Sport has the power to change the world.'' Sports Economics Uncut expresses this insight from Nelson Mandela, exploring sports as a fascinating mirror of the world and a powerful agent of change. In this book, Brian Goff covers subjects ranging from the ebb and flow of racial discrimination, to inequality, law enforcement, managers and risky decisions, club membership, and politics. Much more than merely a review or synthesis, this work extends existing perspectives and explores provocative questions such as: how systematic is racial bias in pro sports today? Is all racial segregation in sports due to racial bias? How much are college athletes really worth, and is league parity really optimal? This book highlights the fascinating paradox of the modest revenues spent on sports but the enormous intangible value of it. The author explains how recent evidence of racial bias in sports actually illustrates how much ground has been gained in society on racial matters; how the scandals of college sports are a built-in feature of a world in which football and basketball athletes are worth millions; how athletic skill can vary widely across and within regions and races, and how this can influence positioning decisions; and how managers reflect both traditional economic views of decision making and more recent behavioral views. While drawing from widespread academic studies, this is a lively presentation accessible to a wide audience, with extensive but easy to digest data. Students and scholars of sports economics, as well as those studying sports analysis or related areas, will find it an engaging and eye-opening read.

No one can deny that sports and business are two of the most potent forces in our culture today. Sport, play, and the terms and phrases that define them, are engrained in our collective psyche, influencing the ways in which we conduct business-as a "game," with rules of engagement, tournaments of competition, the shame that accompanies defeat, and the bragging rights that accrue to the victor. The parallels are ubiquitous; as the NFL's Bill Parcells stated in a Harvard Business Review article, "my guess is that the challenges I've faced are not all that different from the ones that executives deal with every day. People are people, and the keys to motivating them and getting them to perform to their full potential are pretty much the same whether they're playing on a football field or working in an office." From the Ballfield to the Boardroom draws from Brian Goff's expertise as a managerial economist to shed new light on the sports-business connection. Using dozens of examples from across the spectrum of professional and college sports, he analyzes the ways in which key decisions are made on the playing fields and locker rooms and applies these lessons to the corporate context. From the distinctive leadership styles of legendary coaches Tom Landry, Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, and Bobby Knight, among others, to such culturally significant developments as the racial integration of Major League Baseball and the meteoric rise of NASCAR, Goff draws from the world of sports to provide a solid foundation in the managerial arts, including: assessing risk and uncertainty, conducting market and competitive analysis, wooing customers, fostering an innovative culture, managing information andcommunication flows, and resolving labor disputes. The result is an incisive look at the sport of business, with practical insights for successful management at all levels of your organization.

According to commonly repeated reports, wages and personal incomes have stagnated in the U.S. over the last twenty-five years for average Americans. A corollary argument asserts that the combination of flat living standards for the masses and rising standards for a privileged few have created a number of social ills."Spoiled Rotten" presents a simple and contradictory argument: properly measured standards of material well-being have grown for practically all U.S. residents over the last twenty-five years, and this fantastic growth is responsible for a variety of negative social consequences.In developing their ideas about wealth and its influence, Goff and Fleisher look for grass-roots explanations. The problems the authors attribute to the growth in wealth include employment issues such as job selection and security, family issues such as illegitimacy and divorce, rising crime trends, educational issues such as sluggish SAT scores, and others. Further, the authors discuss how wealth has allowed Americans to create problems out of thin air, including many of the supposed environmental dangers, health care expenditures, and safety regulation.Given appropriate space are wealth's many beneficial contributions to social issues. These benefits lead into the authors' final analysis in the book: what to do about wealth's negative effects without destroying its positive impacts?