One of the most colorful and successful football coaches of the last half-century is ready to tell his story for the first time. Howard Schnellenberger learned his trade from two of the all-time greats, Paul "Bear" Bryant and Don Shula, winning championships with each mentor. Schnellenberger then took the football torch that nominated him for the College Football Hall of Fame.
The game of American football may be the greatest team sport that exists. It epitomizes the need of a "team" first approach to achieve the desired success. Success is often measured as the hoisting of a championship trophy, which involved a journey that required discipline, perseverance, sacrifice, and hard work. These traits are the backbone of success in football, but more importantly they are the backbone or blueprint for success in life. The Science of American Football provides an in-depth discussion on the physiology of the game of American football, including the physiological strain associated with playing in various environmental extremes. Acclimatization, preparation, and medical issues associated with each of these environmental extremes are discussed as well as medical issues occurring during the athlete’s playing career (common sites of injury) and potential risks arising post-career (e.g. neurological dysfunction, arthritic joints, obesity). The book goes on to consider aspects of player selection and preparation, including discussion of evidence-based physical conditioning programs, appropriate nutrition, and specific dietary supplementation for the American football player. The Science of American Football is the first book to focus on the physiology, science, and medical issues associated with the game of American football and will be key reading for students of coaching and exercise science as well as those with a keen interest in understanding the science of American football, such as coaches and players.
• A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 • “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.
Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M's Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White's sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.
"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.
Provides coaches of 8- to 14-year-olds with tools to help their players learn and enjoy the game of football. Endorsed by American Youth Football, the largest football organization in the world, with over 400,000 participants and 77,000 coaches. Fundamentals of offense, defense, and special teams are covered in depth. Topics include communicating with and handling players, planning and conducting practices, and providing basic first aid. Includes enhanced section about player safety on the field, with new information on concussions from the CDC. Instruction is supported with nearly 75 drills, over 65 photos and illustrations, games and coaching tips.
The identification and development of talented young players has become a central concern of football clubs at all levels of the professional game, as well as for national and international governing bodies. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey and assessment of youth development programmes in football around the world, to highlight best practice, and to offer clear recommendations for improvement. The book draws on original, in-depth research at eight elite professional football clubs, including Barcelona, Ajax and Bayern Munich, as well as the French national football academy at Clairefontaine. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, including psychology, coaching and management studies, and covers every key topic from organisational structures, talent recruitment and performance analysis to player education and welfare. Written by two authors with extensive experience in English professional football, including five Premiership clubs, this book is important reading for any student, researcher, coach, administrator or academy director with an interest in football, youth sport, sports development, sports coaching or sport management.
