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| biggest point spread in college football history: A Companion to American Sport History Steven A. Riess, 2014-03-26 A Companion to American Sport History presents a collection of original essays that represent the first comprehensive analysis of scholarship relating to the growing field of American sport history. Presents the first complete analysis of the scholarship relating to the academic history of American sport Features contributions from many of the finest scholars working in the field of American sport history Includes coverage of the chronology of sports from colonial times to the present day, including major sports such as baseball, football, basketball, boxing, golf, motor racing, tennis, and track and field Addresses the relationship of sports to urbanization, technology, gender, race, social class, and genres such as sports biography Awarded 2015 Best Anthology from the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Spalding's Official Foot Ball Guide , 1922 |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The USA TODAY College Football Encyclopedia 2008-2009 Bob Boyles, Paul Guido, 2008-08-04 The result of 15 years of exhaustive research, this work is the definitive statistical and factual reference for everything related to college football in the past 50 years. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists Mike Gastineau, Art Thiel, Steve Rudman, 2009-04-28 With loyal fans supporting their major sports teams in the Seahawks (NFL), Mariners (MLB) -- plus a rabid fan base for University of Washington jocks -- Seattle is a great place for a sports debate. Local sports-radio talker Mike Gastineau teams up with longtime sportswriters Steve Rudman and Art Thiel to bring Seattle sports history to life with this provocative and enjoyable -- not to mention debatable -- book of lists. They also enlist list contributions by famous players, coaches, and Seattle celebrities including Mike Holmgren, Matt Hasselbeck, Ichiro Suzuki, George Karl, Pearl Jam, Kevin Calabro, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and more. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: If These Walls Could Talk: Seattle Seahawks Dave Wyman, Bob Condotta, Dave Krieg, 2019-10-29 The Seattle Seahawks are perennial contenders, with ten division titles, three conference championships, and, of course, a Super Bowl title to show for it. Dave Wyman, as a former player and current analyst, has gotten to witness more than his fair share of that history up close and personal. Through singular anecdotes only they can tell, as well as conversations with current and past players, this book provides fans with a one-of-a-kind, insider's look into the great moments, the lowlights, and everything in between. Seahawks fans will not want to miss this. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Natural Enemies John Kryk, 2007-08-20 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. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Season of Saturdays Michael Weinreb, 2014-08-19 From an award-winning sports journalist and college football expert: “A beautifully written mix of memoir and reportage that tracks college ball through fourteen key games, giving depth and meaning to all” (Sports Illustrated), now with a new Afterword about the first ever College Football Playoff. Every Saturday in the fall, it happens: On college campuses, in bars, at gatherings of fervent alumni, millions come together to watch a sport that inspires a uniquely American brand of passion and outrage. This is college football. Since the first contest in 1869, the game has grown from a stratified offshoot of rugby to a ubiquitous part of our national identity. Right now, as college conferences fracture and grow, as amateur athlete status is called into question, as a playoff system threatens to replace big-money bowl games, we’re in the midst of the most dramatic transitional period in the history of the sport. Season of Saturdays examines the evolution of college football, including the stories of iconic coaches like Woody Hayes, Joe Paterno, and Knute Rockne; and programs like the USC Trojans, the Michigan Wolverines, and the Alabama Crimson Tide. Michael Weinreb considers the inherent violence of the game, its early seeds of big-business greed, and its impact on institutions of higher learning. He explains why college football endures, often despite itself. Filtered through journalism and research, as well as the author’s own recollections as a fan, Weinreb celebrates some of the greatest games of all time while revealing their larger significance. “Wry, quirky, fascinating...This surely is one of the most enjoyable books of the college football season...Weinreb wrestles in captivating prose with the violence, hypocrisy, and corruption that are endemic to the sport at its most cutthroat level” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland). |
| biggest point spread in college football history: ESPN College Football Encyclopedia Michael MacCambridge, 2005-09 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. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The USA TODAY College Football Encyclopedia 2009-2010 Bob Boyles, Paul Guido, 2009-08 The most comprehensive resource on college football ever published. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Cheating the Spread Albert J. Figone, 2012-10-30 Delving into the history of gambling and corruption in intercollegiate sports, Cheating the Spread recounts all of the major gambling scandals in college football and basketball. Digging through court records, newspapers, government documents, and university archives and conducting private interviews, Albert J. Figone finds that game rigging has been pervasive and nationwide throughout most of the sports' history. The insidious practice has spread to implicate not only bookies and unscrupulous gamblers but also college administrators, athletic organizers, coaches, fellow students, and the athletes themselves. Naming the players, coaches, gamblers, and go-betweens involved, Figone discusses numerous college basketball and football games reported to have been fixed and describes the various methods used to gain unfair advantage, inside information, or undue profit. His survey of college football includes early years of gambling on games between established schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard; Notre Dame's All-American halfback and skilled gambler George Gipp; and the 1962 allegations of insider information between Alabama coach Paul Bear Bryant and former Georgia coach James Wallace Wally Butts; and many other recent incidents. Notable events in basketball include the 1951 scandal involving City College of New York and six other schools throughout the East Coast and the Midwest; the 1961 point-shaving incident that put a permanent end to the Dixie Classic tournament; the 1978 scheme in which underworld figures recruited and bribed several Boston College players to ensure a favorable point spread; the 1994-95 Northwestern scandal in which players bet against their own team; and other recent examples of compromised gameplay and gambling. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Fourth and Long John U. Bacon, 2013-09-03 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. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: A History of College Football in South Carolina Fritz P. Hamer, John Daye, 2009-11-09 The Medicos, the Purple Hurricane, the Seceders- all South Carolina football mascots that long ago drifted into history. From as early as 1889, college football began to take hold of South Carolina. The fans of the state's first intercollegiate game could hardly have foreseen how it would steadily grow from a competition between amateurs into tightly organized teams with well-paid coaches and demanding alumni, all with a passionate desire to win. This volume goes beyond Clemson and Carolina to trace the history of college teams from all over the state, including Wofford, Furman, SC State, Presbyterian College, Erskine, Claflin, The Citadel, MUSC, the College of Charleston, Newberry College, Benedict College and Allen University. Join museum curator Fritz Hamer and longtime South Carolina high school football coach John Daye as they celebrate the state's most notable coaches, players and rivalries, as well as the many unsung heroes who have helped to make the sport a statewide obsession. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: USA Today Index , 1995 |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Rites of Autumn Richard Whittingham, 2001 Chronicles the history of college football from its first games in 1901 through the major tournaments of the twenty-first century. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Yale Football Through the Years Rich Marazzi, 2020-02-05 Chronicling Yale football from its 1872 inception to the present, this volume offers a comprehensive coverage of the most important games, including all Yale-Harvard contests, most Yale-Princeton games, record-making performances, great plays and more. Human-interest anecdotes offer a sidebar to the game or era covered, giving color to the storied history of Yale football. The evolution is traced of rules that transformed a game combining soccer and rugby into the football we know today. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The King of Vegas' Guide to Gambling Wayne Allyn Root, 2006-08-03 The King of Las Vegas and America's premier sports gambler reveals a powerful program for breaking all the rules, beating all the odds, and achieving all your dreams. In The King of Vegas' Guide to Gambling, Wayne Allyn Root of Spike TV's King of Vegas (TM) demonstrates why it is vital to take risks in life—whether in the casino, on the playing field, or in the boardroom. Root lives an American dream: He makes money watching sports on television. In fact, as CEO of GWIN Inc., America's only publicly traded sports-handicapping firm, Root is a self-made millionaire with hundreds of thousands of sports-betting clients and fans. In this book, he reveals the spiritual principles behind his consistently winning hand. Turning the popular conception of the casino denizen on its head, Root shows readers how to concentrate on the risks they take and to cultivate tranquillity in the face of life-defining, stressful moments. Bringing a unique contrarian approach to gambling, Wayne Allyn Root states his maxim of never following the masses and always taking the lead in life, and guides the way to navigate successfully the many gambles life offers. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Forbidden Bookshelf Presents Dan E. Moldea Dan E. Moldea, 2018-10-23 Three exposés of corruption—behind the NFL, the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa, and Ronald Reagan—from an investigative reporter who “never relents” (The Washington Post). Interference: A shocking exposé of widespread corruption and mob influence throughout the National Football League—on the field, in the owners’ boxes, and in the corporate suites. “[A] true and terrifying picture of a business whose movers and shakers seem to have more connections to gambling and the mob than to touchdowns and Super Bowls.” —Keith Olbermann The Hoffa Wars: The definitive portrait of the powerful, corruption-ridden Teamsters union and its legendary president, Jimmy Hoffa—organizer, gangster, convict, and conspirator—whose disappearance in 1975 remains one of the great unsolved mysteries. “Mr. Moldea’s view of [the Hoffa] wars, which reached its greatest intensity when Robert Kennedy was Attorney General, may explain not only Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance, but the assassination of John Kennedy as well.” —The Wall Street Journal Dark Victory: A “smoldering indictment” of the corrupt influences that rescued Ronald Reagan’s acting career, made him millions (resulting in a federal grand jury hearing), backed his political career, and shaped his presidency (Library Journal). “[Moldea] has, through sheer tenacity, amassed an avalanche of ominous and unnerving facts. [Dark Victory is] a book about power, ego, and the American way.” —Los Angeles Times |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The Unforgettable Buzz Earl Shores, Roddy Garcia, Michael Kronenberg, 2013-06 The Unforgettable Buzz is a thoroughly researched and cleverly written study of electric football. Every Baby Boomer who played the game - and that's all of us - will love this book. - Ray Didinger, Pro Football Hall of Fame Sportswriter and NFL Films Emmy Award Winning Writer and Producer This is such a great book. It immediately took me back to those special moments of my childhood. Shores and Garcia have done their homework in opening a sacred portal to the past. - Rick Burton, David B. Falk Professor of Sport Management, Syracuse University The Unforgettable Buzz is the first and only book ever written on the topic of Electric Football. Yet it's about much more than just a game. It's about receiving the best Christmas gift ever - that's what Electric Football means to millions of Baby Boomers who grew up between 1950 and 1980. Authors Earl Shores and Roddy Garcia have spent over a decade carefully weaving the timelines of Electric Football, Baby Boomer culture, and the NFL into perhaps the most complete toy story ever written. With over 300 images and a stunning cover-to-cover design by Marvel Graphic Artist Michael Kronenberg, Christmas morning is always just a page-turn away in The Unforgettable Buzz. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: College Football, U.S.A., 1869-1973 John Dennis McCallum, Charles Hugo Pearson, 1973 |
| biggest point spread in college football history: You Dropped It, You Pick It Up! Jim Paul, 1983 |
| biggest point spread in college football history: A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age Steven A. Riess, 2022-08-31 A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to today. Over this time, world-wide participation in sport has been shaped by economic developments, communication and transportation innovations, declining racism, diplomacy, political ideologies, feminization, democratization, as well as increasing professionalization and commercialization. Sport has now become both a global cultural force and one of the deepest ways in which individual nations express their myths, beliefs, values, traditions and realities. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion and segregation; minds, bodies and identities; representation. Steven A. Riess is Professor Emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University, USA. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Sport set General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Mark Dyreson, and John McClelland |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The Perfect Pass S. C. Gwynne, 2016-09-20 An “excellent sports history” (Publishers Weekly) in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, award-winning historian S.C. Gwynne tells the incredible story of how two unknown coaches revolutionized American football at every level, from high school to the NFL. Hal Mumme spent fourteen mostly losing seasons coaching football before inventing a potent passing offense that would soon shock players, delight fans, and terrify opposing coaches. It all began at a tiny, overlooked college called Iowa Wesleyan, where Mumme was head coach and Mike Leach, a lawyer who had never played college football, was hired as his offensive line coach. In the cornfields of Iowa these two mad inventors, drawn together by a shared disregard for conventionalism and a love for Jimmy Buffett, began to engineer the purest, most extreme passing game in the 145-year history of football. Implementing their “Air Raid” offense, their teams—at Iowa Wesleyan and later at Valdosta State and the University of Kentucky—played blazingly fast—faster than any team ever had before, and they routinely beat teams with far more talented athletes. And Mumme and Leach did it all without even a playbook. “A superb treat for all gridiron fans” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The Perfect Pass S.C. Gwynne explores Mumme’s leading role in changing football from a run-dominated sport to a pass-dominated one, the game that tens of millions of Americans now watch every fall weekend. Whether you’re a casual or ravenous football fan, this is “a rousing tale of innovation” (Booklist), and “Gwynne’s book ably relates the story of that innovation and the successes of the man who devised it” (New York Journal of Books). |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Football Stadiums Lew Freedman, 2018-10-19 Fully updated to include the recent changes to NFL home stadiums, Football Stadiums tells the stories of 140 great stadiums standing across the United States that have hosted pro football or college football play. These are the home fields of NFL franchises and college teams and as such are a source of endless fascination, research and discussion. They carry vivid memories of victories and losses, and remind spectators of their home town or college life. To loyal fans, they are hallowed ground and the even the destination of pilgrimages. -- publisher |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Encyclopedia of Sports in America [2 volumes] Murry R. Nelson, 2008-12-30 Sports and leisure activities serve as a mirror, allowing us to examine the attitudes and values of everyday people. This new reference explores the development and influence of sports in American culture, as well as how sports icons, commercial enterprises, organizations, sporting events, and even fan culture have changed from decade to decade and from era to era, from the foot races of colonial times to the extreme sports of today. Each chapter focuses on key aspects of sports in American culture, including such topics as ethnicity, gender, and economics. Enhanced with numerous sidebars on the movers and shakers, key sporting trends, as well as the controversies that threatened to tear the sports world apart, this insightful reference is ideal for high school and college students who are interested in tracing the evolution of sports and American culture throughout the nation's history. Features include a timeline of important events, numerous photographs, and a bibliography of print and electronic sources for further |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Shake Down the Thunder Murray A. Sperber, 2002-08-13 Sperber. . .tackles the details, great and small, unearthing a treasure. —New York Times Book Review Shake Down the Thunder traces the history of the Notre Dame football program—which has acquired almost mythical proportions—from its humble origins in the 19th century to its status as the paragon of college sports. It presents the true story of the program's formative years, the reality behind the myths. Both social history and sports history, this book documents as never before the first half-century of Notre Dame football and relates it to the rise of big-time intercollegiate athletics, the college sports reform movement, and the corrupt sporting press of the period. Shake Down the Thunder is must reading for all Fighting Irish fans, their detractors, and any reader engaged by American cultural history. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Bet the House Richard Roeper, 2010 During the course of 30 days in early 2009, Richard Roeper risked more than a quarter million dollars on practically every method of gambling in America. This title both celebrates and details the pitfalls and lures through Roeper's stories about his lifelong affair with gambling. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Three and Out John U. Bacon, 2011-10-25 Like the Moneyball of college football, Three and Out blows the lid off one of the sports world's most perplexing mysteries.—Entertainment Weekly Three and Out tells the story of how college football's most influential coach took over the nation's most successful program, only to produce three of the worst seasons in the histories of both Rich Rodriguez and the University of Michigan. Shortly after his controversial move from West Virginia, where he had just taken his alma mater to the #1 ranking for the first time in school history, Coach Rich Rodriguez granted author and journalist John U. Bacon unrestricted access to Michigan's program. Bacon saw it all, from the meals and the meetings, to the practices and the games, to the sidelines and the locker rooms. Nothing and no one was off limits. John U. Bacon's Three and Out is the definitive account of a football marriage seemingly made in heaven that broke up after just three years, and lifts the lid on the best and the worst of college football. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Scorecasting Tobias Moskowitz, L. Jon Wertheim, 2012-01-17 In Scorecasting, University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz teams up with veteran Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim to overturn some of the most cherished truisms of sports, and reveal the hidden forces that shape how basketball, baseball, football, and hockey games are played, won and lost. Drawing from Moskowitz's original research, as well as studies from fellow economists such as bestselling author Richard Thaler, the authors look at: the influence home-field advantage has on the outcomes of games in all sports and why it exists; the surprising truth about the universally accepted axiom that defense wins championships; the subtle biases that umpires exhibit in calling balls and strikes in key situations; the unintended consequences of referees' tendencies in every sport to swallow the whistle, and more. Among the insights that Scorecasting reveals: • Why Tiger Woods is prone to the same mistake in high-pressure putting situations that you and I are • Why professional teams routinely overvalue draft picks • The myth of momentum or the hot hand in sports, and why so many fans, coaches, and broadcasters fervently subscribe to it • Why NFL coaches rarely go for a first down on fourth-down situations--even when their reluctance to do so reduces their chances of winning. In an engaging narrative that takes us from the putting greens of Augusta to the grid iron of a small parochial high school in Arkansas, Scorecasting will forever change how you view the game, whatever your favorite sport might be. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Billion-Dollar Ball Gilbert M. Gaul, 2015-08-25 • 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. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The Big Scrum John J. Miller, 2011-04-12 “The story . . . has as much vigor and passion as Roosevelt himself. It’s a fascinating and thoroughly American tale.” —Candice Millard, New York Times–bestselling author John J. Miller delivers the intriguing, never-before-told story of how Theodore Roosevelt saved American Football—a game that would become the nation’s most popular sport. Miller’s sweeping, novelistic retelling captures the violent, nearly lawless days of late 19th century football and the public outcry that would have ended the great game but for a crucial Presidential intervention. Teddy Roosevelt’s championing of football led to the creation of the NCAA, the innovation of the forward pass, a vital collaboration between Walter Camp, Charles W. Eliot, John Heisman and others, and, ultimately, the creation of a new American pastime. Perfect for readers of Douglas Brinkley’s Wilderness Warrior, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, and Conn and Hal Iggulden’s The Dangerous Book for Boys, Miller’s The Big Scrum reclaims from the shadows of obscurity a remarkable story of one defining moment in our nation’s history. “The first complete account of Roosevelt’s football rescue . . . a great story.” —The Wall Street Journal “Fascinating . . . At a time when a coalition of suburban soccer moms and misguided caretakers of American athletics are hell-bent on watering down the game of football, you should take the time to read this book.” —Sal Paolantonio, ESPN “A richly detailed history of football’s founding . . . a useful primer, introducing us to some of the sport’s most famous pioneers.” —The New York Times “Enjoyable history of a seldom explored turning point in American sports history.” —Booklist |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Sharp Sports Betting Stanford Wong, 2001 Advice on betting sports for beginners to experts. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Death to the BCS Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, Jeff Passan, 2010-10-14 A team of award-winning sports reporters takes down the Great Satan of college sports: the Bowl Championship Series. Every college sport picks its champion by a postseason tournament, except for one: Division I-A football. Instead of a tournament, fans are subjected to the Bowl Championship Series, an arcane mix of polling and mathematical rankings that results in just two teams playing for the championship. It is, without a doubt, the most hated institution in all of sports. A recent Sports Illustrated poll found that more than 90 percent of sports fans oppose the BCS, yet this system has remained in place for more than a decade. Built upon top-notch investigative reporting, Death to the BCS at last reveals the truth about this monstrous entity and offers a simple solution for fixing it. Death to the BCS includes findings from interviews with power players, as well as research into federal tax records, Congressional testimony, and private contracts, revealing: ?The truth behind the Cartel-the anonymous suits who run the BCS and who profit handsomely by protecting it ?The flawed math and corruption that determine which teams participate in the national championship ?How the system hurts competition by perpetuating cupcake schedules ?How mid-major teams are systematically denied a chance to play for the championship ?How a comprehensive sixteen-team playoff plan can solve the problem while enhancing profitability The first book to lay out the unseemly inner workings of the BCS in full detail, Death to the BCS is a rousing manifesto for bringing fairness back to one of our most beloved sports. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Resurrection Jim Dent, 2010-08-31 Jim Dent, author of the New York Times bestselling The Junction Boys returns with the remarkable and inspiring story of one of the biggest comebacks in college football history. In the 1960's, Notre Dame's football program was in shambles. Little did anyone know, help was on its way in the form of Ara Parseghian, a controversial choice for head coach—the first one outside of the Notre Dame family. It was now his responsibility to rebuild the once-proud program and teach the Fighting Irish how to win again. But it was no small task. The men of Notre Dame football were a bunch of unlikelies and oddballs, but Parseghian transformed them into a team: a senior quarterback who would win the Heisman Trophy; a five-foot-eight walk-on who would make first team All-American; an exceptionally rare black player, who would overcome much more than his quiet demeanor to rise to All-American, All-Pro, Hall of Famer, and to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Parseghian would change everything, from the uniforms and pads to the offensive strategy. It would be a huge gamble against great obstacles. But Ara Parseghian had that look in his eye.... New York Times bestselling author Jim Dent chronicles one of the greatest comeback seasons in the history of college football. Once again confirming his position as one of the top sports writers in the country, Dent brings the legends of Notre Dame football to life in an unforgettable story of second chances, determination, and unwavering spirit. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The Big Book of Conflict Resolution Games: Quick, Effective Activities to Improve Communication, Trust and Collaboration Mary Scannell, 2010-05-28 Make workplace conflict resolution a game that EVERYBODY wins! Recent studies show that typical managers devote more than a quarter of their time to resolving coworker disputes. The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games offers a wealth of activities and exercises for groups of any size that let you manage your business (instead of managing personalities). Part of the acclaimed, bestselling Big Books series, this guide offers step-by-step directions and customizable tools that empower you to heal rifts arising from ineffective communication, cultural/personality clashes, and other specific problem areas—before they affect your organization's bottom line. Let The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games help you to: Build trust Foster morale Improve processes Overcome diversity issues And more Dozens of physical and verbal activities help create a safe environment for teams to explore several common forms of conflict—and their resolution. Inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and proved effective at Fortune 500 corporations and mom-and-pop businesses alike, the exercises in The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games delivers everything you need to make your workplace more efficient, effective, and engaged. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Indentured Joe Nocera, Ben Strauss, 2016-02-16 “How can the NCAA blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?” In the four years since Joe Nocera asked those questions in a controversial New York Times column, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has come under fire. Fans have begun to realize that the athletes involved in the two biggest college sports, men’s basketball and football, are little more than indentured servants. Millions of teenagers accept scholarships to chase their dreams of fame and fortune—at the price of absolute submission to the whims of an organization that puts their interests dead last. For about 5 percent of top-division players, college ends with a golden ticket to the NFL or the NBA. But what about the overwhelming majority who never turn pro? They don’t earn a dime from the estimated $13 billion generated annually by college sports—an ocean of cash that enriches schools, conferences, coaches, TV networks, and apparel companies . . . everyone except those who give their blood and sweat to entertain the fans. Indentured tells the dramatic story of a loose-knit group of rebels who decided to fight the hypocrisy of the NCAA, which blathers endlessly about the purity of its “student-athletes” while exploiting many of them: The ones who get injured and drop out because their scholarships have been revoked. The ones who will neither graduate nor go pro. The ones who live in terror of accidentally violating some obscure rule in the four-hundred-page NCAA rulebook. Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss take us into the inner circle of the NCAA’s fiercest enemies. You’ll meet, among others . . . ·Sonny Vaccaro, the charismatic sports marketer who convinced Nike to sign Michael Jordan. Disgusted by how the NCAA treated athletes, Vaccaro used his intimate knowledge of its secrets to blow the whistle in a major legal case. ·Ed O’Bannon, the former UCLA basketball star who realized, years after leaving college, that the NCAA was profiting from a video game using his image. His lawsuit led to an unprecedented antitrust ruling. ·Ramogi Huma, the founder of the National College Players Association, who dared to think that college players should have the same collective bargaining rights as other Americans. ·Andy Schwarz, the controversial economist who looked behind the façade of the NCAA and saw it for what it is: a cartel that violates our core values of free enterprise. Indentured reveals how these and other renegades, working sometimes in concert and sometimes alone, are fighting for justice in the bare-knuckles world of college sports. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Trading Bases Joe Peta, 2014-03-04 An ex–Wall Street trader improved on Moneyball’s famed sabermetrics and beat the Vegas odds with his own betting methods. Here is the story of how Joe Peta turned fantasy baseball into a dream come true. Joe Peta turned his back on his Wall Street trading career to pursue an ingenious—and incredibly risky—dream. He would apply his risk-analysis skills to Major League Baseball, and treat the sport like the S&P 500. In Trading Bases, Peta takes us on his journey from the ballpark in San Francisco to the trading floors and baseball bars of New York and the sportsbooks of Las Vegas, telling the story of how he created a baseball “hedge fund” with an astounding 41 percent return in his first year. And he explains the unique methods he developed. Along the way, Peta provides insight into the Wall Street crisis he managed to escape: the fragility of the midnineties investment model; the disgraced former CEO of Lehman Brothers, who recruited Peta; and the high-adrenaline atmosphere where million-dollar sports-betting pools were common. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: ESPN Sports Almanac 1999 Gerry Brown, Michael Morrison, 1998-11-05 ESPN has taken the original Information Please Sports Almanac, known for its thorough stats, compelling facts, and commentary, and added ESPN's unique voice, point of view, and contributions of network personalities. Taking on the witty quick-hits tone ESPN is famous for, the new ESPN almanac includes Inside the Numbers statistics, expanded quotes, rule changes, ESPN coverage of the top 40 stories and personalities of the year--with continued annual coverage of college, pro, international and Olympic Sports, bizarre sports occurrences, Hall of Fame awards, Who's Who, parks and arenas, business and media, plus much, much more. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The Wizard of Odds Charley Rosen, 2002-12-03 In The Wizard of Odds, renowned and best-selling basketball writer Charley Rosen brings us for the first time the full life story of Jack Molinas, one of the greatest basketball players of his era, a man whose gambling addiction and hubris caused his ultimate demise. Drawing on numerous, previously unavailable first-person accounts, including Jack Molinas’s own journal and trial transcripts, Rosen presents the true saga of a man who perhaps better than anyone around him understood the weaknesses of the system in which he lived—so much so that he convinced himself that he could manipulate that system to his advantage with total impunity, in a life’s journey that took him from NBA play to the Mafia and the pornographic film industry, and to an ultimate tragic destiny. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. James Bennett, 2019-11-20 Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. examines the corrupting influence and damaging financial effects of big-time intercollegiate athletics, especially football and to a lesser extent basketball, on American higher education. Including historical and contemporary perspectives, the book traces the growth of intercollegiate sports from largely student-run activities supervised by faculty to the gargantuan, taxpayer-supported spectacles that now dominate many public universities. It investigates the regressive student fees that have helped subsidize big-time sports at public universities and prop up chronically unprofitable athletic departments, as well as the corrosive effects of athletics on the university’s academic enterprise. A review of the alleged salutary effects of massive sports programs, such as spurring alumni donations and student applications, reveals that such benefits are largely illusory, more myth than real. The book also pays special attention to the often prescient, if largely unsuccessful, opponents of these developments, and considers the alternatives to big-time athletics, from abolition to professionalization to club sports. Students, scholars, sports fans, and those interested in learning how big-time football and basketball have cast such an enormous—and often baleful—shadow upon American colleges and universities will profit from this provocative and engagingly written book. |
| biggest point spread in college football history: The League That Didn't Exist Gary Webster, 2018-11-09 The All-American Football Conference was the only challenger to the NFL (except for the American Football League of the 1960s) to survive more than two seasons in competition with the established league. It ultimately failed to achieve its goal of a peaceful coexistence with the NFL and folded in 1949. Its Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers, which were absorbed by the NFL in 1950, are still in business. This book takes a brief look at all of the NFL's challengers (and would-be challengers) from 1926 to 1945. It looks particularly at the All-American Conference, which overcame obstacles that proved too difficult for others and opened the 1946 season with teams on the East Coast, in the Midwest, on the West Coast, and in the deep South, making it a truly All-American enterprise. Each season and off-season is examined in detail. |
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