American Football History

On November 23, 1968, near the end of a turbulent and memorable year, there was a football game that would also prove turbulent and memorable: the season-ending clash between Harvard and Yale. Both teams entered undefeated and, technically at least, came out undefeated. The final score was 29-29. To some of the players on the field, it was a triumph; to others a tragedy. George Howe Colt’s The Game is the story of that iconic American year, as seen through the young men who lived it and were changed by it.

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that season's NFL Championship game. Football was still greatly over-shadowed by the country's favored pastime - baseball - but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.

On the field and roaming the sidelines were 17 future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry.

The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sports.

The victory and legend of the Super Bowl XLV-winning Green Bay Packers continues in Chuck Carlson’s Tales from the Green Bay Packers Sideline. In this behind-the-scenes look at the NFL’s second oldest franchise, Carlson captures the determination, aggression, and vision that have constantly spurred the Packers to greatness. Through interviews and extensive research, Carlson brings to life stories from Packers legends such as Curly Lambeau, Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, Ray Nitschke, Brett Favre, and the stars of today’s Packers like Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews, Jr.

University of Miami football is more than national championships, 30-game winning streaks, and being a pipeline to the NFL. It’s the Gator Flop, defeating Tulane on a fifth down, and playing three games in eight days. It’s converting third and 44 against Notre Dame, Michael Irvin talking smack with Florida State’s Deion Sanders, and Vinny Testaverde being sacked by hamburgers.

In The First Star, acclaimed sports writer Lars Anderson recounts the thrilling story of Harold "Red" Grange, the Galloping Ghost of the gridiron, and the wild barnstorming tour that earned professional football a place in the American sporting firmament.

The New York Yankees. The Boston Red Sox. For a hundred years, no two teams have locked horns as fiercely or as frequently, and no two seasons frame the colossal battle more perfectly than 2003 and 2004. Now, with incredible energy and access, leading sports columnist Mike Vaccaro chronicles the history of the greatest rivalry in sports, and the two stunning American League Championship Series that define a century of baseball.

Tom Brady marching the team upfield in the final minute of the 2001 Super Bowl. Troy Brown playing offense, defense, and special teams. The Tuck Rule. A rogue groundskeeper plowing a path for kicker John Smith at the end of a scoreless, snowy game. Gino Cappelletti setting the AFL record for points in a game against the Houston Oilers. These are the moments Patriots fans love to remember, now retold by the players who lived them.

With extensive reporting and engrossing storytelling, Jim Baker and Bernard Corbett give us the scenes of one of the NFL's most successful and popular franchises.

Against the backdrop of the call to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the National Women’s Football League was founded as something of a gimmick. However, their star team, the Toledo Troopers, emerged to challenge traditional gender roles and amass a win-loss record never before or since achieved in American football. The players were housewives, factory workers, hairdressers, former nuns, high school teachers, bartenders, mail carriers, pilots, and would-be drill sergeants. Most of all, they were athletes who had been denied the opportunity to play a game they were born to play.

Voilà plus d'un siècle que le football déchaîne les passions à travers l'Europe. Imaginé comme un passe-temps pour ouvriers dans l'Angleterre brumeuse du 19ème siècle, le football a pris une place prépondérante dans nos sociétés occidentales.

One year before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball in 1947, four black players joined the Cleveland Browns and Los Angeles Rams to become the first professional football players of African-American descent in the modern era. While blacks had played on professional teams in the early days of pro football, none had joined a team since 1934.

In the 1960s, on the heels of the “Greatest Game Ever Played”, professional football began to flourish across the country - except in Texas, where college football was still the only game in town. But in an unlikely series of events, two young oil tycoons started their own professional football franchises in Dallas the very same year: the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and, as part of a new upstart league designed to thwart the NFL’s hold on the game, the Dallas Texans of the AFL. Almost overnight, a bitter feud was born.

Very few institutions in American sports can match the enduring excellence of the University of Alabama football program. Across a wide swath of the last century, the tradition-rich Crimson Tide has claimed twelve national championships, captured 25 conference titles, finished 34 times among the country's top ten, and played in 53 bowl games.

Comprised of exclusive interviews with Jets players, coaches, and other figures surrounding the organization, Sack Exchange: The Definitive Oral History of the 1980s New York Jets is an eye-opening account of a memorable era in one team's history, which also takes a step back and looks at the state of the National Football League as a whole during the 1980s.

In this newly revised edition of Chuck Carlson’s Game of My Life Green Bay Packers, the greatest men to don that green and yellow uniform talk about the best, the most important, and the most entertaining game they ever played. Was it during the immortal "Ice Bowl" of 1967, when Bart Starr snuck across the goal line in the withering cold of Lambeau Field to beat the Dallas Cowboys? Or was it the NFC championship win over the Carolina Panthers in 1997 that sent the Packers back to the Super Bowl for the first time in 30 years?

The first fifty years of America's most popular spectator sport have been strangely neglected by historians claiming to tell the "complete story" of pro football. Well, here are the early stories that "complete story" has left out. What about the awful secret carried around by Sid Luckman, the Bears' Hall of Fame quarterback whose father was a mobster and a murderer? Or Steve Hamas, who briefly played in the NFL then turned to boxing and beat Max Schmeling, conqueror of Joe Louis?

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of America's most beloved sporting event - the Super Bowl - an authoritative collection of the most pivotal plays through the decades, compiled by the legendary Jerry Rice.

In Mavericks, Money and Men, football historian Charles Ross chronicles the AFL's key events, including Buck Buchanan becoming the first overall draft pick in 1963, and the 1965 boycott led by black players who refused to play in the AFL All Star game after experiencing blatant racism. He also recounts how the success of the AFL forced a merger with the NFL in 1969, which arguably facilitated the evolution of modern professional football.

To most of us "mainlanders," the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are resort destinations, summer homes for the Kennedys, the Obamas, and Patriots coach Bill Belichick. But after the tourists and jetsetters leave, the cold weather descends, and the local shop owners, carpenters, and fishermen ready themselves for the main event: high school football. For over 50 years, the local teams have been locking horns every November. They play for pride, a coveted trophy, and, very often, a shot at the league championship.

There was never a player quite like Dudley before he came and there will surely never be another one. He was the most versatile player in football history, college and pro. An NFL team today suits up eight men to play the positions Bill played by himself in a single season. He won the only Quadruple Crown in NFL history, leading the league in rushing, punt returns, interceptions, and lateral passes in 1946. He also won the NFL MVP award in 1946 with the Pittsburgh Steelers, even though he played in the NFL at five-foot 10, 175 pounds.