Sports games and you

chudacoffConsider the NCAA the only pure athletic sphere in our cash-on-the-barrel head culture? Or do you prefer to think of the NCAA as a cesspool built on a tripod of corruption, hypocrisy, and exploitation?

The great thing about the fantastic new UIP book Changing the Playbook is that there’s something inside for all of you. Howard P. Chudacoff, noted sport scholar, breaks down the changes that have transformed the NCAA, focusing on seven issues that remain a part of our sports arguments today:

  • the failed 1950 effort to pass a Sanity Code regulating payments to football players;
  • the thorny racial integration of university sports programs;
  • the boom in television money;
  • the 1984 Supreme Court decision that settled who could control skyrocketing media revenues;
  • Title IX’s transformation of women’s athletics;
  • the cheating, eligibility, and recruitment scandals that tarnished college sports in the 1980s and 1990s;
  • the ongoing controversy over paying student athletes a share of the enormous moneys harvested by schools and athletic departments.

Sports fans, by their very natures, think they have all the answers. Get outside the box and read Changing the Playbook, the history that equips you to ask yourself: what are the right questions?