Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports

In Changing the Playbook, Howard P. Chudacoff delves into the background and what-ifs surrounding seven defining moments that redefined 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.