Gridiron Football Research Articles

Creating value through membership and participation in sport fan consumption communities

Research question: While marketers acknowledge the critical role of developing long-term strategies that enhance the value of the organization, collaborative and co-creation service activities are gaining importance. At sporting events, sport team personnel collaborate with sport consumers to create the event experience. Sport consumers, however, rarely attend sporting events alone. Instead, sport consumers join and participate in networks of like-minded fans and engage in collaborative and co-creation consumption activities. In sports, these networks are called sport fan consumption communities. The purpose of this research is to create and test a hypothesized model of membership and participation in a sport fan consumption community and fans' behavioral intentions. Research methods: In total, 10 hypotheses were generated and tested using a sample of students and alumni (n = 627) from a large Division I-A (NCAA) university in the southeastern USA. Using confirmatory factory analysis procedures, reliability and validity evidence for 15 items measuring the 5 hypothesized constructs was found using approximately half of the data (n = 314). Subsequently, structural equation modeling with bootstrapping procedures was used to examine the direct, indirect (mediated) and total effects with the remaining data (n = 313). Results and findings: The empirical results supported all 10 hypothesized relationships. The results suggest that both a feeling of membership in the sport fan consumption community and participation in the rituals and traditions associated with the community independently and in coordination lead to increases in future intentions to attend the university's (gridiron) football team's games, purchase the team's merchandise, and recommend the team's games to others. Implications: For sport managers and marketers, resources should be allocated to support the creation and development of sport fan consumption communities in order to improve the relationships between fans and their team.

Fabled Futures: Migration and Mobility for Samoans in American Football

Since the 1970s, Samoan participation in American gridiron football has grown exponentially. In American Sāmoa (and other transpacific Samoan communities), football has come to represent both a real and imagined “way out” of what appears to many as a strangled field of possibility. The visibility and vibrancy of football in American Sāmoa is rooted in Samoan histories of migration to the United States, Samoan cultural sensibilities, the changing market of the American football industry, and narrowing economic opportunities. The transnational nature of football migration is key to understanding the appeal of playing football, the rewards that accrue to successful players, and how these resources have continued to transform conditions of possibility (materially and ideologically) for young people in the islands. This article explores the layered and complex motivations for football participation as shaped by prospective forms of capital, transnational sporting institutions, and historical contingency. Focused on history, economy, and a transformed vision of the future, it offers a critical genealogy of football in (American) Sāmoa and Samoans in football.

‘Soldiers may Fall but Athletes Never!’: Sport as an Antidote to Nervous Diseases and National Decline in America, 1865–1905

During the second half of the nineteenth century concerns about hysteria and other nervous diseases in males became extensive in some countries. One presumed cause of such afflictions were military conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The Anglo-Saxon, at least according to many British and American commentators, had more sand, pluck, and courage than did men of other nations. In the United States, concerns about ‘Soldier's Heart’, a condition brought forth by the Civil War (1861–1865), were soon replaced by ‘neurasthenia’, a term used by American physician George Miller Beard in 1869. In an 1872 article entitled ‘Are Americans Less Healthy Than Europeans’, author C. S. Young hoped that the types of ‘games of competition’ that were infused with the values of Muscular Christianity’ would become part of ‘every educational establishment in the land’ so that the youth of America would acquire not only muscular vigor but ‘the manly virtues of truth, honor, and fair play’. Some attention would be given to such values; however, attention turned increasingly to ‘gridiron football’, a game likely to be infused with rampant commercialism that rapidly became the predominating sport in American institutions of higher learning. In 1898, American physician Morton H. Prince asked whether football might cause ‘traumatic neurasthenia and hysteria’ in males in the way that these conditions sometimes occurred among men engaged in a battle, and answered his own question by replying ‘no’! Football players were so well-prepared physically and mentally that there would be ‘no shock or terror’ attendant upon their injuries as might occur in a military conflict. By the time the 1903 edition of Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders: A History of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry was published debates about intercollegiate athletics that continue today were reaching a fever pitch.

Phenomenology and the Question of Instant Replay: A Crisis of the Sciences?

In this article, I address the question of whether or not the use of instant replay in sports improves the ability of officials to make correct calls. I pay special attention to the use of instant reply in American gridiron football. I first explain the method of static phenomenology, by recourse to Edmund Husserl's work and apply a static phenomenological method to the official's quest for evidence in the analysis of a still frame of video. Second, I expose Husserl's genetic method of phenomenology and apply it to the official's search for evidence and accuracy when assessing a play in a frame-by-frame or super-slow-motion analysis. I then look critically at the intersection of these two methods in instant replay analysis. My conclusion is that in cases calling only for a static analysis, I think that instant replay is beneficial. In other cases, the application of a static, frame-by-frame analysis, abstracted from lived experience, to a context of movement, can disrupt the normality of perception such that it yields problematic evidence. The problems that ensue from employing a static analysis to a situation calling for a genetic analysis cause me to recommend a limited use of instant replay in the types of cases which involve a genetic analysis. Epistemologically, I think that lived-time analysis is the optimal mode of perceiving and judging certain events. Humanistically, my concern is that the use of instant replay can disrupt the life-world of sport.

Coming to America: Historical Ontologies and United States Soccer

In January 2007, English international soccer star David Beckham announced to a global media that he would be leaving the Spanish giants Real Madrid to join Major League Soccer's (MLS) Los Angeles Galaxy. MLS Commissioner Don Garber feted Beckham as a global sporting icon whose presence attested to America's gradual transformation into a ‘Soccer Nation.’ However, following LA Galaxy's acquisition, a debate surrounding soccer's previous failure to compete at the highest echelons of American professional sport reappeared. Academic and journalistic commentators identified a number of obstacles—historical, socioeconomic and ideological—that have prevented soccer from gaining a foothold in the United States sporting market and therein becoming a credible adversary to the holy trinity of Gridiron Football, Baseball, and Basketball. This article, drawing upon Ian Hacking's prescriptions for Historical Ontology (2002) and thereby foregrounding issues of identity and power, seeks to analyse the impediments that have marked soccer's development in the United States and that led to the recruitment of Beckham as the sporting celebrity-cum-commercial juggernaut intended to bring MLS to the attention of a mass audience—variegated in terms of class, ‘race,’ and gender—so coveted by leaders of the organisation.

The role of biomechanics in the epidemiology of injuries.

In this paper a review of the epidemiology of both traumatic and overuse injuries is presented with special emphasis on the role of biomechanics. Biomechanical analysis of injuries and the specific sports has increased in sophistication to such a degree we have a much better understanding of both aetiology and management. Particularly in the area of overuse injuries this biomechanical data can also be utilised in prevention. This paper discusses acute traumatic injuries with emphasis on knee injuries. A detailed examination of knee injuries during skiing is explored. In addition, cervical injuries in gridiron football and rugby are outlined. Overuse injuries occurring during running are next discussed. Aetiological factors including training errors, muscular dysfunction and inflexibility, footwear, running gait and lower extremity malalignment are considered. Overuse injuries in swimming, dance, gymnastics and throwing sports are briefly discussed. Biochemical analysis is felt to be important in developing strategies that lead to rule changes, alteration of training techniques and improvement in equipment and footwear.