiron University written by Brian M. Ingrassia and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The quarterback sends his wide receiver deep. The crowd gasps as he launches the ball. And when he hits his man, the team's fans roar with approval-especially those with the deep pockets. Make no mistake; college football is big business, played with one eye on the score, the other on the bottom line. But was this always the case? Brian M. Ingrassia here offers the most incisive account to date of the origins of college football, tracing the sport's evolution from a gentlemen's pastime to a multi-million dollar enterprise that made athletics a permanent fixture on our nation's campuses and cemented college football's place in American culture. He takes readers back to the late 1800s to tell how schools embraced the sport as a way to get the public interested in higher learning-and then how football's immediate popularity overwhelmed campuses and helped create the beast we know today. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Ingrassia proves that the academy did not initially resist the inclusion of athletics; rather, progressive reformers and professors embraced football as a way to make the ivory tower less elitist. With its emphasis on disciplined teamwork and spectatorship, football was seen as a "middlebrow" way to make the university more accessible to the general public. What it really did was make athletics a permanent fixture on campus with its own set of professional experts, bureaucracies, and ostentatious cathedrals. Ingrassia examines the early football programs at universities like Michigan, Stanford, Ohio State, and others, then puts those histories in the context of Progressive Era culture, including insights from coaches like Georgia Tech's John Heisman and Notre Dame's Knute Rockne. He describes how reforms emerged out of incidents such as Teddy Roosevelt's son being injured on the field and a section of grandstands collapsing at the University of Chicago. He also touches on some of the problems facing current day college football and shows us that we haven't come far from those initial arguments more than a century ago. The Rise of Gridiron University shows us where and how it all began, highlighting college football's essential role in shaping the modern university-and by extension American intellectual culture. It should have wide appeal among students of American studies and sports history, as well as fans of college football curious to learn how their game became a cultural force in a matter of a few decades.

Billion-Dollar Ball

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143108638
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (431 download)

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Book Synopsis Billion-Dollar Ball by : Gilbert M. Gaul

Download or read book Billion-Dollar Ball written by Gilbert M. Gaul and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York Times Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges and universities. Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments. College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns—Gaul examines in depth the extraordinary financial model that supports college football and the effect it has had not only on other athletic programs but on academic ones as well. What are the consequences when college football coaches are the highest paid public employees in over half the states in an economically troubled country, or when football players at some schools receive ten times the amount of scholarship awards that academically gifted students do? Billion-Dollar Ball considers these and many other issues in a compelling account of how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities.

Cheated

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Author :
Publisher : Potomac Books
ISBN 13 : 164012246X
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis Cheated by : Jay M. Smith

Download or read book Cheated written by Jay M. Smith and published by Potomac Books. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2010 allegations of an utterly corrupt academic system for student-athletes emerged at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, home of the legendary Tar Heels. Written by UNC professor of history Jay Smith and UNC athletics department whistleblower Mary Willingham, Cheated recounts the story of academic fraud in UNC’s athletics department, even as university leaders focused on minimizing the damage in order to keep the billion-dollar college sports revenue machine functioning. Smith and Willingham make an impassioned argument that the “student-athletes” in these programs are being cheated out of what, after all, they are promised in the first place: a college education. Updated with a new epilogue, the paperback edition of Cheated carries the narrative through the defining events of 2017, including the landmark Wainstein report, the findings of which UNC leaders initially embraced only to push aside in an audacious strategy of denial with the NCAA, ultimately even escaping punishment for offering sham coursework. The ongoing fallout from this scandal—and the continuing spotlight on the failings of college athletics, which are hardly unique to UNC—has continued to inform the debate about how the $16 billion college sports industry operates and influences colleges and universities nationwide.

Football U.

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Author :
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 9780472112999
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (129 download)

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Book Synopsis Football U. by : J. Douglas Toma

Download or read book Football U. written by J. Douglas Toma and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toma scores with a balanced look at the use of athletic programs as a tool in "branding" universities and in building community spirit, support, and identity both on campus and off. 11 photos.

Unpaid Professionals

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780691086903
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (869 download)

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Book Synopsis Unpaid Professionals by : Andrew Zimbalist

Download or read book Unpaid Professionals written by Andrew Zimbalist and published by . This book was released on 2001-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that college athletics actually represent a large-scale commercial interest that is hostile to the values of higher education, the author explores the tension between big sports revenues and academics across the board in college sports.

Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University

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Author :
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472021915
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University by : James J. Duderstadt

Download or read book Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University written by James J. Duderstadt and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-04-21 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of domination on campus, college sports' supremacy has begun to weaken. "Enough, already!" detractors cry. College is about learning, not chasing a ball around to the whir of TV cameras. In Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University James Duderstadt agrees, taking the view that the increased commercialization of intercollegiate athletics endangers our universities and their primary goal, academics. Calling it a "corrosive example of entertainment culture" during an interview with ESPN's Bob Ley, Duderstadt suggested that college basketball, for example, "imposes on the university an alien set of values, a culture that really is not conducive to the educational mission of university." Duderstadt is part of a growing controversy. Recently, as reported in The New York Times, an alliance between university professors and college boards of trustees formed in reaction to the growth of college sports; it's the first organization with enough clout to challenge the culture of big-time university athletics. This book is certainly part of that challenge, and is sure to influence this debate today and in the years to come. James J. Duderstadt is President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, University of Michigan.

Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc.

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000737012
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. by : James T. Bennett

Download or read book Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. written by James T. Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. examines the corrupting influence and damaging financial effects of big-time intercollegiate athletics, especially football and to a lesser extent basketball, on American higher education. Including historical and contemporary perspectives, the book traces the growth of intercollegiate sports from largely student-run activities supervised by faculty to the gargantuan, taxpayer-supported spectacles that now dominate many public universities. It investigates the regressive student fees that have helped subsidize big-time sports at public universities and prop up chronically unprofitable athletic departments, as well as the corrosive effects of athletics on the university’s academic enterprise. A review of the alleged salutary effects of massive sports programs, such as spurring alumni donations and student applications, reveals that such benefits are largely illusory, more myth than real. The book also pays special attention to the often prescient, if largely unsuccessful, opponents of these developments, and considers the alternatives to big-time athletics, from abolition to professionalization to club sports. Students, scholars, sports fans, and those interested in learning how big-time football and basketball have cast such an enormous—and often baleful—shadow upon American colleges and universities will profit from this provocative and engagingly written book.

Sports and Freedom

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190281723
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Sports and Freedom by : Ronald A. Smith

Download or read book Sports and Freedom written by Ronald A. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-12-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps more than any other two colleges, Harvard and Yale gave form to American intercollegiate athletics--a form that was inspired by the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry overseas, and that was imitated by colleges and universities throughout the United States. Focusing on the influence of these prestigious eastern institutions, this fascinating study traces the origins and development of intercollegiate athletics in America from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Smith begins with an historical overview of intercollegiate athletics and details the evolution of individual sports--crew, baseball, track and field, and especially football. Then, skillfully setting various sports events in their broader social and cultural contexts, Smith goes on to discuss many important issues that are still relevant today: student-faculty competition for institutional athletic control; the impact of the professional coach on big-time athletics; the false concept of amateurism in college athletics; and controversies over eligibility rules. He also reveals how the debates over brutality and ethics created the need for a central organizing body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which still runs college sports today. Sprinkled throughout with spicy sports anecdotes, from the Thanksgiving Day Princeton-Yale football game that drew record crowds in the 1890s to a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt on football violence, this lively, in-depth investigation will appeal to serious sports buffs as well as to anyone interested in American social and cultural history.

The Game of Life

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400840694
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Game of Life by : James L. Shulman

Download or read book The Game of Life written by James L. Shulman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The President of Williams College faces a firestorm for not allowing the women's lacrosse team to postpone exams to attend the playoffs. The University of Michigan loses $2.8 million on athletics despite averaging 110,000 fans at each home football game. Schools across the country struggle with the tradeoffs involved with recruiting athletes and updating facilities for dozens of varsity sports. Does increasing intensification of college sports support or detract from higher education's core mission? James Shulman and William Bowen introduce facts into a terrain overrun by emotions and enduring myths. Using the same database that informed The Shape of the River, the authors analyze data on 90,000 students who attended thirty selective colleges and universities in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s. Drawing also on historical research and new information on giving and spending, the authors demonstrate how athletics influence the class composition and campus ethos of selective schools, as well as the messages that these institutions send to prospective students, their parents, and society at large. Shulman and Bowen show that athletic programs raise even more difficult questions of educational policy for small private colleges and highly selective universities than they do for big-time scholarship-granting schools. They discover that today's athletes, more so than their predecessors, enter college less academically well-prepared and with different goals and values than their classmates--differences that lead to different lives. They reveal that gender equity efforts have wrought large, sometimes unanticipated changes. And they show that the alumni appetite for winning teams is not--as schools often assume--insatiable. If a culprit emerges, it is the unquestioned spread of a changed athletic culture through the emulation of highly publicized teams by low-profile sports, of men's programs by women's, and of athletic powerhouses by small colleges. Shulman and Bowen celebrate the benefits of collegiate sports, while identifying the subtle ways in which athletic intensification can pull even prestigious institutions from their missions. By examining how athletes and other graduates view The Game of Life--and how colleges shape society's view of what its rules should be--Bowen and Shulman go far beyond sports. They tell us about higher education today: the ways in which colleges set policies, reinforce or neglect their core mission, and send signals about what matters.

Shaping College Football

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Author :
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780815608868
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis Shaping College Football by : Raymond Schmidt

Download or read book Shaping College Football written by Raymond Schmidt and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-18 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Schmidt examines the many factors that were a part of college football's reshaping in the 1920s as the universities became dependent upon the revenue being generated by football, and the sport increasingly became identified as a commercialized, big business activity; all of it being played out against a backdrop of struggle between the academic and athletic factions over control of intercollegiate sport's place in the lives of the students and the university community. This is the most detailed examination ever undertaken of college football's "Golden Era," and the topics discussed range from the shift of power away from the game's pioneering schools, through the real evolution of forward passing, to stadium building and the decade-long struggle over the game's growing over-emphasis that culminated in the legendary Carnegie Report of 1929. Including chapters on college football's class-oriented opposition to professional football during the decade, the rise of the sport at the Catholic colleges and the historically Black colleges, and some of the major scandals and disputes involving the universities, Shaping College Football also contributes to the study of sport and culture.

Pay to Play

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (161 download)

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Book Synopsis Pay to Play by : Lori Latrice Martin

Download or read book Pay to Play written by Lori Latrice Martin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-03-20 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances the debate about paying "student" athletes in big-time college sports by directly addressing the red-hot role of race in college sports. It concludes by suggesting a remedy to positively transform college sports. Top-tier college sports are extremely profitable. Despite the billions of dollars involved in the amateur sports industrial complex, none winds up in the hands of the athletes. The controversies surrounding whether colleges and universities should pay athletes to compete on these educational institutions' behalf is longstanding and coincides with the rise of the black athlete at predominately white colleges and universities. Pay to Play: Race and the Perils of the College Sports Industrial Complex takes a hard look at historical and contemporary efforts to control sports participation and compensation for black athletes in amateur sports in general, and in big-time college sports programs, in particular. The book begins with background on the history of amateur athletics in America, including the forced separation of black and white athletes. Subsequent sections examine subjects such as the integration of college sports and the use of black athletes to sell everything from fast food to shoes, and argue that college athletes must receive adequate compensation for their labor. The book concludes by discussing recent efforts by college athletes to unionize and control their likenesses, presenting a provocative remedy for transforming big-time college sport as we know it.

Unwinding Madness

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Author :
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
ISBN 13 : 0815730039
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (157 download)

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Book Synopsis Unwinding Madness by : Gerald S. Gurney

Download or read book Unwinding Madness written by Gerald S. Gurney and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical look at the tension between the larger role of the university and the commercialization of college sports Unwinding Madness is the most comprehensive examination to date of how the NCAA has lost its way in the governance of intercollegiate athletics—and why it is incapable of achieving reform and must be replaced. The NCAA has placed commercial success above its responsibilities to protect the academic primacy, health and well-being of college athletes and fallen into an educational, ethical, and economic crisis. As long as intercollegiate athletics reside in the higher education environment, these programs must be academically compatible with their larger institutions, subordinate to their educational mission, and defensible from a not-for-profit organizational standpoint. The issue has never been a matter of whether intercollegiate athletics belongs in higher education as an extracurricular offering. Rather, the perennial challenge has been how these programs have been governed and conducted. The authors propose detailed solutions, starting with the creation of a new national governance organization to replace the NCAA. At the college level, these proposals will not diminish the revenue production capacity of sports programs but will restore academic integrity to the enterprise, provide fairer treatment of college athletes with better health protections, and restore the rights and freedoms of athletes, which have been taken away by a professionalized athletics mentality that controls the cost of its athlete labor force and overpays coaches and athletic directors. Unwinding Madness recognizes that there is no easy fix to the problems now facing college athletics. But the book does offer common sense, doable solutions that respect the rights of athletes, protects their health and well-being while delivering on the promise of a bona fide educational degree program.

Marching Toward Madness

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781531018566
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (185 download)

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Book Synopsis Marching Toward Madness by : John LeBar

Download or read book Marching Toward Madness written by John LeBar and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is a thoughtful consideration of the college athlete and whether those athletes should be paid. The authors discuss the history of the student athlete and the ideals that those role models have inspired. As former college coaches, the authors hope to offer their insight into the consequences of paying these student athletes"--

Fourth and Long

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Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476706441
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (767 download)

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Book Synopsis Fourth and Long by : John U. Bacon

Download or read book Fourth and Long written by John U. Bacon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author and Michigan football expert John Back, an analysis of the state of college football: Why we love the game, what is at risk, and the fight to save it. In search of the sport’s old ideals amid the roaring flood of hypocrisy and greed, bestselling author John U. Bacon embedded himself in four college football programs—Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, and Northwestern—and captured the oldest, biggest, most storied league, the Big Ten, at its tipping point. He sat in as coaches dissected game film, he ate dinner at training tables, and he listened in locker rooms. He talked with tailgating fans and college presidents, and he spent months in the company of the gifted young athletes who play the game. Fourth and Long reveals intimate scenes behind closed doors, from a team’s angry face-off with their athletic director to a defensive lineman acing his master’s exams in theoretical math. It captures the private moment when coach Urban Meyer earned the devotion of Ohio State’s Buckeyes on their way to a perfect season. It shows Michigan’s athletic department endangering the very traditions that distinguish the college game from all others. And it re-creates the euphoria of the Northwestern Wildcats winning their first bowl game in decades. Most unforgettably, Fourth and Long finds what the national media missed in the ugly aftermath of Penn State’s tragic scandal: the unheralded story of players who joined forces with Coach Bill O’Brien to save the university’s treasured program—and with it, a piece of the game’s soul. This is the work of a writer in love with an old game—a game he sees at the precipice. Bacon’s deep knowledge of sports history and his sensitivity to the tribal subcultures of the college game power this elegy to a beloved and endangered American institution.