In Changing the Playbook, Howard P. Chudacoff delves into the background and what-ifs surrounding seven defining moments that transformed college sports. These changes involved fundamental issues--race and gender, profit and power--that reflected societal tensions and, in many cases, remain pertinent 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.
A thought-provoking journey into the whos and whys of college sports history, Changing the Playbook reveals how the turning points of yesterday and today will impact tomorrow.
""Changing the Playbook is a timely, thoughtful, persuasive book, a welcome addition to the scholarship on big-time intercollegiate athletics. It will help many readers understand some of the key turning points in the history of college sports since 1950, moments that have greatly contributed to making this unique cultural institution and practice bigger than ever, for better and (mostly) worse.""Daniel A. Nathan, President, North American Society for Sport History ""Anyone seriously interested in the future of college sports should first look backward. In a book as timely, lively, and compelling as the most vivid sports headlines, one of this country's most distinguished historians brilliantly demonstrates that the current disputes over amateurism, academic standards, and gender equity in sports have a long and contentious history, and that any resolution to the current controversies surrounding concussions and unionization of athletes must draw upon the lessons of the past."" Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood ""Historian Howard P. Chudacoff is both a good sport and a great scholar in his fresh analysis of the transformation of college sports in our modern era. Changing the Playbook leads the reader through a logical, lively succession of chapter topics which demonstrate again and again that intercollegiate athletics are integral to the vital aspects of American culture--race relations, commercialism, media coverage, and the politics of power and money. This is a timely new interpretation that concludes with significant questions about the character and future of college sports."" John R. Thelin, author of Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics
