American Football

Gene Washington’s football career ended long before his daughter Maya was born. She never saw the legendary powerhouse as anything but her dad. She didn’t yet grasp the impact he’d had on the sport - and on America. To understand his historic role in the integration of college football and fully appreciate his legacy, Maya had a lot of catching up to do. Maya retraces her father’s journey from the segregated south to Michigan State during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement and his journey as an NFL pioneer after the 1967 draft.

As Don Shula and Johnny Unitas elevated the brutal game of football, the world around them clashed about Vietnam, civil rights, and sex. Collision of Wills looks at the complicated relationship between Don Shula, the league's winningest coach of all time, and his star player Johnny Unitas, and how their secret animosity fueled the Colts in an era when their losses were as memorable as their victories.

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.

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.

The Forgotten First chronicles the lives of four incredible men, the racism they experienced as Black players entering a segregated sport, the burden of expectation they carried, and their many achievements, which would go on to affect football for generations to come.

Football is evolving rapidly. Defenses are accelerating their ability to adapt to the no-huddle tempo, the full-field passing attack, and RPO advancements of the modern offensive passing game. The offense must adapt or get left behind. Fortunately, the R4 system continually advances, making an already proven equalizer the decisive weapon to fast-track offensive adaptability against the modern warfare of defense.

During the 1980s, Black athletes and other athletes of color broadened the popularity and profitability of major college televised sports by infusing games with a "Black style" of play. At a moment ripe for a revolution in men's college basketball and football, clashes between "good guy" white protagonists and bombastic "bad boy" Black antagonists attracted new fans and spectators. And no two teams in the 1980s welcomed the enemy's role more than Georgetown Hoya basketball and Miami Hurricane football. The Hoyas and the 'Canes made the bad-boy image look good. Pop culture took notice.

Francis Benali is a Southampton Football Club legend and a celebrated charity endurance athlete, and he's ready to tell his story. Francis 'Franny' Benali played football for 20 years for Southampton FC in nearly 400 games, almost his entire career. His utter dedication to the club caused him to be a hero to Saints fans around the world.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Dabo's World and learn about how Dabo Swinney used his energy, faith, and determination to turn the Clemson Tigers into a football powerhouse.

Founded in 1960, the Denver Broncos took 13 years to achieve their first winning season. But since then, this indomitable team has catapulted to excellence. In this newly revised edition of Game of My Life - Denver Broncos, fans of past and present will relive the greatest moments of Mile High football through the eyes of the players themselves. Floyd Little shares the pride and joy of scoring a touchdown in his last game as a Bronco, and John Elway describes the glory of leading the Broncos to their first Super Bowl victory in 1998....

In Slow Getting Up - hailed by Rolling Stone as "the best football memoir of all time" - Nate Jackson told his story facedown on the field. Now, in Fantasy Man, he's flat on his back. Six years have passed since the former Denver Broncos tight end wore a helmet, and every day he drifts further from the NFL guy, the sanctioned-violence guy, the psychopath who ran headfirst into other psychos for money. But Nate hasn't quite left the game.

Football teams create playbooks, in which they draw up the plays they will use on the field. Playbooks are how teams work and why they win. This book is about a different kind of playbook: The one coaches, teams, universities, police, communities, the media, and fans seem to follow whenever a college football player is accused of sexual assault. It’s a deep dive into how different institutions - the NCAA, athletic departments, universities, the media - run the same plays over and over again when these stories break.

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.

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.

For 11 players on the Auburn University football team, the road to the 2011 BCS National Football Championship began among the poorest of the poor outside Puerta Plata, Dominican Republic. Team chaplain Chette Williams led those young men on a mission trip that opened their eyes to the desperate needs of others. The players spent time among children who were living on the streets and finding their next meal at the garbage dump on the outskirts of town.

At the age of eight, Chad Gibbs attended his first Southeastern Conference football game. Since then he has been in a constant battle to not let his love of all things pigskin consume him. As a Christian, Gibbs knows he cannot serve two masters, but at times his faith is overwhelmed by his fanaticism. He is not alone. In 2008 over six million people attended an SEC football game.

NFL Brawler is a raucous first-person account of an NFL under siege by the game's first player turned agent, Ralph Cindrich, the original "Blind Side" agent. This entertaining pro football memoir takes listeners behind the scenes of the game's most important and outrageous drafts, deals, and trades; takes on NFL scandals by telling it like it is; and takes listeners closer to the real action of the sport - from locker rooms to boardrooms and into the worlds of agents and players - than any book to date.

Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry could not have had two more divergent personalities. Yet, while working for the New York Giants of the mid-to-late ’50s under head coach Jim Lee Howell, the pair formed what stands, to this day, as the greatest set of coordinators on one team. Given their personalities, one might have likened Howell’s job to that of Dwight Eisenhower as the general struggled to control the egos and politics of his allied subordinates during WWII. But for some reason, Lombardi and Landry worked almost seamlessly, and as a result, the Giants rose to the top of the NFL.

Alan Curbishley has spent a lifetime in football as a fan, player and manager. In his 40 years, he has seen the game he loves change beyond all recognition. The money, the media, the celebrity culture, the agents - when Curbishley began his playing career in 1975, no one could have foreseen a future in which television rights sold for £10 billion. Through incredible access to the biggest names in the game, he takes a look at the modern game in all its guises, from the chairmen and chief executives at the very top to managers and players and all the way to the fans and ground staff.