Four Super Bowl championships. Twelve Hall of Famers. Two hundred interviews.They were the best to ever play the game: the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s. Three decades later their names echo in popular memory—Mean Joe, Bradshaw, Webster, Lambert, Ham, Blount, Franco, Swann, and Stallworth. They define not only the brother­hood and camaraderie of football, but what Americans love about their most popular sport: its artistry and its brutality. From the team’s origins in a horseplayer’s winnings to the young armored gods who immaculately beat the Raiders in 1972 to the grandfathers with hobbles in their gait, Their Life’s Work tells the full, intimate story of the Steeler dynasty. But this book does much more than that: it tells football’s story. What the game gives, what it takes, and why, to a man, every Steeler, full well knowing the costs, unhesitatingly states, “I’d do it again.”

    Belichick and Pioli have been friends since the 1980s, when Belichick was a young coordinator for the New York Giants. They worked together in Cleveland, New York (Jets) and New England. In 2008, Pioli left for Kansas City to build a Midwestern Patriots model. A year before Pioli left, Dimitroff was the surprising top GM choice of the Falcons, who dreamed of building Patriots South in Atlanta.The culmination of the narrative will be all three men preparing their teams for the lifeblood of the NFL, which is the draft, as all three franchises seek to improve themselves through similar philosophies but perhaps different strategies.

    He takes up football and school after a rich, white, Evangelical family plucks him from the streets. Then two great forces alter Oher: the family's love and the evolution of professional football itself into a game in which the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist becomes the priceless package of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback's greatest vulnerability: his blind side.

    Their uncommonly competitive relationship came to symbolize the most compelling rivalry in the NBA. These were the basketball epics of the 1980s--Celtics vs Lakers, East vs West, physical vs finesse, Old School vs Showtime, even white vs black. Each pushed the other to greatness--together Bird and Johnson collected 8 NBA Championships, and 6 MVP awards and helped save the floundering NBA at its most critical time. When it started they were bitter rivals, but along the way they became lifelong friends. With intimate, fly-on-the-wall detail, When the Game Was Ours transports readers to this electric era of basketball and reveals for the first time the inner workings of two players dead set on besting one another. From the heady days of trading championships to the darker days of injury and illness, we come to understand Larry's obsessive devotion to winning and how his demons drove him on the court. We hear him talk with candor about playing through chronic pain and its truly exacting toll. In Magic we see a young, invincible star struggle with the sting of defeat, not just as a player but as a team leader. We are there the moment he learns he's contracted HIV and hear in his own words how that devastating news impacted his relationships in basketball and beyond. But always, in both cases, we see them prevail.A compelling, up-close-and-personal portrait of basketball's most inimitable duo, When the Game Was Ours is a reevaluation of three decades in counterpoint. It is also a rollicking ride through professional basketball's best times.

    These were the days when the young Oilers, led by a teenaged Wayne Gretzky, were poised on the edge of greatness, and about to blaze their way into the record books and the consciousness of a nation. While the story of the early Oilers embodies the book, The Game of Our Lives is much more than a retelling of one season in the life of an NHL team.Unlike any book ever written in the annals of hockey, Gzowski beautifully weaves together the anatomy of a modern NHL team with the magnificent history of the game to create one of the best books about hockey in Canada. Here are the great teams and the great players through the ages—Morenz, Richard, Howe, Orr, Hull—the men whose rare and indefinable genius on the ice exemplified the speed, grit and innovation of the game.The Game of Our Lives is the best book on the Canadian passion for hockey; a wondrously perceptive account of the hold the game has on Canadians. —Jack Granatstein, The National Post

    They hadn't fielded a winning team in more than a decade and were close to losing their franchise to another city. They were in desperate need of a savior, and he arrived in a wood-paneled station wagon in the dead of winter from New York City. In a single year, Vince Lombardi—the grizzled coach who took no bull—transformed a team of underachievers into winners and resurrected a city known for its passion for sport.

    Gwynne tells the incredible story of how two unknown coaches revolutionized American football at every level, from high school to the NFL.Hal Mumme is one of a handful of authentic offensive geniuses in the history of American football. The Perfect Pass is the story of how he irreverently destroyed and re-created the game.Mumme spent fourteen mostly losing seasons coaching football before inventing a potent passing offense that would soon shock players, delight fans, and terrify opposing coaches. The revolution he fomented began at a tiny, overlooked college called Iowa Wesleyan, where Mumme was head coach and Mike Leach, a lawyer who had never played college football, was hired as his offensive line coach. In the cornfields of Iowa, while scribbling plays on paper napkins, these two mad inventors, drawn together by a shared disregard for conventionalism and a love for Jimmy Buffett, began to engineer the purest, most extreme passing game in the 145-year history of football. Implementing their “Air Raid” offense, their teams—at Iowa Wesleyan and later at Valdosta State and the University of Kentucky—played blazingly fast—faster than any team ever had before, and they routinely beat teams with far more talented athletes. And Mumme and Leach did it all without even a playbook. Their quarterback once completed sixty-one of eighty-six passes, both collegiate records.In The Perfect Pass, S.C. Gwynne explores Mumme’s leading role in changing football from a run-dominated sport to a pass-dominated one, the game that tens of millions of Americans now watch every fall weekend. Whether you’re a casual or ravenous football fan, this is a truly compelling story of American ingenuity and how a set of revolutionary ideas made their way from the margins into the hot center of the game we celebrate today.

    Now, critics, sports writers and fans across America are cheering The NEW Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football as the worthy heir to Zimmerman's 1971 classic The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football, which Howard Cosell called "the best book of its kind I've ever read." Far more than a revision, The NEW Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football is virtually a brand-new book (in 1984) prompted by, as Zimmerman writes in his introduction, "a whole new generation of players and coaches (who have) given rise to a new set of reflections about a world that is ever changing." Zimmerman examines positions, tactics, the great players and moments of peak performance, football scouting, broadcasting, minor leagues, the rule changes of the pst decade and how they have inspired new playing stategies (crisply illustrated with diagrams). And with characteristic verve, insight and no-nonsense prose, Zimmerman pays close attention to the effect of football''s pounding nose-to-nose competition on the everyday player's personality.

    NFL Unplugged lets you see that world through the eyes of the pros who live and sweat in it. Here are the places the cameras don't go: the locker room where coaches' speeches can deflate or motivate, the huddle where fart jokes vie with playcalling, the training camp where locusts and heat conspire to break the strongest bodies and shake the most determined minds. Now you can experience it all up close and unplugged.Draws on firsthand accounts of more than thirty players and coaches from teams across the NFL, including Mark Schlereth, Bill Romanowski, Kevin Long, Kyle Turley, John Gruden, Hugh Douglas, Jon Runyan, and Michael StrahanAn unvarnished look at everything from training camp and broken dreams, conditioning and injuries, and camaraderie and hazing to the quest to gain a competitive edge and the exhilarating triumphs of the gameWritten by one of the top figures in sports radio, Anthony Gargano of Philadelphia's 610-WIPFrom the injuries that never heal and the money that never lasts to the memories and the glory that never fade, NFL Unplugged shows the unbridled brutality and sheer brilliance of the game.

    The QB is the story of a year in the making of those star players, and of the most significant year in QB development in sport’s history… with the meteoric rise of various quarterback gurus finally coming to light. George Whitfield, profiled in the New Yorker and called the “Quarterback Whisperer,” gets a regular spot on ESPN’s College GameDay, Trent Dilfer, former Super Bowl quarterback, starts his own qb business, Steve Clarkson, another qb maker, gets profiled on 60 minutes, among many others. It is also the year 5’10” Russell Wilson wins the Super Bowl and for the first time in over 60 years a sub-6-foot QB, Johnny Manziel, gets drafted in the first round, forcing NFL power brokers to re-examine how they look at the position—and the game.          To tell the story of all that goes on to create the perfect quarterback, bestselling author Bruce Feldman gained unique access to "Johnny Football" (that's Johnny Manziel), George Whitfield and many other players in what has become a specialized and high-stakes business. In the past decade the boom of the private quarterback-coach business, with its pageant-world-for-boys vibe, has changed the position and the game. The QB tells the story of the interlocking paths of the most fascinating characters involved in this secretive world, examining how advanced analysis has taken root in football. Manziel’s portrait is the most intimate look at him yet, detailing all his talents and antics.  His guru is a man who has come to be known for making QBs--George Whitfield, unparalleled in the business. And then there is Trent Dilfer, the quarterback who never could get to the superstar level, despite winning the Super Bowl.  He is the Salieri to Manziel's Mozart. There is the computer/brain analysis company trying to quantify how playmakers think, the biomechanics expert who saved Drew Brees’s career, and many more fascinating behind-the-scenes looks into this world. Never before has the game so relied on the development of the quarterback. In The QB, the stories of these men illustrate how high the stakes of the quarterback’s game really are, taking readers on a compelling journey into the heart of America's beloved game.

    A thoroughly obsessive, intermittently uplifting, and occasionally unbiased account of the Duke–North Carolina basketball rivalry

    During its nine seasons, the ABA generated scorn and laughter--and made a lasting impact on how the game is played. 24 pages of photographs.

    In this book, 8-year veteran of the NFL Tim Green reveals for the first time the scandals, the horrors, the abuses and also the wonders of playing football.

    He was brutal yet brilliant, narcissistic yet magnanimous, relentless yet unyielding. Most of all, he was the greatest football player of all time. He was Jim Brown.Jim Brown was an astonishing physical specimen with tremendous skills and intelligence. An athlete who played a number of sports at Syracuse University, he ultimately discovered that it was the violence of football that appealed to him most. The idea of physically dominating other men, surviving ferocious battles on the field against opponents who would just as soon call him a nigger as try to gouge out his eyes fueled an astonishing, record-making NFL career that led to the Hall of Fame. He battled his defenses, sometimes his teammates, and often the Cleveland Browns' legendary head coach Paul Brown.But Jim Brown had ambitions greater than football. He used his athletic brilliance to launch a movie career, becoming Hollywood's first black action hero, culminating in a scandalous love scene with America's sweetheart Raquel Welch. He leveraged his popularity into helping the NFL's black players and becoming a civil rights activist. Never shy about expressing his opinions, Brown would become the subject of FBI investigations and surveillance throughout parts of his life.Then there were the women. The patient wife who was essentially a single mother and who endured public humiliation. The girlfriends he ran through and the scandalous accusations of violence made by some of them.A complex and fascinating story, Jim Brown is a towering biography of a living legend.

    Rex Ryan is known for his exuberance . . . and Play Like You Mean It explores every aspect of Ryan’s amazing passion for the game of football, plus the lessons he has learned in leadership and motivation during his years in and around the game. In his own words, Ryan takes readers behind the scenes of the NFL as he shares colorful football stories from his experiences with the Jets and the Ravens as well as his years recruiting players, coaching college foot­ball, and growing up as a child of legendary NFL coach Buddy Ryan. Rex’s unique brand of enthusiasm and motiva­tion comes through on every page. Most of all, fans will get insider access to Ryan’s headline-grabbing, brutally honest, and undeniably entertaining views on the NFL . . . and the very human side of the larger-than-life athletes who devote their lives to the game of foot­ball. From Ryan’s acceptance of the Jets head coaching job to his success in turning around a team that has long been number two in New York, from his drafting and believing in Mark Sanchez to kicking off the 2010 season with massive expectations (and a target on his back)—this book goes deep, and entertains on every level.