By Cat Ariail Tomorrow night, the University of Connecticut’s Breanna Stewart and Moriah Jefferson will attempt to make college basketball history. With a victory over Syracuse, Stewart and Jefferson will become the first athletes to complete a national championship grand slam, winning a title each of their four years (when UCLA won ten of twelve men’s…
By Alex Parrish Winter, Scott, foreword by Tom Izzo. Nebrasketball: Coach Tim Miles and a Big Ten Team on the Rise. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xvi+355. 22 black and white photographs. $24.95 Hardcover. In 1985, Indiana University men’s basketball coach Bob Knight gave journalist John Feinstein extraordinary access to his locker room…
By Charles Westmoreland, Jr. The 1996 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament entered uncharted territory in recent college basketball memory. On March 14, 1996, Duke University saw its mediocre 18-13 campaign come to an end at the hands of the unheralded Eastern Michigan University Eagles. The injury-riddled, talent-depleted Blue Devils were no match for a hungry Eagles…
By Kate Aguilar I spent the week leading up to the Super Bowl in El Paso, Texas. For a historian of race and sport, it felt quite fortuitous to be awaiting Super Bowl 50 while engrossed in the emotion surrounding the 50th anniversary celebration of Texas Western’s 1966 historic 72-65 win over the University of…
Smith, Jay M., and Mary Willingham. Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. 304. Notes and Index. $26.95 hardback. Reviewed by Jorge Iber With the current brouhaha surrounding the purported prostitution scandal tied to the University of Louisville’s basketball program,…
I remember him saying, “You don’t want to go to many football games. It will be a unique experience for you.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I would find out.–Sylvester Brooks, MTSU Student and civil rights activist in mid-1960s,from an interview given in 2000 Author’s Note: Since writing this article in…
By Murry Nelson, Guest Contributor It was January 25, 1972, and Ohio State, the defending Big Ten champion and favorite to repeat was to play Minnesota in an early season match-up that some saw as a turning point for the remainder of the Big Ten season. It was, but not for the reasons that most…
by Jorge Iber, PhD Texas Tech University In a previous blog, I discussed the story of E.C. Lerma, one of the first Mexican American high school football (and basketball and track) coaches in the history of the state of Texas. His career during the late 1930s though the middle of the 1960s provided coaches, teachers,…
I’m going to be doing a bit of “thinking out loud” in this post. It’s an extension of a Twitter conversation I had with Paul Putz about a month ago. We were talking about college sports teams in predominantly rural states as a way for their residents “to explain ourselves to other Americans” as well as…
Jerry Tarkanian put the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on the map. The Runnin’ Rebels former coach, who died yesterday at age 84, was the architect of a basketball powerhouse that established UNLV as a national brand. Tarkanian and UNLV, followed the example of other major universities and used sports as an important method of public relations…
Sport in American History 