Hole in the Roof Pearson, Drew; Granberry, Michael; Murchison, Burk
2023, 2022
eBook
In 1966, when the still-young Dallas Cowboys franchise ended six years of agony with their first winning season, the team’s owner and founder, Clint Murchison Jr., son of a billionaire oilman, ...was feeling ambitious. He believed his team would be good, even special, for years to come. With such dreams dancing in his head, Murchison found that the aging Cotton Bowl in Dallas’s Fair Park was no longer a suitable home for what would soon be dubbed “America’s Team.” Hole in the Roof: The Dallas Cowboys, Clint Murchison Jr., and the Stadium That Changed American Sports Forever tells the story of Texas Stadium, with its trademark hole in the roof, which served the Cowboys for 38 seasons without ever requiring a penny of public dollars. In 1966, though the Cotton Bowl was one of the newer stadiums in the National Football League, Murchison saw it as an outdated venue. What he envisioned was a shiny new stadium near downtown Dallas, but to realize his vision for what a professional sports venue could be—and the many benefits that the resulting revenue could generate—he needed buy-in from Dallas city leaders. Hole in the Roof chronicles Murchison’s founding of an extraordinary sports franchise and the battles he fought to build the stadium he wanted. Along the way, this book provides not only a sweeping biography of Clint Jr., a history of the Cowboys from before their inception in 1960 until now (including Jerry Jones), and a history of Texas Stadium, but also a critical look at how Clint's original concept of the stadium has been corrupted—by greed and avarice. Opening with a foreword by Drew Pearson, all-time Cowboy great and NFL Hall-of-Famer, and based on extensive research in both public and media archives and Murchison family records,  Hole in the Roof contains the inside story of the iconic venue where the Cowboys went on to play each of their five Super Bowl-winning seasons: where Murchison proved that stadiums could be a source of revenue surpassing even television.
From the untimely deaths of young athletes to chronic disease among retired players, roiling debates over tackle football have profound implications for more than one million American boys-some as ...young as five years old-who play the sport every year. In this book, Kathleen Bachynski offers the first history of youth tackle football and debates over its safety. In the postwar United States, high school football was celebrated as a "moral" sport for young boys, one that promised and celebrated the creation of the honorable male citizen. Even so, Bachynski shows that throughout the twentieth century, coaches, sports equipment manufacturers, and even doctors were more concerned with "saving the game" than young boys' safety-even though injuries ranged from concussions and broken bones to paralysis and death. By exploring sport, masculinity, and citizenship, Bachynski uncovers the cultural priorities other than child health that made a collision sport the most popular high school game for American boys. These deep-rooted beliefs continue to shape the safety debate and the possible future of youth tackle football.
We study the link between family violence and the emotional cues associated with wins and losses by professional football teams. We hypothesize that the risk of violence is affected by the ..."gain-loss" utility of game outcomes around a rationally expected reference point. Our empirical analysis uses police reports of violent incidents on Sundays during the professional football season. Controlling for the pregame point spread and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses (defeats when the home team was predicted to win by four or more points) lead to a 10% increase in the rate of at-home violence by men against their wives and girlfriends. In contrast, losses when the game was expected to be close have small and insignificant effects. Upset wins (victories when the home team was predicted to lose) also have little impact on violence, consistent with asymmetry in the gain-loss utility function. The rise in violence after an upset loss is concentrated in a narrow time window near the end of the game and is larger for more important games. We find no evidence for reference point updating based on the halftime score.
The term "repetitive head impacts" (RHI) refers to the cumulative exposure to concussive and subconcussive events. Although RHI are believed to increase risk for later-life neurological consequences ...(including chronic traumatic encephalopathy), quantitative analysis of this relationship has not yet been examined because of the lack of validated tools to quantify lifetime RHI exposure. The objectives of this study were: 1) to develop a metric to quantify cumulative RHI exposure from football, which we term the "cumulative head impact index" (CHII); 2) to use the CHII to examine the association between RHI exposure and long-term clinical outcomes; and 3) to evaluate its predictive properties relative to other exposure metrics (i.e., duration of play, age of first exposure, concussion history). Participants included 93 former high school and collegiate football players who completed objective cognitive and self-reported behavioral/mood tests as part of a larger ongoing longitudinal study. Using established cutoff scores, we transformed continuous outcomes into dichotomous variables (normal vs. impaired). The CHII was computed for each participant and derived from a combination of self-reported athletic history (i.e., number of seasons, positions, levels played), and impact frequencies reported in helmet accelerometer studies. A bivariate probit, instrumental variable model revealed a threshold dose-response relationship between the CHII and risk for later-life cognitive impairment (p < 0.0001), self-reported executive dysfunction (p < 0.0001), depression (p < 0.0001), apathy (p = 0.0161), and behavioral dysregulation (p < 0.0001). Ultimately, the CHII demonstrated greater predictive validity than other individual exposure metrics.
In January 2014, President Barack Obama made headlines when he confided to New Yorker reporter Davis Remnick that, if he had a son, he would discourage him from playing in the NFL. "I would not let ...my son play pro football," he told the writer. Obama's words came on the heels of a year of heightened awareness of the life-long consequences of a professional football career. In August 2013, the NFL agreed to a $765 million settlement with over 4,500 retired players seeking damages for head injuries sustained during play. Thousands of others are seeking disability benefits in the Sate of California for on-field injuries. But the possibility of lifelong disability is not the only problem facing professional football players after their playing careers-often brief to begin with-come to an end. Many players, having spent years focusing on football, find themselves at sea when they either leave or are forced out of the NFL, without any alternate life plans or even the resources to make them.
Is There Life After Football?draws upon the experiences of hundreds of former players as they describe their lives after their football days are over. It also incorporates stories about their playing careers, even before entering the NFL, to provide context for understanding their current situations.The authors begin with an analysis of the "bubble"-like conditions of privilege that NFL players experience while playing, conditions that often leave players unprepared for the real world once they retire and must manage their own lives. The book also examines the key issues affecting former NFL players in retirement: social isolation, financial concerns, inadequate career planning, psychological challenges, and physical injuries. From players who make reckless and unsustainable financial investments during their very few high-earning years, to players who struggle to form personal and professional relationships outside of football, the stories in the book put a very human face on the realities of the world of professional football. George Koonce Jr., a former NFL player himself, weaves in his own story throughout, explaining the challenges and setbacks he encountered and decisions that helped him succeed as an NFL Director of Player Development, PhD student, and university administrator after leaving the sport.
Ultimately,Is There Life After Football?concludes that, despite the challenges players face, it is possible for players to find success after leaving the NFL if they have the right support, education, and awareness of what might await them. But players themselves must also resist being totally engulfed by the NFL culture in which they live. A fascinating study with unprecedented insider access, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the world of professional football.
Professional football today is an $8 billion sports entertainment industry--and the most popular spectator sport in America, with designs on expansion across the globe. In this astute field-level ...view of the National Football League since 1960, Michael Oriard looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life. New to the paperback edition is Oriard's analysis of the offseason labor negotiations and their potential effects on the future of the sport, and his account of how the NFL is dealing with the latest research on concussions and head injuries.
Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation ...legal inPlessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches.Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M's Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White's sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.
Introduction: Previous literature has examined the effect of match location (home vs away) on physical performance in association football matches; however, conflicting findings suggest that further ...contextual factors need to be considered. ...this study investigated the impact of both match location and travel modality on physical performance, for an A-League football team. Results: For the match location model, results demonstrated statistically greater work-rate (p=0.011) and LSA distance (p=0.038) for away matches and statistically greater HSA distance (p=0.038) for home matches.
Due to the tremendous popularity of youth football, practitioners in this domain face the ongoing question of the most effective solutions in early talent selection. Although the scientific community ...has suggested multidimensional models for some time, coach assessments and motor performance tests remain common. Earlier research has determined the strengths and weaknesses within these different approaches. The current investigation directly compared the effectiveness of each approach in talent selection (coach assessment vs. motor performance tests vs. multidimensional data). A sample of 117 youth football players, their parents, and coaches participated in multidimensional measurements in the U14 age category (coach assessments, motor performance tests, psychological characteristics, familial support, training history, and biological maturation). The area under the curve (AUC 95% CI) from receiver operating characteristic indicated the prognostic validity of each approach in predicting U19 player status five years after the assessments (professional vs. non-professional). Motor performance tests (0.71 0.58; 0.84) showed a lower AUC than the multidimensional data (0.85 0.76; 0.94,
= 0.02), whilst coach assessments did not differ from the two others (.82 .74; .90). Further, combined talent selection approaches, especially the use of coach assessments and multidimensional data together, were significantly better at predicting U19 player status (0.93 0.87; 0.98,
= 0.02 vs. multidimensional data only). Although certain limitations may impede further insights (summation of data, skipped use of non-linear statistics), scientific claims for using multidimensionality within talent selection were confirmed to be fruitful. In particular, the combination of the subjective coaches' eye with scientific data may buffer the mutual weaknesses of these different approaches. Future research should focus on optimizing the output of promising multidimensional models. Knowledge of detailed values relating to specific dimensions within these models and the implementation of enhanced non-linear statistics may enable further improvements in the field of talent selection.
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