Delving into the history of gambling and corruption in intercollegiate sports, Cheating the Spread recounts all of the major gambling scandals in college football and basketball. Digging through court records, newspapers, government documents, and university archives and conducting private interviews, Albert J. Figone finds that game rigging has been pervasive and nationwide throughout most of the sports'' history. The insidious practice has spread to implicate not only bookies and unscrupulous gamblers but also college administrators, athletic organizers, coaches, fellow students, and the athletes themselves.
Naming the players, coaches, gamblers, and go-betweens involved, Figone discusses numerous college basketball and football games reported to have been fixed and describes the various methods used to gain unfair advantage, inside information, or undue profit. His survey of college football includes early years of gambling on games between e
Trade Review"Cheating the Spread is an important study that usefully synthesizes existing literature on college sports gambling and the major scandals and provides a wealth of new information gleaned from heretofore untapped sources. The exhaustive research in Cheating the Spread has a comprehensive sweep that is stunning."--Richard O. Davies, author of Sports in American Life: A History
"A compelling, informative look into the dark side of collegiate athletics."--
Booklist"An informative account illustrating the nature of incentives in big-time college athletics. It should be required reading for any serious student of college athletics."--
The International Journal of the History of Sport
