NFL Football

A History of America's New National Pastime

by Richard C. Crepeau

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Pub Date Sep 15 2014 | Archive Date Jul 20 2014

Description

This wide-ranging history synthesizes scholarship and media sources to give the reader an inside view of the television contracts, labor issues, and other off-the-field forces that shaped the National Football League. Historian Richard Crepeau shows how Commissioner Pete Rozelle's steady leadership guided the league's explosive growth during the era of Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl's transformation into a mid-winter spectacle. Crepeau also delves into the league's masterful exploitation of media from radio to the internet, its ability to get taxpayers to subsidize team stadiums, and its success in delivering an outlet for experiencing vicarious violence to a public uneasy over the changing rules of masculinity.

Probing and learned, NFL Football tells an epic American success story peopled by larger-than-life figures and driven by ambition, money, sweat, and dizzying social and technological changes.

Richard C. Crepeau is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida and former president of the North American Society for Sports History. He is the author of Baseball: America's Diamond Mind, 1919-1941.

This wide-ranging history synthesizes scholarship and media sources to give the reader an inside view of the television contracts, labor issues, and other off-the-field forces that shaped the...

Advance Praise

"NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime chronicles the NFL's growth in an insightful manner that is valuable to all NFL fans. This thorough research by Richard Crepeau does more than provide historical facts, it explains the league's business from an economic and media perspective in a way that no other book has. No understanding of the history of the NFL and its societal impact is complete without reading this book."--John A. Fortunato, author of Commissioner: The Legacy of Pete Rozelle

"Brings to the table a much needed history of professional football, especially for his examination of the NFL in the second half of the twentieth century. On one side he shows no reverence for the NFL as he clearly highlights its flaws and problems. But Crepeau also has an appreciation for the NFL as a business and for all that its owners/administrators have achieved."--Melvin L. Adelman, author of Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics