This volume, that Jack Pardee terms a dissertation on six-man football, is not only the definitive rule book for the sport, but includes a thorough sixty-five-year history of Texas six-man competition, the teams that have played, and the coaches who have developed and led them. Because of the continual sprinting, dodging, and aggressive contact demanded in every one of the forty minutes of play, six-man games are won on conditioning. For this reason, the book includes a chapter titled Getting the Team Ready Physically. Strategies for offense and defense are detailed, including the O'Brien Wing Set and the O'Brien Veer, with input, also, for specialty teams. The playbook of over 250 offensive plays from various Texas six-man offensive formations will prove useful to those who compete in the game of six-man football.
“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.
Fantasy Football's Big Six brings you a complete collection of draft tips and strategies from six of the most successful fantasy football players in the world! Content covers all types of fantasy football leagues including redraft, salary cap, auction, IDP, and dynasty/keeper leagues.
"Haywood Harris and Gus Manning, who together represent more than one hundred years of following the Vols, conducted dozens of interviews and combed through countless newspaper articles and picture collections to tell this story. In these pages, the reader will encounter demanding but fair-minded coaches - from the legendary Bob Neyland to Doug Dickey and Phillip Fulmer - who guided their teams to the national spotlight, as well as the many outstanding players whose running, passing, kicking, blocking, and tackling made the difference in game after game."--BOOK JACKET.
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.
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.
