The sports journalism chose how to produce and allocate the content for the women's and men's Swedish national football teams during a championship. The media mediate an unjustified reality that people perceive as the real reality. They do not reflect the real reality but chose what to mediate and produce. The purpose of the survey is to find out how the gender representation is perceived between the women's and men's national football team during the World and European Championships group play periods in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter. The thesis examines how much attention each national team gets during their championships. Furthermore, we examine what similarities and differences exist in the production of the women's and men's national team. In order to answer the two questions of the study, a combination of two methods is applied. The first question of the study is answered through quantitative content analysis and the second question is answered through a qualitative discourse analysis, which follows up the quantitative method and makes an in-depth analysis of the discourses. The study is based on framing theory, gender theory and media, which indicates that the media possess power in how they allocate and shape their content for men, women and their representations. The results of the survey show that the men's national team is allocated more attention during their championships compared to the women's national team. The result shows that men are over-represented in sports journalism, which confirms the previous research that the study presented. The discourses show that men and women in the national teams are presented differently where the men are usually referred to as a team and a unit while the women are mentioned as individuals and less about the team. The thesis also shows that women are presented in a more negative sense compared to men, where journalism usually takes positive aspects despite adversity for the men. The discourse is also characterized by the fact that the national teams have the same task of representing Sweden but that the women's and men's national team are nevertheless presented differently in that sense. The conclusion is that the Swedish national team is overrepresented in media and that the gender representation distinguishes the national law.

The problem addressed is the lack of empirical research describing the delivery of individualized learning material in a secure and mobile manner. The goal was to investigate the effectiveness of deploying training materials to National Football League (NFL) players during a recent NFL season. Over the past few seasons, NFL teams have started to deliver player training material to mobile devices. The training material is sensitive and includes planning documents for upcoming games. An effort was made to survey a representative at each of the 32 NFL teams in order to gain insight on effectiveness, security, and process. Nearly half of the league responded with 14 of the 32 franchises reporting back. The results demonstrate that mobile devices can be an effective means to distribute educational materials to individuals in secure manner. The iPad was identified as a suitable platform for delivery of instructional material. Security elements such as encryption and using mobile security products should be strongly considered. The results are discussed in detail. A set of standards and guidelines were created based on the responses provided by club employees.

George Taliaferro was a trailblazer. He was the first black quarterback in professional football, the first black quarterback in the National Football League (NFL), and the first black man to be drafted by an NFL team.Taliaferro's story of perseverance revealed the slow and difficult process of integration in high school, at Indiana University, and in his professional football career. The obstacles he faced and the lessons he learned were representative of issues related to the integration of the NFL.A combination of personal narrative and historical investigation was used in this creative project. In addition to Taliaferro's first-hand accounts, depth and perspective were added through interviews and reportage.The biography that resulted, the story of Taliaferro's resolve, became a vehicle for telling a larger story, the integration of the NFL. / Department of Journalism

Master of Science / Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Todd Easton / Throughout an NFL season, 512 games are played in 17 weeks. For a given fan that follows one team, only 16 of those games usually matter, and the rest of the games carry little significance. The goal of this research is to provide substantial reasons for fans to watch other games. This research finds the easiest path to a division championship for each team. This easiest path requires winning the least number of games. Due to NFL’s complicated tiebreaker rules, games not involving the fan’s team can have major implications for that team. The research calls these games critical because if the wrong team wins, then the fan’s team must win additional games to become the division champion. To identify both the easiest path and the critical games, integer programming is used. Given the amount of two-team, three-team, and four-team division tie scenarios that can occur, 31 separate integer programs are solved for each team to identify the easiest path to the division championship. A new algorithm, Shortest Path of Remaining Teams (SPORT) is used to iteratively search through every game of the upcoming week to determine critical games. These integer programs and the SPORT algorithm were used with the data from the previous 2 NFL seasons. Throughout these 2 seasons, it was found that the earliest a team was eliminated from the possibility of winning a division championship was week 12, and occurred in 2012 and 2013. Also, throughout these 2 seasons, there was an average of 65 critical games per season, with more critical games occurring in the 2013-2014 season. Additionally, the 2012 season was used to compare flexed scheduled games with the critical games for those weeks and it was found that the NFL missed three weeks of potentially scheduling a critical game.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-88). Also available online (PDF file) by a subscription to the set or by purchasing the individual file.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-88).

Women have been marginalised in societies around the world, and the world of sports isno exception. The aim of this study was to examine in the swedish newspapersAftonbladet and Expressen the differences and similarities between female and malesports journalists' publications in the coverage about the swedish national footballteams. The used method for this study was a quantitative content analysis, which wasthe most usable method to give us an answer to our question at issue. The theoreticalframework in the study included news values as a theory, a framing theory, a feministmedia theory and a gender contract theory. The results implies that female sportsjournalists tend to write more about the swedish female national football team and thatmale sports journalists tend to write more about the swedish male national footballteam.

The Main Thing is that You did Your Best - a comparative study about how a male respectively a female failure from Swedish national teams in football is portrayed in tabloids aims to examine how Swedish tabloid is influenced by current societal ideologies in their portraying of failures performed by the male respectively the female national team in football. To examine this, the study uses three main theories with perspectives considering power-settings in society. Philosopher Antonio Gramscis theory about hegemony helps the study to understand how different social groups dominate eachother. Linguistic professor Norman Faircloughs theory about discourse gives tools to understand how this dominance and power is confirmed or challenged in language and in this specific study in text. The final theory that this study uses is sociologist Raewyn Connells ideas about that there is a patriarchal hegemony in the society and theories about how it arises. Rooted in these theories the study uses Faircloughs three-dimensional model as the method and tool to investigate the material for traces of power-structures between women and men. The main result of the study shows that the male failure receives far greater critique from the tabloids, despite the fact that the female failure based on pure performance was at least as big. The male failure was in that sense portrayed as more important than the female equivalent. The results also shows that when the female athletes got critique, their abilities were portrayed as amateurish. Another interesting result was that in our study there were no trace of objectifying the women. which opposes the result of other studies about the subject. These results add to the conclusion that there is a patriarchal hegemony surrounding the tabloid portrayal of failure performed by the Swedish national teams in football. A hegemony which to some extent is challenged.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Education and Dept. of Sociology. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2007. / "A dissertation in education and social science." Advisor: Carolyn Thompson. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed July 30, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-121). Online version of the print edition.

Despite evidence indicating negative consequences of repetitive head impacts (RHIs) on the brain, the long-term effects remain largely unknown. Contact sports, such as football, expose players to multiple collisions. Professional sports players have undergone thousands of concussive and sub-concussive RHIs over their careers. In this study we used structural 3T MRI to evaluate cortical thickness of 86 former NFL players (mean age ± SD = 54.9 ± 7.9 years old) and 24 former professional non-contact sport athletes as controls (mean age ± SD =57.2 ± 6.9 years old). Cortical thickness was compared between groups using FreeSurfer. The NFL players displayed decreased cortical thickness in the right temporal lobe and fusiform gyrus (cluster-wise p-value=0.0003, 90% CI=0.0001-0.0005) and the left pre- and postcentral gyrus (cluster-wise p-value=0.0096, 90% CI=0.0084-0.0109). When looking only at NFL subjects impaired in measurements of mood and behavior (n=36) compared to controls, NFL players displayed a similar but more extensive cluster of decreased cortical thickness in the right temporal lobe and fusiform gyrus (cluster-wise p-value=0.0001, 90% CI=0.0000-0.0002) and in the left supramarginal gyrus and pre- and postcentral gyrus, (cluster-wise p-value=0.0002, 90% CI=0.0000-0.0004). Reduced cortical thickness in NFL players is suggestive of the long-term effects of RHIs. Still, future studies are necessary for examining the time-course of damage and the implications of regional cortical thinning.