Opening Kickoff (eBook)

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

---

A New York Times Bestseller and Boston Globe Bestseller!It's America's most popular sport, played by thousands, watched by millions, and generating billions in revenues every year. It's also America's most controversial sport, haunted by the specter of life-threatening injuries and plagued by scandal, even among its most venerable personalities and institutions. At the college level, we often tie football's tales of corruption and greed to its current popularity and revenue potential, and we have vague notions of a halcyon time--before the new College Football Playoff, power conferences, and huge TV contracts. Perhaps we conjure images of young Ivy Leaguers playing a gentleman's game, exemplifying the collegial in collegiate. What we don't imagine is a game described in 1905, not today, as a social obsession--this boy-killing, man-mutillating, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.In The Opening Kickoff, Dave Revsine tells the riveting story of the formative period of American football (1890-1915). It was a time that saw the game's meteoric rise, fueled by overflow crowds, breathless newspaper coverage and newfound superstarsincluding one of the most thrilling and mysterious the sport has ever seen. But it was also a period racked by controversy in academics, recruiting, and physical brutality that, in combination, threatened football's very existence. A vivid storyteller, Revsine brings it all to life in a captivating narrative.