Fourth Down and Inches

Fourth Down and Inches

Author: Carla Killough McClafferty

Publisher: Carolrhoda Books

Published: 2013-09-01

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1467716650

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When the 1905 football season ended, nineteen players were dead and countless others were critically injured. The public was outraged. The game had reached a make-or-break moment—fourth down and inches. Coaches, players, fans, and even the president of the United States had one last chance: change football or leave the field. Football's defenders managed to move the chains. Rule changes and reforms after 1905 saved the game and cleared the way for it to become America's most popular sport. But they didn't fix everything. Today, football faces a new injury crisis as dire as 1905's. With increased awareness about brain injury, reported concussions are on the rise among football players. But experts fear concussions may only be the tip of the iceberg. The injuries are almost invisible, but the stakes couldn't be higher: the brains of millions of young football players across the country. Award-winning author Carla Killough McClafferty takes readers on a bone-crunching journey from football's origins to the latest research on concussion and traumatic brain injuries in the sport. Fourth Down and Inches features exclusive photography and interviews with scientists, players, and the families of athletes who have literally given everything to the game. It's fourth and inches. Can football save itself again?


Fourth Down and Inches

Fourth Down and Inches

Author: Carla Killough McClafferty

Publisher: Carolrhoda Books ®

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1467737372

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When the 1905 football season ended, nineteen players were dead and countless others were critically injured. The public was outraged. The game had reached a make-or-break moment—fourth down and inches. Coaches, players, fans, and even the president of the United States had one last chance: change football or leave the field. Football's defenders managed to move the chains. Rule changes and reforms after 1905 saved the game and cleared the way for it to become America's most popular sport. But they didn't fix everything. Today, football faces a new injury crisis as dire as 1905's. With increased awareness about brain injury, reported concussions are on the rise among football players. But experts fear concussions may only be the tip of the iceberg. The injuries are almost invisible, but the stakes couldn't be higher: the brains of millions of young football players across the country. Award-winning author Carla Killough McClafferty takes readers on a bone-crunching journey from football's origins to the latest research on concussion and traumatic brain injuries in the sport. Fourth Down and Inches features exclusive photography and interviews with scientists, players, and the families of athletes who have literally given everything to the game. It's fourth and inches. Can football save itself again?


Fourth Down in Dunbar

Fourth Down in Dunbar

Author: David A. Dorsey

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813060194

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"Fourth Down in Dunbar tells the story of how one community, plagued by drugs and violence, where many children are fatherless, gives rise to an incredible number of stellar youth athletes. Using [Deion] Sanders as the centerpiece of the story, David Dorsey explores Dunbar's history to show how the same drug culture that ruined so many promising futures also serves as motivation for football success"--


Fourth Down

Fourth Down

Author: Dave Klein

Publisher: Forge Books

Published: 2000-09-15

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1466842873

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Once Ed Buck, sports reporter, and Adam Benson, star quarterback for the Chicago Bears, played football on the same college team. Years later, they are still close friends. In New York for a game against the Giants, Benson hands Buck the biggest story of his career. Gambling on football is one of the country's leading "industries," and the mob's been forcing Benson to throw games. The quarterback has had enough. Sunday, he tells Buck, he's playing to win, and to hell with the mob. After the game, Buck can run with the story. Adam Benson never makes it off the field alive, and Ed Buck suspects his friend was murdered. Buck knows barely enough to convince a police detective to look into Benson's death--but more than enough to set the mob on his tail. As Lt. Gerry Keegan probes the tangled connections between the dead quarterback and the head of an organized crime family, uncovering drug dealing, murder, blackmail, prostitution, and double- and triple-crosses, Ed Buck and his fiancee run for their lives. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


Fourth and Long

Fourth and Long

Author: John U. Bacon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-09-03

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1476706441

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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.


League of Denial

League of Denial

Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0770437567

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.


4th and Fixed

4th and Fixed

Author: Reggie Rivers

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1402252633

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Fix a Super Bowl? I never thought it possible, but 4th and Fixed is so chock-full of NFL skinny that it sweeps you along from the field to the front office and makes you believe. --Frank Deford


When It's Fourth and Long

When It's Fourth and Long

Author: Josh Bidwell

Publisher: Harvest House Publishers

Published: 2007-08-01

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0736936793

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At 23 years old, Josh Bidwell felt as if he were on the top of the world. A stellar college kicking career at the University of Oregon earned him a fourth-round NFL draft pick. But everything seemed to fall apart at the Packers' training camp when he received a diagnosis of aggressive testicular cancer. Now Josh shares his gripping story of overcoming adversity and eventually becoming one of the NFL's leading punters. From his insider's view, Josh describes what life is really like in the high-pressure world of professional sports--and how he is able to maintain a vibrant faith in a seemingly secular environment. He offers an inspiring tribute to those who influenced him along the way, and he provides tremendous motivation to readers who seek to overcome their own adversity or encourage others to become the people God created them to be.


Ain't Nothin' But a Winner

Ain't Nothin' But a Winner

Author: Barry Krauss

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2016-09-15

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 0817358641

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A rollicking memoir from the linebacker at the heart of the most famous Alabama football play of all time No university has won more football championships than Alabama, and Barry Krauss played a key role in one of them. The linebacker’s fourth down stop of Penn State’s Mike Guman in the Sugar Bowl on January 1, 1979, was recently named by ESPN as one of the ten most important plays of the 20th century. The Goal Line Stand, as the play became known, immortalized Krauss among legions of fans. More than twenty-five years later, people still tell him exactly what they were doing and how they felt when he collided in mid-air with Guman that New Year’s Day—and almost never mention his twelve-year career in the NFL. In this entertaining and well-illustrated memoir, Krauss tells of scrimmaging on front lawns with friends as a kid in Pompano Beach, Florida, and of his childhood dream to play for Don Shula. He acknowledges how Coach Bear Bryant tamed his free spirit and shaped him into the football player—and the man—he became. In addition, he emphasizes the importance of team, weaving together the personal stories of his Alabama teammates on the field during the Goal Line Stand, and acknowledges their significant roles in winning the game and the championship. Ain’t Nothin’ But a Winner offers an insider’s look at how a team is built, tested, and becomes a national champion—and how that process sometimes calls upon an individual to rise to the challenge presented by his own personal gut check.