American Football History

Listen to How to Understand Football for Beginners once. Then watch a game on television. You will see that it's possible to understand football in less than an hour! If you find some things about football that are not clear, listen to the short book again and watch another game. By that point, you will understand football enough to enjoy the game. You will pick up on the intricacies of football as you continue to watch and enjoy football.

This wide-ranging history synthesizes scholarship and media sources to give the listener 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.

From the day Princeton played the first intercollegiate game in 1869, these major schools of the northeast - Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale - shaped football as we now know it. In this rich history, Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League.