A detailed expose on the corruption in college football by acclaimed sportswriter Rick Telander, with a foreword by Rick Reilly! In 1989, when Rick Telander first published The Hundred Yard Lie, he proposed that big-time college football should be professionalized. In doing so, Telander was ahead of his time, for the problems that he outlined more than thirty years ago are still relevant today—and in some cases are more severe. In The College Football Problem, a newly revised edition of the 1989 book, Telander reveals that more than thirty years later there still exists the dominance of multimillionaire coaches whose only goal is winning regardless of cost to athletes; the presence of wealthy boosters, board members, and athletic department bigshots who have little regard for the academic side of universities; and, of course, the exploited players themselves—many of whom are impoverished minorities—who too often leave school without degrees or real world working skills but with physical injuries and mental betrayals that often will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Many of these concerns have come to a head in California, where in the Fall of 2019 the governor passed the Fair Pay to Play Act, whereby college athletes can hire agents to help them with business deals. With a new foreword by Rick Reilly, this book frames these longtime issues in a new light and offers solutions from Telander in an attempt to put an end to the corruption once and for all.
Continuing its series of spectacular coffee-table books for the holiday season, Sports Illustrated presents The College Football Book, the ultimate gift for America's most passionate fans. SI launched this series in 2005 with The Football Book, devoted to the professional game. A New York Times best-seller that year, the book has taken root as a perennial, selling more than 200,000 copies to date. Now the editors of Sports Illustrated return to the gridiron, this time to serve the most avid football fans of all. With the best words and pictures SI has to offer, The College Football Book, brings to life the game's unparalleled excitement and pageantry, its legendary players, historic teams and epic rivalries. In 288 pages of the greatest photography and writing available anywhere, The College Football Book spans the sport's history, from its infancy in the 1800s right up to the postseason showdowns of 2008. The book is packed with stunning pictures, award-winning stories, original stats, decade-by-decade all-star teams and iconic artifacts photographed exclusively for this book at the College Football Hall of Fame--the same exciting mix of elements that makes each book in the SI series a must-have for sports fan.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Even the most casual sports fans celebrate the achievements of professional athletes, among them Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Louis. Yet before and after these heroes staked a claim for African Americans in professional sports, dozens of college athletes asserted their own civil rights on the amateur playing field, and continue to do so today. Integrating the Gridiron, the first book devoted to exploring the racial politics of college athletics, examines the history of African Americans on predominantly white college football teams from the nineteenth century through today. Lane Demas compares the acceptance and treatment of black student athletes by presenting compelling stories of those who integrated teams nationwide, and illuminates race relations in a number of regions, including the South, Midwest, West Coast, and Northeast. Focused case studies examine the University of California, Los Angeles in the late 1930s; integrated football in the Midwest and the 1951 Johnny Bright incident; the southern response to black players and the 1955 integration of the Sugar Bowl; and black protest in college football and the 1969 University of Wyoming "Black 14." Each of these issues drew national media attention and transcended the world of sports, revealing how fans--and non-fans--used college football to shape their understanding of the larger civil rights movement.
Now, with this book fans can find out whos on top as a team of blue ribbon athletes, coaches, and journalists in the field come together to choose their favourites. With the tremendous increasing popularity of college football a devoted and large audience of college football lovers are sure to embrace this book for themselves and give as a gift to friends and family alike.
In 2015, when Ohio State took on the University of Oregon in the first College Football Playoff championship game, millions of sports fans tuned in. But back in 1869, when Rutgers University and Princeton University played the first-ever college football game, no one predicted the national spectacle that a college football championship game would become. Author Matt Doeden takes readers on a journey from the disorganized games of the early years to the most recent playoffs to determine the best college team in the nation. Along the way, discover some of the most incredible moments, games, blunders, and statistics in the history of college football championships.
