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 Alexander Hyres In February, the Big Ten Conference held a lengthy discussion with faculty, administrators, and student-athletes about how to “keep education central to the mission of college sports.” Whether education has actually been the central to mission of college sports in the last one-hundred years is questionable; however, the discussion did produce a proposal…
As you read this, a mixture of nerves, excitement, and celebration have blanketed Clemson, SC as more than 1,000 collegiate triathletes converge for the 2015 Collegiate Club National Championships. In addition to the high energy, these championships come with a slight name change: from the Collegiate National Championships to the Collegiate Club National Championships. The…
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…
ESPN’s latest entry in its remarkable 30 for 30 series is a Randy Moss biopic entitled “Rand University”. The title refers to the small West Virginia town where he grew up. The film charts Moss’s progress from High School star to NFL draft pick, with a particular focus on the off the field troubles that…
By Murry Nelson, Guest Contributor Murry Nelson is a Professor Emeritus of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the history of basketball, and is the author of The National Basketball League: A History, 1935–1949 (2009) and Abe Saperstein and the American Basketball League (2013). He recently edited a multiple-volume encyclopedia on the history of…
The first months of 2014 have seen a flurry of labor related actions on University campuses across the country. As administrators continue the push for corporate structures and profit driven business models, graduate employees, staff, and faculty have pushed back. The ongoing case of Northwestern University football team’s unionization provides an interesting and unique ripple…
Sport in American History 