A driving ambition linked Oakland and Kansas City in the 1960s. Each city sought the national attention and civic glory that came with being home to professional sports teams. Their successful campaigns to lure pro franchises ignited mutual rivalries in football and baseball that thrilled hometown fans. But even Super Bowl victories and World Series triumphs proved to be no defense against urban problems in the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Matthew C. Ehrlich tells the fascinating history of these iconic sports towns. From early American Football League battles to Oakland's deft poaching of baseball's Kansas City Athletics, the cities emerged as fierce opponents from Day One. Ehrlich weaves a saga of athletic stars and folk heroes like Len Dawson, Al Davis, George Brett, and Reggie Jackson with a chronicle of two cities forced to confront the wrenching racial turmoil, labor conflict, and economic crises that arise when soaring aspirations collide with harsh realities.Colorful and thought-provoking, Kansas City vs. Oakland breaks down who won and who lost when big-time sports came to town.

Walter Camp made the development of football-indeed, its very creation-his lifelong mission. From his days as a college athlete, Camp's love of the game and dedication to its future put it on the course that would allow it to seize the passions of the nation. Roger R. Tamte tells the engrossing but forgotten life story of Walter Camp, the man contemporaries called "the father of American football." He charts Camp's leadership as American players moved away from rugby and for the first time tells the story behind the remarkably inventive rule change that, in Camp's own words, was "more important than all the rest of the legislation combined." Trials also emerged, as when disputes over forward passing, the ten-yard first down, and other rules became so public that President Theodore Roosevelt took sides. The resulting political process produced losses for Camp as well as successes, but soon a consensus grew that football needed no new major changes. American football was on its way, but as time passed, Camp's name and defining influence became lost to history. Entertaining and exhaustively researched, Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football weaves the life story of an important sports pioneer with a long-overdue history of the dramatic events that produced the nation's most popular game.

Was Alabama's Crimson Tide in 2020 the greatest team of all time? The squad went 13-0 in a pandemic year, scored a combined 107 points against SEC powerhouses LSU and Florida, crushed Ohio State in a National Championship Game 52-24 in a contest that wasn't even that close, and followed it up with another top-rated signing class. Nick Saban called his boys the "ultimate team," but it wasn't just because they kicked the ever-living hell out of everyone on the football field. It was because the team leveraged a power and influence born of Southern pride to push back against a hateful legacy of racism that a populist president was exploiting to divide the nation. At a time when Americans needed real leaders in the face of so much hate, the sports world answered the call and fought back for the soul of the country. In the summer of 2020, the Tide players left their training facility and, led by their celebrated coach, marched to a campus doorway made infamous sixty years earlier by another political demagogue and showed what people can accomplish when they fight together for a just cause in the name of unity. The most powerful force in a state crazy for college football had chosen to make a stand and replace George Wallace's "Segregation forever!" with a different message, written by one of the players: "All lives can't matter until Black lives matter." ? There have been some great football teams through the years, and they all deserve respect. But here's what we know for sure: They all would have been appreciative of what this Alabama team represented, and proud of what it accomplished. The Crimson Tide in 2020 captured something special that moved it beyond the conversation of best ever, and into the place reserved for most important of all time.

Big Ten football fans pack gridiron cathedrals that hold up to 100,000 spectators. The conference's fourteen member schools share a broadcast network and a 2016 media deal worth $2.64 billion. This cultural and financial colossus grew out of a modest 1895 meeting that focused on football's brutality and encroaching professionalism in the game. Winton U. Solberg explores the relationship between higher education and collegiate football in the Big Ten's first fifty years. This formative era saw debates over eligibility and amateurism roil the sport. In particular, faculty concerned with academics clashed with coaches, university presidents, and others who played to win. Solberg follows the conference's successful early efforts to put the best interests of institutions and athletes first. Yet, as he shows, commercial concerns undid such work after World War I as sports increasingly eclipsed academics. By the 1940s, the Big Ten's impact on American sports was undeniable. It had shaped the development of intercollegiate athletics and college football nationwide while serving as a model for other athletic conferences.

In the mid-1960s, George Plimpton talked his way into the Detroit Lions' pre-season training camp and in doing so set the bar for participatory sports journalism. With his characteristic wit, Plimpton recounts his experience of a month practising and living with the team - getting to know the pressures and tensions rookies confront, the hijinks, taking behind the scenes snaps and capturing a host of American football rites and rituals. Plimpton might not have made it as a quarterback, but fifty years after its first publication, Paper Lion remains one of the most insightful and entertaining classics of sports literature.

Brian Kinchen was a thirty-eight-year-old father of four and seventh-grade Bible teacher whose professional football career had been over for three years when he received the call of a lifetime. The New England Patriots needed him to fill in for their injured long snapper for the remainder of the 2003 season and the playoffs. In the hands of Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Marx, Brian's remarkable true story becomes a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit. For all lovers of the game of football, "The Long Snapper" reveals the grit and glory of America's favorite sport.

The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school such as, say, how to read or write. Nor has he ever touched a football. What changes? He takes up football, and school, after a rich, Evangelical, Republican family plucks him from the mean streets. Their love is the first great force that alters the world's perception of the boy, whom they adopt. The second force is the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist turns out to be the priceless combination of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback's greatest vulnerability: his blind side.

2016 Best Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport A human face on the realities of professional football, from the challenges players face after leaving the NFL to the factors that can enable them to continue to find success Is There Life After Football? draws upon the experiences of hundreds of former players as they describe their lives playing the sport and after their football days are over. The "bubble"-like conditions of privilege that NFL players experience while playing, often leave players unprepared for the real world once they retire and must manage their own lives. The book also reveals the difficulties affecting former NFL players in retirement: social isolation, financial concerns, inadequate career planning, psychological challenges, and physical injuries. From players who make reckless and unsustainable financial investments during their very few high-earning years, to players who struggle to form personal and professional relationships outside of football, the stories in the book put a very human face on the realities of professional football. George Koonce Jr., a former NFL player himself, weaves in his own story throughout, explaining the challenges he encountered and decisions that helped him succeed after leaving the sport. Ultimately, Is There Life After Football? concludes that, despite the challenges players face, it is possible for players to find success after leaving the NFL if they have the right support, education, and awareness of what might await them.

At last, the definitive account of the Redskins' championship decade Based on more than ninety original interviews, here is the rollicking chronicle of the famed Washington Redskins teams of the Joe Gibbs years--one of the most remarkable and unique runs in NFL history. From 1981 to 1992, Gibbs coached the franchise to three Super Bowl victories, making the team the toast of the nation's capital, from the political elite to the inner city, and helping to define one of the sport's legendary eras. Veteran sportswriter Adam Lazarus masterfully charts the Redskins' rise from mediocrity (the franchise had never won a Super Bowl and Gibbs's first year as head coach started with a five-game losing streak that almost cost him his job) to its stretch of four championship games in ten years. What makes their sustained success all the more remarkable, in retrospect, is that unlike the storied championship wins of Joe Montana's 49ers and Tom Brady's Patriots, the Redskins' Super Bowl victories each featured a different starting quarterback: Joe Theismann in 1983, the franchise's surprising first championship run; Doug Williams in 1988, a win full of meaning for a majority African American city during a tumultuous era; and Mark Rypien in 1992, capping one of the greatest seasons of all time, one that stands as Gibbs's masterpiece. Hail to the Redskins features an epic roster of saints and sinners: hard-drinking fullback John Riggins; the dominant, blue-collar offensive linemen known as "the Hogs," who became a cultural phenomenon; quarterbacks Williams, the first African American QB to win a Super Bowl, and Theisman, a model-handsome pitchman whose leg was brutally broken by Lawrence Taylor on Monday Night Football; gregarious defensive end Dexter Manley, who would be banned from the league for cocaine abuse; and others including the legendary speedster Darrell Green, record-breaking receiver Art Monk, rags-to-riches QB Rypien, expert general managers and talent evaluators Bobby Beathard and Charley Casserly, aristocratic owner Jack Kent Cooke, and, of course, Gibbs himself, a devout Christian who was also a ruthless competitor and one of the sport's most adaptable and creative coaching minds. A must-read for any fan, Hail to the Redskins builds on Lazarus's interviews with key inside sources to vividly re-create the plays, the players, the fans, and the opponents that shaped this unforgettable football dynasty.

17th September 2020 will mark the centenary of the National Football League. It will reach that landmark as a behemoth, an all-encompassing conglomerate that is the most lucrative sports league in the world - and also the dominant pop culture entity in the United States. The NFL is also making considerable gains worldwide. The International Series has been heading to London since 2007 with incredible sell-outs at the four games in 2019 at Wembley and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadiums. This may lead some to believe the league has always been a roaring success story. History contradicts that reputation, for the NFL of today is a by-product of the humblest beginnings. It is a rocky road filled with genius detours and wrong turns; with heroes and villains; and, most importantly, with thousands of games. Any Given Sunday will detail some of the biggest of those, beginning with the first contest ever played in 1920 and working through to multiple key fixtures from last season. Each chapter will be complemented by countless interviews with some of the game's true legends, from Hall of Fame players and coaches to owners and executives; first-hand accounts from games, including multiple Super Bowls; and, finally, full access to the Pro Football Hall of Fame and NFL Films' extensive archives, including pieces not available to the public. Any Given Sunday takes readers from the boardrooms to the field, into the locker-room and inside the journeys of legends, providing a full snapshot of the NFL's epic first century.

An all-access pass into the powerhouse teams and passionate fanbases of the legendary Southeastern Conference, from one of the most influential men in college football: ESPN's Paul Finebaum.Proud owner of 14 prestigious college football programs, producing seven consecutive national championships, twelve NFL first round draft choices, and a budget that crushes the GDP of Samoa, the Southeastern Conference collects the most coveted ratings, rankings, and revenue of any conference in college football. With its pantheon of illustrious alumni like Bear Bryant, Herschel Walker, Peyton Manning, and Nick Saban, the SEC is the altar at which millions of Americans worship every Saturday, from Texas to Kentucky to Florida.If the SEC is a religion, its deity is radio talk-show host Paul Finebaum. In My Conference Can Beat Your Conference, Finebaum, chronicles the rise of the SEC and his own unlikely path to college football fame. Finebaum offers his blunt wisdom on everything from Joe Paterno and the Penn State scandal to the relevancy of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron's girlfriend, and chronicles the best of his beloved callers, and the worst of his haters.My Conference Can Beat Your Conference is illustrated with 8 pages of color photos.

Seven decades of the intense Steelers-Browns rivalry.Football historians regard the games between the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers as the basis for one of the greatest rivalries in NFL history. Authors Richard Peterson and Stephen Peterson, in telling the engaging story of these teams who play only a two-hour drive along the turnpike from each other, explore the reasons behind this intense rivalry and the details of its ups and downs for each team and its fans. The early rivalry was a tale of Browns dominance and Steelers ineptitude. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Browns-led by Hall of Famers ranging from Otto Graham and Marion Motley in the 1950s to Jim Brown, Bobby Mitchell, and Leroy Kelly in the 1960s-won 32 of the first 40 games played against the Steelers. In the 1970s, the Steelers-led by Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and the Steel Curtain-finally turned things around. When the AFL and NFL merged in 1970, Art Rooney agreed to move the Steelers only if the Browns also moved into the AFC and played in the same division so that their rivalry would be preserved. Despite the fierce rivalry, these cities and their fans have much in common, most notably the working-class nature of the Steeler Nation and the Dawg Pound and their passion, over the decades, for their football teams. Many fans are able to regularly making the 130-mile trip to watch the games. From the first game on October 7, 1950, where Cleveland defeated the Steelers 30-17, to last season's infamous helmet incident with Mason Rudolph and Myles Garrett, the rivalry remains as intense as ever.