Mike Oriard was a professional American football player who played offensive lineman for four seasons for the Kansas City Chiefs. Oriard has gone on to have a distinguished career as a professor of English and later Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. His academic work has centered around American sports fiction in multiple mediums. His bibliography includes Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport (published in 2010), Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era (published in 2009), Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Literature (published in 2008), King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, the Weekly and