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During the 2022 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) college football season, eight of the 65 Power-5 head coaches were Black. The racial composition of assistant coaches, however, was nearly 50% Black and 50% White. While the head coach of a Power-5 football team serves as the leader of the program, the 10 assistant coaches permitted by the NCAA oversee a variety of critical roles; the most valuable of which is recruiting. This study extends previous work by examining the racial composition of Power-5 football coaching staffs and recruiting responsibilities through the lens of racial tasking. An analysis of Power-5 football recruiting classes from 2019 and 2020 illustrates that assistant coaches are tasked with recruiting prospective athletes racially similar to themselves 58% of the time. Furthermore, Black assistant coaches are disproportionately tasked with recruiting Black recruits and higher rated recruits (i.e., five- and four-star) compared to their White counterparts. We contend such racialized responsibilities and expectations may affect opportunities for advancement among Black assistant coaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the environmental impacts of college football's 2024 conference realignment, focusing on the increased aviation pollution due to expanded travel requirements for teams. Recent realignments in college football conferences have led to significant changes in team travel schedules, resulting in longer travel distances and a greater reliance on air travel. The research employs a comparative analysis of travel distances and carbon footprint calculations using data from 2024 NCAA team schedules and aviation emission factors. Additionally, the study compares a theoretical model of logical geographically based conferences against the actual 2024 conference alignments, examining just how much grouping schools based on their geography could reduce travel and therefore overall emissions. The analysis reveals a significant increase in travel-related carbon emissions, with certain schools experiencing substantial increases in aviation pollution using the 2024 schedule compared to if they were to use the geographical based model. The study also examines the impact of increased travel on student-athlete mental health, identifying heightened stress and reduced academic performance as significant concerns due to increased cross country travel which was not in place before. Case studies illustrate the varying impacts on different universities and student-athletes. To address these issues, the study suggests a geographical model be put in place in the next ten to fifteen years to avoid the unnecessary increase in aviation pollution, protect student athlete’s mental and academic well being, and keep historic geographically based rivalries strong. The study also highlights sustainability initiatives for stadiums and travel, including the adoption of greener transportation methods and eco-friendly stadium practices. Policy recommendations include regulatory measures to mitigate aviation pollution and support for sustainability initiatives within college athletics. These findings underscore the need for change in comprehensive strategies to 3 manage the environmental and mental health impacts of conference realignment, promoting sustainability and well-being in FBS college football.

Research Summary: Pipeline hiring, repeatedly hiring individuals from the same external source organization, is a common recruiting practice. Yet, whether this pipeline approach improves incoming human capital quality or performance has limited empirical evidence. We argue that, in cooperative source‐hiring organization contexts, pipelines reduce the information asymmetries present in labor markets in a way that both attracts individuals with higher pre‐entry human capital and predicts postentry performance that surpasses pre‐entry expectations. In the context of particularly intense recruiting competition—American college football—we test and find support for these hypotheses. We also probe key boundary conditions, specifically discontinuity, geographic proximity, and factor market competition that highlight the limits of when the informational advantage is more or less salient. Managerial Summary: Organizations often recruit through pipelines ‐ repeatedly hiring new workers from the same sources, such as universities or supply partners. Despite how common pipeline hiring is, we have little evidence to suggest if this practice helps hire more capable workers. Using rich data from American college football, we find that players who are successfully recruited through a pipeline tend to be rated as higher potential before joining their college team and perform better, holding their potential constant, in their collegiate career than players who joined from a standalone source. We argue that these benefits come from information flows between recruiting organizations, alumni, and prospective workers. When conditions make these information flows less exclusive, more interrupted, or redundant, we find evidence that the typical pipeline recruiting benefits diminish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growth of online networks, understanding the intricate structure of communities has become vital. Traditional community detection algorithms, while effective to an extent, often fall short in complex systems. This study introduced a meta-heuristic approach for community detection that leveraged a memetic algorithm, combining genetic algorithms (GA) with the stochastic hill climbing (SHC) algorithm as a local optimization method to enhance modularity scores, which was a measure of the strength of community structure within a network. We conducted comprehensive experiments on five social network datasets (Zachary's Karate Club, Dolphin Social Network, Books About U.S. Politics, American College Football, and the Jazz Club Dataset). Also, we executed an ablation study based on modularity and convergence speed to determine the efficiency of local search. Our method outperformed other GA-based community detection methods, delivering higher maximum and average modularity scores, indicative of a superior detection of community structures. The effectiveness of local search was notable in its ability to accelerate convergence toward the global optimum. Our results not only demonstrated the algorithm's robustness across different network complexities but also underscored the significance of local search in achieving consistent and reliable modularity scores in community detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-established in the literature on the economic dimensions of US college sport that it has become a site of professionalized, value-producing work that does not equitably compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for the production of value therein. Yet, while these interventions make highly compelling political economic claims, few focus on how college athletes themselves experience the system and thus the exploitation they might endure. Drawing on testimony from semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 former college football players, we aim to expand discussions of exploitation beyond debates over compensation through our analysis of the contrast between 'work' and 'play' that exists in the lives of campus athletic workers. Utilizing a non-deterministic Marxian theory of exploitation, this paper explicitly interrogates the way capitalist ideology permeates college football by centering the important tension between 'work' and 'play' that contributes to that ideology as experienced and understood by college football players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence and justification to the home advantage – the benefit a sports team receives when playing at home – has been studied across sport. The majority of research on this topic is limited to individual leagues in short time frames, which hinders extrapolation and a deeper understanding of possible causes. Using nearly two decades of data from the National Football League (NFL), the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and high schools from across the United States, we provide a uniform approach to understanding the home advantage in American football. Our findings suggest home advantage is declining in the NFL and the highest levels of collegiate football, but not in amateur football. This increases the possibility that characteristics of the NCAA and NFL, such as travel improvements and instant replay, have helped level the playing field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Link prediction in social network is an important topic due to its applications like finding collaborations and recommending friends. Among existing link prediction methods, similarity-based approaches are found to be most effective since they examine the number of common neighbours (CN). Current work presents a novel link prediction algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) and implemented on four real world datasets namely, Zachary's karate club (ZKC), bottlenose dolphin network (BDN), college football network (CFN) and Krebs' books on American politics (KBAP). It consists of three experiments: i) to find the measures on existing methods and compare them with our proposed algorithm; ii) to find the measured values of the existing methods along with our proposed one to determine future links among nodes that have no CN; and iii) to find the measures of the methods to determine future links among nodes having same number of CN. In experiment 1, our proposed approach achieved 75.88%, 78.34%, 82.63% and 78.36% accuracy for ZKC, BDN, CFN, and KBAP respectively. These results beat the performances of traditional algorithms. In experiment 2, the accuracies are found as 75.53%, 74.25%, 81.63% and 78.34% respectively. In experiment 3, accuracies are detected as 72.75%, 81.53%, 78.35% and 75.13% respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the Fall 2020 semester, college presidents and the NCAA made decisions about playing college football. The current study aims to examine the association between college football games and COVID-19 infections at universities. More than 1,800 college campuses nationwide from The New York Times database on COVID-19 cases on college campuses. Random effects negative binomial regression is used to analyze the association between college football games, membership to college football organizations, and COVID-19 cases at the universities studied. The number of football games played was significantly associated with higher COVID-19 cases at the universities studied. Membership to certain college football organizations was also significantly associated with higher COVID-19 cases, particularly FBS and Power Five conferences. These findings provide a baseline for subsequent analyses across other sports and advocates for continued assessment of protocols that ensure the safety and well-being of student-athletes, fans, and university communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports betting markets are an attractive setting to evaluate the degree to which publicly available information is efficiently incorporated into asset prices. Weather information represents one category of potentially undervalued public data, and we assess its impact on wagering outcomes and market behaviour in American college football. We uncover statistically significant effects of weather characteristics on totals market outcomes, indicating that the market does not appropriately assimilate this data into its forecasts. We also demonstrate that weather characteristics are not statistically significant predictors of totals market line movement magnitude. Together, these results suggest the market systematically undervalues weather data. We then develop simple wagering strategies utilizing only three weather characteristics and illustrate the ability to profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a future in which two "super conferences" dominate college football. Considering the erosion of the PAC 12 Conference and the looming threats to the Atlantic Coast Conference against the skyrocketing media rights revenues of the Big Ten Conference and the Southeastern Conference ("Power Two"), thought leaders across college athletics anticipate that future industry changes will be characterized by a continued consolidation of valuable college football brands into fewer high major conferences than we see today. At the same time, the frequency and public sentiment toward legal attacks on student-athlete compensation restrictions are now such that major college football student-athletes are soon likely to gain access to greater compensation, through employment, collective bargaining, revenue-sharing, or otherwise. As college football becomes captured by the Power Two, there will be a greater incentive for the two rival conferences to work together to maximize the revenues associated with their media rights agreements and minimize the expenses associated with student-athlete compensation. This article argues that antitrust concerns related to media rights agreements are more salient than those related to student-athlete compensation, because courts will be more likely to find that the Power Two controls the relevant product market with respect to high major college football broadcasts than with respect to elite football student-athlete talent. The distinction is grounded in the presence or absence of a reasonable substitute for Power Two products in the context of different consumer groups. Regardless of the legal viability, this article also argues that public perception is such that conferences should avoid using their authority to cap student-athlete benefits. Instead, each institution should decide to compensate its student-athletes at fair, but fiscally responsible, levels that will sustain the college athletics framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of the transfer portal and eased transfer restrictions has drastically impacted the migration of college football players. While such athlete autonomy aligns with sweeping organizational policy adopted, and mandated, by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the absence of barriers preventing the mobility of players may have a resultant effect on the development of sustained organizational culture. Through interviews with direct stakeholders currently coaching football at the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) level, the findings of this study reveal that while the transfer portal is commonly utilized to achieve short-term success, building a roster composed predominantly of transfer players was perceived as unsustainable in the desired cultivation of meaningful organizational culture. As coaches grapple with the intensified demands to win football games, the findings of this study indicate that sustained long-term programmatic success may be more suitably achieved through the cultivation of distinct organizational culture rather than a reliance on transfer players.

This study examined the way college football players used social media to resist, highlight, and address inequity in college football. Employing a critical discourse analysis guided by poststructuralism as a theoretical framework, three public statements were analyzed to explore how the language used in the statements resisted multiple discourses that shape college football players' experiences. The ways that college football players used discourse to mobilize as activists and exert control over their college athlete experience were considered. These findings highlight three consistent themes and expand research on college athlete activism through social media and language analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the history of Depression era financing in the United States with respect to various New Deal programs and the impact they had on the development of stadia used by current institutions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I level (i.e., Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision). Specifically, the current research provides findings and explanations regarding regional differences and presents data on the various New Deal programs. We further highlight the construction and renovation of stadia importantly created an atmosphere of "institutional legitimacy" for the universities, helped provide a substantial amount of work to the unemployed, and produced a significant amount of financial investments by the U.S. government. Practically, the present study offers the subsequent information as rhetorical work or as a resource for museums on and off campuses for the purpose of commercial gain, marketing, and cultivating the next generation of college football fans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Rooney's (1969) seminal geographical work on the origins of U.S. college football players showed how a comprehensive examination of player origins could be analyzed and presented. This study utilizes Rooney's findings to compare changes in the origin and migration patterns 50 years after his work. The hometowns of 14,937 elite high school football players recruited to play for "Power 5" schools between 2010 and 2020 are analyzed. The findings reveal that substantially more elite players now originate in the southern states and migrate into areas that underproduced elite talent. The methods and results of this study contribute to the merging research fields of sports management and sports geography on geographic patterns and the migration of athletes and how they can change over periods of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the importance of accurate team rankings in American college football (CFB) – due to heavy title and playoff implications – strides have been made to improve metrics for team performance evaluation, going from basic averages (e.g. points scored per game) to metrics that adjust for a team's strength of schedule, but one aspect that's yet to be accounted for is the ability of team's offense and defense to complement one another, termed 'complementary football'. American football is unique because the same team's offensive and defensive units typically consist of separate player sets that don't share the field simultaneously, which tempts one to evaluate them independently. Yet, some aspects of your team's defensive (offensive) performance may directly impact the complementary unit, e.g. turnovers forced by your defense could lead to easier scoring chances for your offense. Our main goal is to identify the most consistently influential features of complementary football in a data-driven way, subsequently adjusting each team's offensive (defensive) performance for that of their complementary unit. To achieve that, for the 2009–2019 CFB seasons, we incorporate natural splines with group penalty approaches, conducting partially constrained optimization to guarantee the full adjustment for the strength of schedule and home-field factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the implications of Grant of Rights (GOR) agreements in college football and their influence on conference realignment. Topics include an overview of GOR agreements and their effects on media rights, a discussion of current GOR contracts used by Power Five conferences, and recommendations for structuring future GOR agreements.

A balanced panel (99 teams over 40 years) is used to estimate three regression models: average attendance via fixed and random effects plus Tobit estimation of percent of capacity. Variables are either stationary or cointegrated. Estimation makes adjustments for serial correlation and endogeneity between several variables. Independent variables measure economic conditions, demographic characteristics, and team performance. Attendance is a normal good. Travel cost is insignificant in two models but positive in one. Weak evidence suggests undergraduate enrollment and county population exert a positive impact. Three team performance measures and power ranking scores exert consistent positive impacts. Stadium renovations that increase capacity also increase attendance while those that reduce capacity are insignificant except in the percent of capacity equation. Attendance responses vary, either in sign or significance, across Power Five and Group of Five teams for eight of 10 independent variables. Specification tests suggest that random effects estimation is preferred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers one-off actions for a football coach who is asking for a specific outcome from a play. This will be in the form of a minimum gain in yards, usually in order to gain a first down. Using a random utility model approach we propose the play to be called is the one which maximizes the probability of the desired outcome. We specifically focus on pass plays, which requires the modeling of outcomes in terms of yards gained, for which we use the family of generalized gamma distributions. The data and results relate to the Fall 2021 Presbyterian College football team, in which we leverage specific information pertaining to the offensive playbook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Considering the multifaceted consequences of improperly managed sport-related concussions (SRCs) in American football, identifying efficacious prevention measures for enhancing player safety is crucial. Purpose: To investigate the association of primary prevention measures (no-tackle practices and using a mobile tackling dummy in practice) with the frequency of SRCs within college football programs in the United States. Study Design: Descriptive epidemiology study. Methods: In this pilot study, we analyzed the frequency of new SRCs recorded during various settings (total, in preseason, in season, in practice, and game) across 14 seasons (2007-2019 and 2021) for Dartmouth College and across 7 seasons (2013-2019) for the 7 other teams in the Ivy League men's athletic football conference. Trends between seasons and the number of SRCs sustained were examined using correlations and basic descriptive statistics. We also examined SRC frequency in relation to primary prevention measures (no-tackle practices, use of mobile tackling dummies during practice) in the Dartmouth College football program, and we compared SRCs with regard to the no-tackle practice policy in the other Ivy League teams. Results: There was a statistically significant reduction in the number of SRCs over the seasons studied, with the strongest finding observed for Dartmouth College in-game SRCs (r = −0.52; P =.029). Relatedly, the strongest between-season effect was seen for the Dartmouth College practice policy on in-game SRCs (η2 = 0.510; P =.01). The use of mobile tackling dummies was found to be independently associated (adjusting for no-tackle practice) with a lower number total (β = −0.53; P =.049), in-season (β = −0.63; P =.023), and in-game (β = −0.79; P =.003) SRCs. While seasons with the no-tackle practice were not meaningfully associated with SRCs for Dartmouth College, stronger trends were observed in the other Ivy League teams, such that seasons with this policy were associated with lower SRC prevalence. Conclusion: Our data indicate that the use of the mobile tackling dummy in practice was related to the reduced number of SRCs sustained at multiple settings during the football season. To a lesser extent, the no-tackle practice policy was also associated with a reduced number of SRCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, attitudes toward marijuana usage have softened. This shift in sentiment coincided with reduced punishments, decriminalization, and in some states, legalization. We find evidence of unexpected consequences of marijuana legalization. Using difference-in-difference estimation, we show that legalization correlates with recruiting outcomes in NCAA D1 sports. Specifically, legalization appears to improve basketball recruiting outcomes for in-state colleges but hurts recruiting outcomes for football programs. Since collegiate athletics are directly correlated with revenues and may affect the number of general applications that a university receives, our results reveal a channel through which marijuana laws could impact post-secondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lower-body strength and power are commonly measured performance qualities across a number of sports. In recent years, more attention has been given to relationships, primarily between lower-body strength and linear speed performance. While still limited, evidence is in agreement that lower-body strength positively contributes to linear speed performance. However, what is less well understood is if there comes a point in an athlete's development, at which, further working on increasing maximal strength may not fully compliment additional gains in speed performance. Within this study, authors aimed to provide practitioners with lower-body strength and power thresholds that can discriminate between slow and fast performers, within a group of collegiate American football players. The sample was further divided into a high-body and low-body weight group, and authors hypothesized that by using logistic regression, supplemented with receiver operator curve analyses, optimal cut-off points (i.e., relative lower-body strength thresholds) that are able to significantly discriminate between slow and fast linear speed performers may be identified. Findings indicate that optimal cut-off scores differed between the groups of athletes, as well as the lower body strength and power tests. All models were able to significantly distinguish between slower and faster performers, and area under the curve values ranged from 0.695 to 0.903. Although thresholds will likely vary based on factors such as sex, training age, and sport, findings from this investigation may be used to benchmark athletes and to further individualize training aimed at improving linear speed performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Purpose) We analyzed injury reports of team belonging to the university soccer TOP league. (Materials) 44 players who were enrolled in the top team in the 2021 season. (Methods) We recorded the exposure time and number of injuries for each player and calculated the injury rate. Injury site, injury type, onset factors, and severity were investigated by year and month. (Results) The number of injuries was 40, exposure time was 13,543 hours, and injury rate was 2.3/1,000 hours (95% CI: 1.8-3.8). Injury rate changes by month showed the highest in February at 6.4/1,000hours, and the highest in June at 41.3/1,000hours during matches. As a monthly trend, number of injuries and injury rate were high in February, June, September and October, and exposure time in the previous month tended to be low. As for injury type, sprain/ligament injury occurred most frequently, and muscle rupture occurred less frequently. (Discussion) The injury rate was lower than those of the top leagues in other countries. On the other hand, an increase in the total activity time by month may increase injury rate. Sprain/ligament injury was the most common type of injury, while muscle rupture was rare, suggesting that it was not affected by COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fluctuations in U.S. college football team performance have been shown to have impacts on the student experience. This study explores the long-run implications, examining the impact of college football team performance relative to the period of student attendance on future earnings. Better college football team performance during the early years of school attendance increases average wages of male students, but does not impact female wages. Supplemental evidence suggests that positive shocks to student social networks may partly explain the positive impact on earnings. Better team performance near the time of graduation increases average wages for both men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research exists on conflict of interest in high-performance sport in the global North. Yet, the research conducted particularly into US college football—a fairly unique social site of athletic labor given that the fact that enormous revenue is produced by professionalized work that is not compensated—is largely quantitative in nature. In this study, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with twenty-five former power five football players Based on our conversations with former college football players in order to interrogate in a more granular way how and why conflict of interest undermines health and safety in the sport. We found that the well-being of college football players is consistently jeopardized because of the financial imperatives that shape the sport and compromise the care players receive from medical practitioners beholden to the team's ‘need’ to win at all costs. In addition to the inherent concerns this raises about the state of medicine in college athletics, we would also contend that the experiences of the players we spoke to offer a crucial intervention into the debate over ‘exploitation’ in college sport. While exploitation is generally understood in economic terms based on the question of how and to whom the value produced through the commodity spectacle of college sport is distributed, we contend that it should also be understood in terms of the attendant harms. The testimony in this article contributes to the literature on conflict of interest principally by providing some of the most rich and evocative available testimony about how and why conflict of interest occurs and what the implications are for the players whose care is compromised by it.

College football programs invest millions of dollars into recruiting top high school prospects. This recruiting process is covered extensively by reporters from sports media outlets. While the players being recruited are predominately Black, the sports media is disproportionately dominated by White men. In this context, the current study reports on data from interviews with 15 participants who work in the college football recruiting media industry. While some participants adopted a color-blind perspective dominated by a belief that racism no longer exists, most reporters expressed an awareness of racial stereotypes in the sports media and felt a need to address racial inequity. Such awareness presents an opportunity for anti-racist training that may help media members avoid racial stereotyping and address racism in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) bowl games represent a final opportunity for teams to showcase themselves in front of a national television audience. Capital One Bowl Mania, as branded by the broadcast network ESPN, is a signature event of college football, and the College Football Playoff national championship marks the end of the FBS season. During the 2019–2020 FBS postseason, ESPN owned the broadcast rights to 36 of the 41 FBS bowl games. Controlling nearly 90% of FBS bowl games, ESPN controls the representation of almost every broadcast bowl game. Informed by extant research on the now defunct Bowl Championship Series, this study looks for evidence of a hypercommercial media logic in the institutional field of FBS bowl games. Using a mixed-method approach, this paper investigates the reproduction of a sample of 18 FBS bowl game broadcasts and considers the extent to which the increased use of in-game graphics in broadcast production structures and practices reflects an hypercommercial media logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the early wooden facilities and grounds of American college football within National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Football Bowl Subdivision and Ivy League schools from 1869 through 1903. Within, we identify what set of events and opportunities led to the development of the earliest football playing spaces. Furthermore, we recognize and explain what patterns of construction and renovation influenced the creation of permanent stadia. Critical environmental conditions that impacted the spread of knowledge about football and its playing grounds are recognized in addition to specific rules, which influenced the evolution of fields and facilities. Finally, we recognize the importance of facility enclosure and interests in producing revenues, and feature discussion on the movement of games from off- to on-campus while offering a collective picture of what these places looked like as potential synedochial social anchors for their institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirteen institutions left the Southern Conference to form the Southeastern Conference during 1932. Why did these schools leave the Southern Conference? Previous historical research portrays the large size of the Southern Conference and the desire to pass academic reforms as reasons for the Southeastern Conference's formation. This article argues that the university presidents and other administrators at Southeastern Conference institutions formed it to enhance the legitimacy of their member institutions. Throughout the Great Depression, the conference's administrators pursued increased legitimacy by attempting to reform academic eligibility rules, allowing football games to be broadcast over the radio, awarding athletic scholarships, allowing member institutions to compete in emerging postseason football bowl games, and hiring a commissioner. This instance of conference realignment is historically significant because some of the policies implemented by the Southeastern Conference contributed to its rise as one of the top revenue-generating conferences in college athletics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After graduation, Brooks had stints at the University of Florida Athletic Association and USA Track & Field before accepting a position at ESPN as the manager of college network PR. Interview With Amanda Brooks, ESPN PR/Director of Communications for College Football and SEC Network Graph: Amanda Brooks - ESPN PR/Director of Communications for College Football and SEC Network. Amanda Brooks, a Kent, Ohio native, graduated from Hendrix College with a degree in religion. [Extracted from the article]

This article investigated whether an association existed between the academic clustering of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) college athletes and the reporting lines of athletic academic support departments at their institutions during the 2017-18 academic year. Critics have argued that college athletes cluster into a major at a higher rate when athletic academic support departments report to athletic department officials instead of university administrators not employed by their athletic department. The authors contacted athletic academic support directors at NCAA Division I FBS institutions to find out whether their departments reported to an administrator employed by or outside of the athletic department. Then, the authors used annual football media guides provided by athletic departments to determine the number of college athletes who were enrolled in each academic major. Finally, the authors used an ANOVA to calculate whether an association existed between an athletic academic support department's reporting lines and the rate that college football athletes clustered into one or more majors. The results indicated that the association between the rate that college football athletes clustered into one or more majors and the reporting lines used by athletic academic support departments at their institutions was insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the in-game communication of football players from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) was excessively penalized in the field of play. Previous literature has found that referee bias is commonplace and uncovered evidence that referees socially judge the communicative behaviors of HBCU student athletes differently than the communicative behaviors of student athletes from predominantly White institutions. This led to social judgment theory emerging as the theoretical frame. Quantitative methods were utilized to analyze National Collegiate Athletic Association data for Division II college football. Findings revealed that referees disproportionately flagged football teams from HBCUs in comparison with predominantly White institutions. These results provide implications for theory. The uncovered results also support a well-developed line of communication research that has indicated that excessive penalties are levied against HBCU teams in multiple sports. A rhetorical call to action is made to facilitate officiating change in intercollegiate athletics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a theoretical underpinning of parasocial interaction—BIRGing (basking in reflected glory) and CORFing (cutting off reflected failure)—this study explored fan reactions to high school athletes' commitments to play football for National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I programs. A thematic analysis of tweets made by fans during the 2020 recruiting period was examined in two stages: (a) tweets directed toward recruits before they committed to a program and (b) tweets directed toward recruits after they committed. Findings show fan frivolity in regard to identification, as well as a desire to become part of the recruiting process of high school football players. In addition, results yield the possibility of a shift in athlete motivations for social media use, fan association with athletics programs, and how fans cope with unexpected loss. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this study is to examine the dispersion of football-generated revenue and athlete talent among Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams in the modern College Football Playoff (CFP) era. This study is a follow-up to Caro and Benton's examination of the "Great Divide" in 2012. The results of this study indicate that the conference and university stratification that existed through the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) era has intensified over the last decade. This study quantifies the inequality in college football and recommends means to correct or control this disparity, including the possibility of the Group of Five collective breaking off and beginning their own subdivision. College football may be past the point where parity in recruiting and revenue can be achieved. The implications and realities of this outcome are considered here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, people's life is getting better and better, and the attention to sports competition is also increasing. In the current information age, sports and athletes' data are very important, especially team football. In college, football coaches can use the data to analyze the situation of college football players and opposing players to better specify the corresponding tactics to win the game. However, at present, most of the data results need to be manually recorded and counted on the spot or after the game. In the process of statistics, Zhou Jing will inevitably have omissions and other problems. For this problem, a method based on space-time graph convolution. In the process, machine vision and motion recognition methods are combined, and the joint movements of different football players are extracted through the pose estimation method to obtain motion recognition results. To ented the methods on the KTH dataset. The results showed that the football motion recognition using the research method reached 98% on the dataset, which significantly improved the accuracy of nearly 5% over the existing state-of-the-art methods. At the same time, the accuracy rate of football movements was less than 5%. This means that the research method can effectively identify football sports, and can be widely used in other fields, and promote the development of human movement recognition in human-computer interaction and smart city and other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television coverage's impact on college football attendance is a topic of debate. Between 2005 and 2019, annual growth in athletic department revenues for Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools from media rights, postseason football, and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) conference distributions far exceeded revenue growth in ticket sales revenue. This study re-evaluates the substitution or complementarity of television coverage and stadium attendance in college football with updated data while controlling for selection bias through endogenous treatment regression. Although initial results reveal a positive correlation between television coverage and attendance, national coverage and attendance appear to be substitutes after controlling for selection bias. That said, from an attendance maximizing perspective, national coverage is preferable to lower-tiered coverage if a game is to be televised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous researches have confirmed that perceived social support has a profound effect on individuals' mental health. However, the effects and potential mechanisms of perceived social support on mental health of college athletes are still largely unknown, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore the relationship between perceived social support and mental health in college football athletes, and to evaluate whether hopelessness and psychological pressure affected this relationship. A sample of 672 Chinese college football athletes (37.9% girls; Mage = 20.43 years; SDage = 1.68) were investigated with the Perceived Social Support Scale (PSSS), the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Surveys were voluntary and anonymous. The findings revealed that, after adjusting for demographic factors, hopelessness mediated the relationship between Chinese college football athletes' perceived social support and their mental health. Furthermore, psychological pressure moderated the negative association between perceived social support and hopelessness, and the association was stronger for them with high-level psychological pressure. These results underline the need for focused strategies in the prevention and treatment of mental health issues among Chinese college football athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International students represent a valuable stakeholder for U.S. institutions of higher learning, but universities often struggle to integrate this unique student group into the university community. Drawing upon social identity theory and the acculturation process, this study explored how college sport contributes to international students' university identification using narrative interviews with East Asian international students who attended college football events at a U.S. university. Findings revealed international students mainly interacted with their co-national peers during college football games while associating with the football spectator subgroup through the influence of American students, which contributed to their university identity. Theoretically, our research shows how college sport and acculturation interact to influence the various social identities of international students. Practically, our research offers guidance on how universities can use college sport to initiate organic social interactions between students from different cultures and empower international students to identify as essential members of universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study offers a descriptive history of the football grounds at Baylor from 1894 to 2014. The current review identifies important individuals and notable events that impacted the football facilities at Baylor. Moreover, the contextual factors influencing each period of change were recognized, and it was determined if Baylor's facilities followed the pattern of other regional peers. In the case of Baylor, football ultimately created social anchors for the institution and Waco because the increasing popularity and commercial interest in college football produced spectacles capable of providing a unique campus spirit. Next, the spectacle of football and spirit both established and improved alumni relationships and corresponded with interest in elevating the prestige of the university and city to attract students, visitors, and businesses to operate in the area. Finally, the construction of various Baylor football playing grounds produced significant media attention capable of boosting enrollments and recognition that Baylor was a major university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]