A one-stop source for the media, coaches, players, NFL scouts, and serious fans

It took nearly a century for a tiny agricultural school in the hills to transform itself into the powerful state university that is UConn, and the game of basketball has been integral to the rise of Huskymania. In the University of Connecticut Basketball Vault: The History of the Huskies you will find the stories of all the heroes of the Husky hardwood, from Louis Alexander to Walt Dropo to Ray Allen and Khalid El-Amin. Author Ken Davis has spent more than 30 years covering college basketball, including 20 for The Hartford Courant, and here he combines great game coverage with behind-the-scenes anecdotes to present a view of Connecticut basketball you won't find anywhere else. UConn fans will also find never-before-published vintage photographs, artwork and memorabilia drawn from Connecticut's extensive campus archives, including reproductions of old game programs, historic tickets, stickers and other amazing replicas tucked into dozens of pockets.

Starting high school is never easy. Seniors take your lunch money. Girls you’ve known forever are suddenly beautiful and unattainable.The guys you grew up with are drifting away.And you can never get enough sleep. Could there be a worse time for Scott’s mother to announce she’s pregnant? Scott decides high school would be a lot less overwhelming if it came with a survival manual, so he begins to write down tips for his new sibling. Scott’s chronicle of his first year of bullies, romance, honors classes, and brotherhood is both laugh-out-loud funny and touchingly wise.

Employing a system of brackets used in sports, this light-hearted study looks at some of popular culture's most baffling questions on topics ranging from popular songs and cookbooks to French phrases and wine.

Since he first began publishing his Baseball Abstracts in the 1980s, Bill James has constantly challenged conventional wisdom by asking simple questions like, "Is that really true?" or "What if we looked at the question this way?" He has sparked a virtual revolution in the way the game of baseball is understood and played, from how players are evaluated or positioned to whether or not they should attempt to bunt or steal a base. In Solid Fool s Gold James continues his lifelong work with new analyses of: Hot pitchers, clutch pitching, and "late career" players The predictability of RBI A better way to organize the minor leagues The 33 best starting rotations and the worst teams of all time The best pitching matchups of the 1980s (and 2010) How the "Expansion Time Bomb" will affect the Hall of Fame But it is not just baseball that draws James inquisitive eye. He discusses the growing expectation for tips and decreasing effectiveness of advertising; his new method for measuring rainfall; the counterproductive use of physical stop lights and red-light cameras; and the statistical inefficiencies of the federal Transportion Security Administration. James wonders how Buck O Neil would have related to his ancestor s cousin (Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds), proposes whimsical rules for Olympic NASCAR Racing, and poeticizes about Ricky Weeks and WikiLeaks. He compares the chances of a particular-size town producing a Justin Verlander or a William Shakespeare, imagines Roger Maris apologizing in heaven for having beaten Babe Ruth s single-season home run record, and explains how to "battle expertise with the power of ignorance." As a bonus, he includes one of his seminal articles from The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1983 titled "The Law of Competitive Advantage" and looks at how it has held up over the intervening years.

A one-stop source for the media, coaches, players, NBA scouts, and serious fans

This book reviews the literature and institutional practice concerned with intercollegiate sports in higher education. Six sections cover the following topics: (1) academics and athletics (e.g., trends in research and scholarship and a framework for institutional analysis); (2) fiscal fitness: the peculiar economics of intercollegiate athletics (e.g. why expenses for college sports are so high and philanthropy and fund raising); (3) public policy and intercollegiate athletics programs (e.g., accountability, compliance, and other aspects of paying the price of nonprofit status, and colleges and the courts as illustrated by the case of television); (4) presidential leadership (e.g., the prescribed presidential role and problems of presidential leadership); (5) intercollegiate athletics and institutionalized administration (e.g. faculty involvement and the athletics director); and (6) educational mission, academic structure, and intercollegiate athletics policy, including recommendations for reform (e.g. structural models and institutional mission and from mission statements to self-study and accountability). Contains approximately 140 references. (SM)