Describes the history, key people, teams, important games, and mascots of the Southeastern Conference of NCAA basketball.

College football in the South, it has been said, is like a religion, and nowhere is the passion and dedication more evident than at the twelve universities that make up the Southeastern Conference. The SEC is one of the most storied associations in all of collegiate sports. Its intense rivalries, historic programs, iconic coaches, and championship traditions are felt every autumn, from Gainesville to Little Rock, Baton Rouge to Lexington. The competition among the schools is as fervent as ever, fomenting rivalries within states (Alabama vs. Auburn and Mississippi State vs. Ole Miss) and across borders (Florida vs. Georgia and LSU vs. Arkansas). Many legends of the game have graced the SEC gridiron, including Fran Tarkenton, Joe Namath, Reggie White, Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, Emmitt Smith, and Peyton, Archie, and Eli Manning---to name just a few. Celebrating three-quarters of a century of incomparable football, this lavishly illustrated book celebrates the stars, heroes, characters, and games that have made the SEC a force beyond reckoning. The book explores the players and the coaches, the teams and the traditions, and the great games and individual performances that have defined each decade of SEC football. Vintage and modern photography bring the world of the Southeastern Conference, past and present, brilliantly to life, and complete this timely tribute to an exceptional football legacy.

New York Times Best Seller 2015 RFK Book Awards Special Recognition 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award 2015 AAUP Books Committee "Outstanding" Title Based on more than eighty interviews, this fast-paced, richly detailed biography of Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the SEC, digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated and profound story of sports pioneering than we've come to expect from the genre. Perry Wallace's unusually insightful and honest introspection reveals his inner thoughts throughout his journey. Wallace entered kindergarten the year that Brown v. Board of Education upended "separate but equal." As a 12-year-old, he sneaked downtown to watch the sit-ins at Nashville's lunch counters. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Wallace entered high school, and later saw the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. On March 16, 1966, his Pearl High School basketball team won Tennessee's first integrated state tournament--the same day Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky Wildcats lost to the all-black Texas Western Miners in an iconic NCAA title game. The world seemed to be opening up at just the right time, and when Vanderbilt recruited him, Wallace courageously accepted the assignment to desegregate the SEC. His experiences on campus and in the hostile gymnasiums of the Deep South turned out to be nothing like he ever imagined. On campus, he encountered the leading civil rights figures of the day, including Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Robert Kennedy--and he led Vanderbilt's small group of black students to a meeting with the university chancellor to push for better treatment. On the basketball court, he experienced an Ole Miss boycott and the rabid hate of the Mississippi State fans in Starkville. Following his freshman year, the NCAA instituted "the Lew Alcindor rule," which deprived Wallace of his signature move, the slam dunk. Despite this attempt to limit the influence of a rising tide of black stars, the final basket of Wallace's college career was a cathartic and defiant dunk, and the story Wallace told to the Vanderbilt Human Relations Committee and later The Tennessean was not the simple story of a triumphant trailblazer that many people wanted to hear. Yes, he had gone from hearing racial epithets when he appeared in his dormitory to being voted as the university's most popular student, but, at the risk of being labeled "ungrateful," he spoke truth to power in describing the daily slights and abuses he had overcome and what Martin Luther King had called "the agonizing loneliness of a pioneer."

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) is divided into east and west divisions, each containing six basketball teams. The East Division consists of the University of Florida, University of Georgia, University of Kentucky, University of South Carolina, University of Tennessee, and Vanderbilt University. The University of Alabama, University of Arkansas, Auburn University, Louisiana State University, University of Mississippi, and Mississippi State University make up the West Division. Basketball in the SEC (Southeastern Conference) is packed with a wealth of fascinating information and statistics about one of the nation’s most popular sports and most successful college conferences, including conference history; teams and mascots; player and coach profiles; conference rivalries; and important game and tournament highlights.

"Historians, sports scholars, and students will refer to Benching Jim Crow for many years to come as the standard source on the integration of intercollegiate sport."ùMark S. Dyreson, author of Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience --

There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory. In September 2006, popular sports columnist and lifelong University of Tennessee fan Clay Travis set out on his "Dixieland Delight Tour." Without a single map, hotel reservation, or game ticket, he began an 8,000-mile journey through the beating heart of the Southland. As Travis toured the SEC, he immersed himself in the bizarre game-day rituals of the common fan, brazenly dancing with the chancellor's wife at a Vanderbilt frat party, hanging with University of Florida demigod quarterback Tim Tebow, and abandoning himself totally to the ribald intensity and religious fervor of SEC football. Dixieland Delight is Travis's hilarious, loving, irreverent, and endlessly entertaining chronicle of a season of ironic excess in a world that goes a little crazy on football Saturdays.

A gripping narrative nonfiction account of the forgotten life and legacy of Henry Harris, the first black athlete at Auburn University during the final days of the civil rights movement. A former newspaper reporter, Sam Heys traces Harris's odyssey from living in a converted store in rural Alabama to his suicide six years later.