Sports Illustrated: The College Football Book
by Editors of Sports Illustrated
from Sports Illustrated
Continuing its series of spectacular coffee-table books for the holiday season, Sports Illustrated presents The College Football Book, the ultimate gift for America's most passionate fans.
SI launched this series in 2005 with The Football Book, devoted to the professional game. A New York Times best-seller that year, the book has taken root as a perennial, selling more than 200,000 copies to date. Now the editors of Sports Illustrated return to the gridiron, this time to serve the most avid football fans of all.
With the best words and pictures SI has to offer, The College Football Book, brings to life the game's unparalleled excitement and pageantry, its legendary players, historic teams and epic rivalries.
In 288 pages of the greatest photography and writing available anywhere, The College Football Book spans the sport's history, from its infancy in the 1800s right up to the postseason showdowns of 2008. The book is packed with stunning pictures, award-winning stories, original stats, decade-by-decade all-star teams and iconic artifacts photographed exclusively for this book at the College Football Hall of Fame--the same exciting mix of elements that makes each book in the SI series a must-have for sports fan.
The Maisel Report: College Football's Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Coaches, Teams, and Traditions
by Ivan Maisel
from Triumph Books (IL)
Whether you saw winning national championships in the 1983 Orange Bowl or 2001 Rose, Ivan Maisel says there's only one true nickname for the Miami Hurricanes - the No. 1 most overrated program in college football history. Who's his most overrated Heisman Trophy winner? Only the star of Michigan's 1997 national championship team, the Wolverines' Charles Woodson. Michigan fans will join the rest of the Big Ten in lamenting Maisel's assertion that the conference is the most overrated in the NCAA.
The Maisel Report:College Football's Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Coaches, Teams, and Traditions by Ivan Maisel pulls no punches and takes no prisoners. With more than 20 years of sports journalism under his belt - including six with ESPN - Maisel has seen, talked to and worked with the best in the business. But he is setting the record once and for all about what are probably the biggest sports debates ever argued between fans.
Football fans will be stunned when they see where he ranked the following stadiums, coaches and players:
* Nick Saban
* Frank Beamer
* Eddie George
* Tim Tebow
* Charlie Weis
* Phillip Fulmer
* Bill Walsh
* Michigan Stadium
* Orange Bowl
Nobody is left out. Maisel goes through the best of college football's history, including sections on the most over/underrated moments, national champions, Heisman Trophy winners, stadiums and more.
The Maisel Report is not a fans' opinion of college football history, it is a detailed, highly-researched thesis that will make even the most die-hard fan of a team admit that their feelings have muddied their opinions and weakened all previous arguments about the who and what is the most overrated and underrated ever .
Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting
by Bruce Feldman
from ESPN
In college football circles, the first Wednesday in February is New Year's Day, the Fourth of July, and Christmas all rolled into one. It's payoff time for a year spent screening miles of videotape and probing mountains of data, balancing the promise of a dazzling 40-yard-dash time against the perils of a putrid GPA, and text-messaging high schoolers 50 times a day. It's the day when coaches across the country camp out in front of their fax machines waiting for their football futures to be decided by a bunch of 18-year-olds.
It's National Signing Day.
In this surprising and unprecedented dissection of college football's secret season, author Bruce Feldman takes you deep inside the war room of Ole Miss head coach Ed Orgeron, the combustible Cajun who built national championship teams at the University of Miami and USC before setting up shop in the Deep South. In a blow-by-blow account of the year leading up to National Signing Day 2007, Feldman reveals the inner secrets of Orgeron's success, recounting every step along the way as Orgeron and his Ole Miss staff pick 25 winners from a list of 1,000 names.
Meat Market makes the actual football season—the one that runs from September through January—read like a postscript.
Bowls, Polls, and Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy That Reign over College Football
by Stewart Mandel
from Wiley
SI.com "College Football Mailbag" author Stewart Mandel tackles the ten issues that confound college football fans—with a new chapter on the 2007 season
"An intricate tour through the ills of the college football world (and there are many), but still manages to take on a breezy, airy tone."
——The Quad, NYTimes.com
"Stewart Mandel writes about college football's major controversies with a wit and depth of knowledge that will impress even the most obsessed fans. And because he's both fair and objective, there is something in this book to infuriate nearly everyone."
——Warren St. John, author of the bestselling Rammer JammerYellow Hammer: A Road Trip into the Heart of Fan Mania
"In a book dripping with sarcasm, Stewart Mandel plays tour guide on an interesting ride through the college football nuthouse."
——Bruce Feldman, author of Meat Market and senior writer for ESPN the Magazine
"If you're confused by the world of college football, particularly the BCS and how the present polls are conducted, then I will recommend to you Bowls, Polls & Tattered Souls."
——Football Outsiders
"Presents history and insights on all aspects of the sport, from recruiting to the bowl system to why certain teams play in certain conferences. A great read for fans with thirty days or thirty years of experience."
——Orlando Sentinel
If your heart beats faster on Saturday afternoons as your team takes the field, this book will give you new insight into the fanaticism and chaos that characterize college football today. Stewart Mandel takes a provocative, hard-hitting look at the hot-button issues: the controversial BCS; the polls and their largely arbitrary rankings; the ego-inflating recruiting craze; cheating and recent scandals; the huge pressures and salaries heaped on coaches; the Heisman hype-fest; the NFL draft; the clunky conference expansions; privileged Notre Dame, college football's greatest juggernaut; and the proliferation of bowl games. You'll get behind-the-scenes insights on how the issues evolved and why some are almost impossible to resolve in a book that's as entertaining, passionate, and thought-provoking as the game itself.
The Die-Hard Fan's Guide to Longhorn Football
by Geoff Ketchum
from Regnery Publishing
Hook 'em Horns! The Die-Hard Fan's Guide to Longhorn Football is THE indispensable guide that all Texas fans must have. Within its pages are never-before-published stories about some of the greats of Longhorn football--from Earl Campbell to Ricky Williams to Mack Brown. Also included are key stats about players, coaches, and games with UT records on a season-by-season and game-by-game basis. Timed to release just before the opening kickoff of the 2008 season.
Then Tress Said to Troy: The Best Ohio State Football Stories Ever Told with CD
by Jeff Snook
from Triumph Books
Includes an exclusive audio CD featuring interviews with Ohio Buckeye's greatest players.
Ohio State University Football Vault (College Vault)
by Jack Park
from Whitman Publishing
In the Ohio State University® Football VaultTM: The History of the Buckeyes®, Ohio State Football Radio Network commentator and football speaker Jack Park takes you on a memorable journey through more than 100 years of Buckeye football. The detailed scrapbook narrative contains neverbefore- published vintage photographs, artwork and memorabilia drawn from OSU s extensive campus archives. Tucked into dozens of sleeves and pockets, fans will find reproductions of old game programs, historic tickets, bumper stickers and more. These fascinating replicas include a formation diagram for the band s famous Script Ohio, a letter from President Gerald Ford to Woody Hayes and those classic Buckeye helmet stickers. No Ohio State fan should be without this home archive of OSU s long and illustrious history. Illustrated; Hardcover; 144 Pages.
Dixieland Delight: A Football Season on the Road in the Southeastern Conference
by Clay Travis
from Harper Paperbacks
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.
Urban's Way: Urban Meyer, the Florida Gators, and His Plan to Win
by Buddy Martin
from Thomas Dunne Books
“Members of the ‘Gator Nation’ are going to burn the midnight oil turning these pages because Buddy Martin will be boldly taking them where no Florida fan has gone before.”
---Tony Barnhart, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/CBS
To write the Urban Meyer story, Buddy Martin enjoyed a vantage point rarely afforded authors in constructing the authorized biography of the University of Florida’s high-profile coach. Martin takes the reader where no other journalist has gone before as he reports the most intimate details about one of the nation’s top college football programs and its coach.
During the show-and-tell story of the 2007 Gator season, Martin listened on the headsets in the coaching booth, monitored Meyer’s locker room speeches, conducted in-depth interviews with assistant coaches and support personnel, ran on Florida Field with the team prior to the Gators game against Tennessee, and gave Tim Tebow his first Heisman Trophy quiz while having dinner together just weeks before he was named as the winner.
Urban’s Way, however, is much more than a look at the 2007 season. Martin dug deep into Meyer’s background, from his growing-up days in Ashtabula, Ohio, under the strict guidance of his father; to his tumultuous days as a young assistant when he almost quit the profession; to the dynamics of his close relationship with mentors Earle Bruce and Lou Holtz; to the ultimate prize as coach of the 2006 national champion Florida Gators. Readers learn how Meyer was encouraged by his father and his wife, Shelley, to keep going; how his career took off at Notre Dame and then as a head coach at Bowling Green and Utah; how the Falcons came together after their historic “Black Wednesday”; and the impressive manner in which he championed diversity among players in Salt Lake City. Florida fans will be surprised to discover how close Meyer came to choosing the Notre Dame job over the one in Gainesville, despite his yearnings as a small boy to someday coach the Fighting Irish. Through his intense research---and talks with Urban himself---Buddy Martin provides an amazingly detailed look into how a football coach is made.
This is not simply the authorized biography of one of college football’s top coaches; Buddy Martin also gives fans the inside scoop on the 2006 National Championship. In the chapter “The Joy of Winning It All,” players and coaches share their stories of that championship season that produced the middle leg of the “Gator Slam,” leading to the good life on the so-called Cul de Sac of Champions, which Urban shares with Gators basketball coach Billy Donovan.
It is rare that fans get inside the head of a top coach, but here full disclosure is offered about Urban’s personal faith, his Plan to Win, and the inner workings of the Spread offense. Readers are also treated to Meyer’s own breakdown of the national championship tape, including his Six Key Plays of the game.
Buddy Martin shines a bright light on Urban Meyer, the Florida Gators, and one of the top programs in the country. This is a must-have for Florida Gator football fans and one of the most insightful books ever written on college football.
The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation
by Sally Jenkins
from Doubleday
Sally Jenkins, bestselling co-author of It's Not About the Bike, revives a forgotten piece of history in The Real All Americans. In doing so, she has crafted a truly inspirational story about a Native American football team that is as much about football as Lance Armstrong's book was about a bike.
If you’d guess that Yale or Harvard ruled the college gridiron in 1911 and 1912, you’d be wrong. The most popular team belonged to an institution called the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Its story begins with Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, a fierce abolitionist who believed that Native Americans deserved a place in American society. In 1879, Pratt made a treacherous journey to the Dakota Territory to recruit Carlisle’s first students.
Years later, three students approached Pratt with the notion of forming a football team. Pratt liked the idea, and in less than twenty years the Carlisle football team was defeating their Ivy League opponents and in the process changing the way the game was played.
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Sally Jenkins gives this story of unlikely champions a breathtaking immediacy. We see the legendary Jim Thorpe kicking a winning field goal, watch an injured Dwight D. Eisenhower limping off the field, and follow the glorious rise of Coach Glenn “Pop” Warner as well as his unexpected fall from grace.
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The Real All Americans is about the end of a culture and the birth of a game that has thrilled Americans for generations. It is an inspiring reminder of the extraordinary things that can be achieved when we set aside our differences and embrace a common purpose.
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