The first fifty years of America's most popular spectator sport have been strangely neglected by historians claiming to tell the "complete story" of pro football. Well, here are the early stories that "complete story" has left out. What about the awful secret carried around by Sid Luckman, the Bears' Hall of Fame quarterback whose father was a mobster and a murderer? Or Steve Hamas, who briefly played in the NFL then turned to boxing and beat Max...

A chronological survey of regular and post-season play in college and professional football from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

"Gregg Easterbrook is one of the country's best-known football commentators, having analyzed football on-air for ESPN and the NFL Network. MSNBC calls his ESPN blog "the best and most compelling football column anywhere." The King of Sports takes an expansive look at our biggest sport. Easterbrook explores these and many other topics: The real harm done by concussions (It's not to NFL players) The real way in which college football players are exploited...

From the leather helmet era to the media circus of college football today, Travers presents a carefully researched examination of college football and its role in our society. Photographs complement the text, providing a deep sense of how the sport has evolved, details our obsession with identifying winners, and uses examples of popular culture— the top 8 football movies of all time—to accent the influence this sport has on our culture....

"By the face of The Big Ten Network, the story of the creation of the college football nation from 1890 to 1915, the intense media coverage, the academic fraud, recruiting scandals, shocking violence, new sports superstars, and the manifest destiny of football out of the Ivy League and to the Great Midwest"--