Fourth And Long Gone

From New York Times bestselling author and Michigan football expert John Back, an analysis of the state of college football: Why we love the game, what is at risk, and the fight to save it. In search of the sport’s old ideals amid the roaring flood of hypocrisy and greed, bestselling author John U. Bacon embedded himself in four college football programs—Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, and Northwestern—and captured the oldest, biggest, most storied league, the Big Ten, at its tipping point. He sat in as coaches dissected game film, he ate dinner at training tables, and he listened in locker rooms. He talked with tailgating fans and college presidents, and he spent months in the company of the gifted young athletes who play the game. Fourth and Long reveals intimate scenes behind closed doors, from a team’s angry face-off with their athletic director to a defensive lineman acing his master’s exams in theoretical math. It captures the private moment when coach Urban Meyer earned the devotion of Ohio State’s Buckeyes on their way to a perfect season. It shows Michigan’s athletic department endangering the very traditions that distinguish the college game from all others. And it re-creates the euphoria of the Northwestern Wildcats winning their first bowl game in decades. Most unforgettably, Fourth and Long finds what the national media missed in the ugly aftermath of Penn State’s tragic scandal: the unheralded story of players who joined forces with Coach Bill O’Brien to save the university’s treasured program—and with it, a piece of the game’s soul. This is the work of a writer in love with an old game—a game he sees at the precipice. Bacon’s deep knowledge of sports history and his sensitivity to the tribal subcultures of the college game power this elegy to a beloved and endangered American institution.

Ever heard the saying "It can't get any worse?" I made the mistake of saying that and since this game; I swore I would never say it again. You see, once you say that it can't get any worse it usually does! Now I say "it will only get so bad that eventually, it has to get better!" I will never forget what happened next in this game. I went into the huddle to call the play and one of my linemen looked at me and said "Lotti, I don't feel well. I just don't feel like blocking." Not the phrase a quarterback wants to hear from his linemen. One after another echoed the same phrase, "I don't feel well." It was late in the game when this started and one after another, each player started getting sick. I tried to get substitutions for the sick players, but there was a problem. Players and coaches on the sidelines were getting sick. The illness was hitting one person after another and we knew something was definitely wrong.

How often have I overheard alluring snatches of song, only to be baffled by denial when I asked for more. Kindly black faces smile indulgently as at the vagaries of an imaginative child, when I persist in pleading for the rest. "Nawm, honey, I wa and n and t singing nothing — nothing a-tall! " How often have I been tricked into enthusiasm over the promise of folk-songs, only to hear age-worn phonograph records, — but perhaps so changed and worked upon by usage that they could possibly claim to be folk-songs after all! — or Broadway echoes, or conventional songs by white authors! Yet cajolements might be in vain, even though all the time I knew, by the uncanny instinct of folk-lorists, that there were folk-songs there. And even when you get a song started, when you are listening with your heart in your ear and the greed of the folk-lorist in your eye, you may lose out. If you seem too much interested, the song retreats, draws in like a turtle and s head, and no amount of coaxing will make it venture back. And there is something positively fatal about a pencil! Songs seem to be afraid of lead-poisoning. Or perhaps the pencil is secretly attached by a cord (a vocal cord?) to the singer and s tongue. It must be so, for otherwise, why has it so often happened that when I, distrustful of my tricky memory to hold a precious song, have sneaked a pencil out to take notes, the tongue has suddenly jerked back and refused to wag again? Yet that is not always the case, for sometimes the knowledge that his song is being written down inspires a bard with more respect for it and he gives it freely.

A comic novel portrays the struggle of two college football coaches to recruit the top high school running back

The Fourth Tier is the first book of the Underworld series, a spin off from author Penn Fawn's Necropolis dark fantasy novels. For the deceased, the underworld represents a terrifying awakening. It is where men who believe after they die they will sleep in eternal peace go, as opposed to being in a state where they are forever at rest. The fourth tier is the deepest, darkest, most terrifying place in the afterlife where only the most unfortunate souls might be downcast. It is home to the master of sorcery and dark arts, the necromancer, and his alliance of beasts and the undead. This is precisely where our protagonist, Hespatia, and her peers who've fallen from grace find themselves. A desperate struggle to try and find a way out is their fare in this place filled with horror, and abound with curses and danger at every corner that the necromancer instills to keep all who try to escape in line.