The System

The System PDF Author: Jeff Benedict
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0345803035
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year NCAA football is big business. Every Saturday millions of people file into massive stadiums or tune in on television as "athlete-students" give everything they've got to make their team a success. Billions of dollars now flow into the game. But what is the true cost? The players have no share in the oceans of money. And once the lights go down, the glitter doesn't shine so brightly. Filled with mind-blowing details of major NCAA football scandals, with stops at Ohio State, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, BYU, LSU, Texas A&M and many more, The System explores and exposes the complex, and perhaps broken, machine that churns behind the glamour of college football. With a New Afterword.

The System

The System PDF Author: Jeff Benedict
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0345803035
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year NCAA football is big business. Every Saturday millions of people file into massive stadiums or tune in on television as "athlete-students" give everything they've got to make their team a success. Billions of dollars now flow into the game. But what is the true cost? The players have no share in the oceans of money. And once the lights go down, the glitter doesn't shine so brightly. Filled with mind-blowing details of major NCAA football scandals, with stops at Ohio State, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, BYU, LSU, Texas A&M and many more, The System explores and exposes the complex, and perhaps broken, machine that churns behind the glamour of college football. With a New Afterword.

Billion-Dollar Ball

Billion-Dollar Ball PDF Author: Gilbert M. Gaul
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143108638
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
“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.

Bowled Over

Bowled Over PDF Author: Oriard
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458782352
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
In this compellingly argued and deeply personal book, respected sports historian Michael Oriard--who was himself a former second-team All-American at Notre Dame--explores a wide range of trends that have changed the face of big-time college football and transformed the role of the student-athlete. Oriard considers such issues as the politicizati...

Natural Enemies

Natural Enemies PDF Author: John Kryk
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1589793307
Category : Sports rivalries
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Called the "definitive history of the rivalry" by the Chicago Tribune, this updated history of the classic tilt is much more than just the recounting of old games. The fates of Michigan and Notre Dame have been intertwined since that cold November day in 1877 when the Wolverines literally taught the game of football to an eager group of Notre Dame students. Richly illustrated and now including games through the 2006 season, Natural Enemies weaves these two chronologies together to produce a college rivalry book like no other.

College Football

College Football PDF Author: John Sayle Watterson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421441578
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 772

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Book Description
The rules of the game have changed in the past hundred years, but human nature has not. "In March [1892] Stanford and California had played the first college football game on the Pacific Coast in San Francisco . . . The pregame activities included a noisy parade down streets bedecked with school colors. Tickets sold so fast that the Stanford student manager, future president Herbert Hoover, and his California counterpart, could not keep count of the gold and silver coins. When they finally totaled up the proceeds, they found that the revenues amounted to $30,000—a fair haul for a game that had to be temporarily postponed because no one had thought to bring a ball!"—from College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, Chapter Three In this comprehensive history of America's popular pastime, John Sayle Watterson shows how college football in more than one hundred years has evolved from a simple game played by college students into a lucrative, semiprofessional enterprise. With a historian's grasp of the context and a novelist's eye for the telling detail, Watterson presents a compelling portrait rich in anecdotes, colorful personalities, and troubling patterns. He tells how the infamous Yale-Princeton "fiasco" of 1881, in which Yale forced a 0-0 tie in a championship game by retaining possession of the ball for the entire game, eventually led to the first-down rule that would begin to transform Americanized rugby into American football. He describes the kicks and punches, gouged eyes, broken collarbones, and flagrant rule violations that nearly led to the sport's demise (including such excesses as a Yale player who wore a uniform soaked in blood from a slaughterhouse). And he explains the reforms of 1910, which gave official approval to a radical new tactic traditionalists were sure would doom the game as they knew it—the forward pass. As college football grew in the booming economy of the 1920s, Watterson explains, the flow of cash added fuel to an already explosive mix. Coaches like Knute Rockne became celebrities in their own right, with highly paid speaking engagements and product endorsements. At the same time, the emergence of the first professional teams led to inevitable scandals involving recruitment and subsidies for student-athletes. Revelations of illicit aid to athletes in the 1930s led to failed attempts at reform by the fledgling NCAA in the postwar "Sanity Code," intended to control abuses by permitting limited subsidies to college players but which actually paved the way for the "free ride" many players receive today. Watterson also explains how the growth of TV revenue led to college football programs' unprecedented prosperity, just as the rise of professional football seemed to relegate college teams to "minor league" status. He explores issues of gender and race, from the shocked reactions of spectators to the first female cheerleaders in the 1930s to their successful exploitation by Roone Arledge three decades later. He describes the role of African-American players, from the days when Southern schools demanded all-white teams (and Northern schools meekly complied); through the black armbands and protests of the 60s; to one of the game's few successful, if limited, reforms, as black athletes dominate the playing field while often being shortchanged in the classroom. Today, Watterson observes, colleges' insatiable hunger for revenues has led to an abuse-filled game nearly indistinguishable from the professional model of the NFL. After examining the standard solutions for reform, he offers proposals of his own, including greater involvement by faculty, trustees, and college presidents. Ultimately, however, Watterson concludes that the history of college football is one in which the rules of the game have changed, but those of human nature have not.

Mrs. Coach

Mrs. Coach PDF Author: Kathy Kronick
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1462856500
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
Mrs. Coach is a true story about the life of a college football coach and his family. The excitement of meeting celebrities, dealing with the media, and the highs and lows of winning and losing, are all covered in this book. If you have ever played any sport, attended any games, or realized the hardships of frequent moving to a new home, you will enjoy the drama and the humor contained in Mrs. Coach. Every avenue of the college athletic world is covered in this cant put it down book.

Fourth and Long

Fourth and Long PDF Author: John U. Bacon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476706441
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
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.

ESPN College Football Encyclopedia

ESPN College Football Encyclopedia PDF Author: Michael MacCambridge
Publisher: ESPN
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1654

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Book Description
The most comprehensive reference book ever assembled on the history of college football From South Bend, Indiana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, Palo Alto, California, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Tallahassee, Florida, college football attracts the most dedicated fans in all of sports. This book is their Biblea rich and exhaustive reference guide to the games history, tradition, and lore. Based on three years of research by the nations foremost college football experts, the book features: lCapsule histories for each of the Division 1-A programs, the Ivy League schools, and the historically black colleges lYear-by-year schedules and scores for each school lStatistical leaders from each school lFight-song lyrics lBox scores for every bowl game ever played lWeekly AP and UPI polls dating back to 1936 lA four-color insert illustrating the evolution of each schools helmet design lEssays by the games top wordsmiths, including Dan Jenkins, Beano Cook, Chris Fowler, and more. lAnd a lively round-table discussion on the state of the game with ESPNs popular GameDay team (Fowler, Lee Corso, and Kirk Herbstreit). Packed with tables and charts and designed in an easy-to-read style, the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia is sure to dazzle even the most knowledgeable fan.

Meat Market

Meat Market PDF Author: Bruce Feldman
Publisher: ESPN
ISBN: 1933060689
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
"One of the most insightful books ever written about college football." - The New York Times "Easily among the best sports books of the new millennium." - Paul Finebaum, columnist and radio host In this unprecedented look at college football’s secret season, Bruce Feldman rips the cover off the game’s frenzied pursuit of raw talent, taking you deep inside the SEC war room of recruiting legend Ed Orgeron,the combustible Cajun who helped build national championship teams at the University of Miami and at USC. In a stunning, blow-by-blow account of the year leading up to National Signing Day 2007, the award-winning journalist shadows Orgeron and his Ole Miss assistants as they set about hunting high school students, pleading, plotting, and inventing ways to lure them to their sleepy Oxford campus. Packed with candid confessions and outrageous off-the-field action, Meat Market makes what happens on the field seem almost tame by comparison.

College Football Traditions and Rivalries

College Football Traditions and Rivalries PDF Author: Morrow Gift
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062790943
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
A must-have for football fans of all ages, this handsomely designed gift book is a comprehensive illustrated guide to the greatest traditions and rivalries in college football. Every Saturday each fall, millions of Americans watch their favorite college teams take to the gridiron, battling to make it to the coveted national championship bowl game in January. From the Cornhuskers of the University of Nebraska to the Nittany Lions of Penn State, the USC Trojans to Alabama’s Crimson Tide, the University of Michigan Wolverines to the Clemson Tigers, each school has its own traditions, trivia, and rivalries. This concise, illustrated handbook is a collection of the past and present lore of college football’s major teams for both novices and diehard followers alike. Focusing on the top schools from each division, this handy guide contains original full-color illustrations that showcase the biggest traditions and rivalries in the sport, along with a short description and fun trivia. Learn about the pink visitor’s locker room at Iowa State, the prisoner exchange preceding the annual Army–Navy showdown, and the University of Miami team’s dramatic smoke-filled stadium entrance. The book also includes a special section of quick facts on some other schools that weren’t fully featured. Fascinating and informative, filled with seventy full-color illustrations, College Football Traditions and Rivalries is a must for every college football fan.