Today's National Football League is more successful, more exciting, and more popular than ever. But the game in the twenty-first century is also ruled by a constant quest for more money. Super Bowl-winning head coach Brian Billick's More Than a Game examines how the relentless competition off the field affects the game on the field, and what it means for the future of America's most popular sport. One of the NFL's most successful leaders, Billick coached the Baltimore Ravens from 1999 to 2007, leading his team to victory in Super Bowl XXXV in 2001. With nearly two decades in the league, and now a Fox game analyst and NFL Network contributor, Billick has experienced the league's enormous pressure to win as well as seen what happens to those who don't. Following the 2007 season, he took a step back from the coaching life and decided to spend a season examining the game he loved so much from other perspectives. Collaborating with Michael MacCambridge (whose book America's Game is regarded as the definitive modern history of the NFL), he delved into the NFL from every possible angle, spending time with people at every level of the game. More Than a Game explains how the spectacle that dominates fall weekends in America works, and why it has served all of football's interest groups -- owners players, and fans alike -- so well over the years. We get a glimpse of the changing profile and increased influence of the league's owners. We come to better understand the pressure that players are under to perform for their team and for themselves and their future contracts. We see the challenge facing NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who must balance the concerns of owners, players, sponsors, the league's television network "partners," and the fans, whose devotion and dollars make the entire enterprise possible. Along the way, we see how the financial forces are exerting themselves on every level, working their way into the essence of the game itself. Billick takes the measure of new offensive and defensive strategies, explains refined scouting and team-building methods, and focuses on the elusive quest for the franchise quarterback that can make or break careers. Packed with the privileged knowledge that comes from a true NFL insider, More Than a Game is more than a look inside the complex system that is pro football. It's an attempt to understand why the game is so compelling, and what it will take to keep it that way. Complete with important developments in the 2009 off-season, the book stands as an absolute must-read for NFL fans.
More than Just a Game celebrates the history of basketball from a Black perspective, revealing how it changed Black communities and how they made the sport into what it is today.
This is Jackson in his prime, transitioning from the Bulls to the Lakers, a master of the art of winning, who would go on to claim more NBA championships, eleven, than any other coach in NBA history.
In this book, Robert Burk traces the turbulent labor history of American baseball since 1921. His comprehensive, readable account details the many battles between owners and players that irrevocably altered the business of baseball.
bell. had. been. rung. He. had. confronted the prisoners at the time and taken their meal tickets — standard procedure for the punishment of individuals—then immediately afterwards had announced that there would be no sports that ...
Maverick: More Than a Game
More Than a Game: Why North Carolina Basketball Means So Much to So Many
Collins, Robert M. “Richard M. Nixon: The Psychic, Political, and Moral Use of Sport.” Journal of Sport History 10, no. 2 (1983): 77–84. Congressional Record, 100th Cong., 2d sess., 17 March 1988. Vol. 134, no. 33, S 2409.
The story of the crusade for gender equity in sport and for compliance with Title IX at a small, liberal arts college in northwest Oregon.
More than a Game discusses how African American men and women sought to participate in sport and what that participation meant to them, the African American community, and the United...
Throughout John Major's life, his love of cricket has been a constant source of enjoyment, anguish- and solace.