Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era

good

Needed for class, came in very quickly

After a brief history of college football and the founding of the NCAA, Oriard focuses on the history of college football from the 1960s-2000s and details how the controversies about integration and students' attitudes in the 1960s led to reactionary measures by coaches, university administrations, and the NCAA. In these reactions, Oriard argues, were the seeds for the rise of the multi-million dollar entertainment industry that college football is today. The NCAA emerges as reluctant to reform itself, hypocritical, and most of all greedy. According to Oriard, the idea of "student-athlete" is a sham: an unattainable ideal in today's money-driven big-time college football environment. What is even more sobering is that he wrote the book in March 2009; the system is, if anything, even worse in 2012.Well-written and researched, with some interesting perspectives from Oriard's own past as a Notre Dame football player in the 1960s and pro player with the Kansas City Chiefs. There are some illustrations and tables.For the Kindle edition: Unfortunately, this book has not been optimized for an e-reader. The illustrations are small and very dark. There are wide multicolumn tables that would span a 2-page spread in the paper edition and these are basically unusable on the Kindle. There are some typos and occasional odd text formatting (like no space between words). If you need this book for serious research, I recommend buying the paper edition or getting it from a library. For the casual reader -- especially if you don't care about the tables and illustrations -- the Kindle edition is okay for reading but a little expensive given that it's not optimized for an e-reader.

book was ordered for college class...received in great shape