Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era

In this compellingly argued and deeply personal book, respected sports historian Michael Oriard—who was himself a former second-team All-American at Notre Dame—explores a wide range of trends that have changed the face of big-time college football and transformed the role of the student-athlete.

Oriard considers such issues as the politicization of football in the 1960s and the implications of the integration of college football. The heart of the book examines a handful of decisions by the NCAA in the early seventies—to make freshmen eligible to play, to lower admission standards, and, most critically, to replace four-year athletic scholarships with one-year renewable scholarships—that helped transform student-athletes into athlete-students and turned the college game into a virtual farm league for professional football.

Oriard then traces the subsequent history of the sport as it has tried to grapple with the fundamental contradiction of college football as both extracurricular activity and multi-billion-dollar mass entertainment. The relentless necessity to pursue revenue, Oriard argues, undermines attempts to maintain academic standards, and it fosters a football culture in which athletes are both excessively entitled and exploited.

As a former college football player, Oriard brings a unique perspective to his topic, and his sympathies are always with the players and for the game. This original and compelling study will interest everyone concerned about the future of college football.

Former college and professional football player Oriard explores a wide range of trends that have changed the face of college football and transformed the role of the student-athlete. He gives close attention to decisions by the NCAA in the early 1970s that helped transform student-athletes into athlete-students and turned the college game into a virtual farm league for professional football. The relentless necessity to pursue revenue, he argues, undermines attempts to maintain academic standards, and it fosters a football culture in which athletes are both excessively entitled and exploited.

Library Journal

Oriard (American literature & culture, Oregon State Univ.; King Football), former center for Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs, lends a personal perspective to his thesis that college football has been transformed into a multibillion dollar industry within academia, turning the student-athlete into the athlete-student. Oriard finds this change rooted in the evolving American culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, when colleges maximized their leverage over athletes by converting the traditional four-year athletic scholarship to a one-year renewable version. In conjunction with instituting freshman eligibility and lowering academic standards, the new policies saw conversion of a game previously subservient to the academic mission into an expensive business with more direct connection to professional football than to the university. This will be of greater interest to collegiate educational and athletic reformers than to general football fans.—J.M.

Michael Oriard is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University. He was offensive captain and a second-team All-American at the University of Notre Dame and played four years with the Kansas City Chiefs. He is the author of six previous books on sports in American literature and culture, including Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport (UNC Press).