Football books: from the Seattle Seahawks to Nick Saban

Here are some of the best titles to check out as the season begins.

6. 'Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games,' by Michael Weinreb

The evolution of college football is captured through an examination of selected games that serve as signposts in the changes the sport has seen.  

“The most utterly random sequence in the history of college football – the most unforeseeable single moment in the history of American sports – is the final play of the Cal-Stanford game in 1982. Trailing 20-19 after a heroic go-ahead field goal drive by Stanford quarterback John Elway, Cal received the kickoff with four seconds remaining, lateraled the ball five times, and reached the end zone as the Stanford band charged onto the field. The same guy who originally received the kick, Kevin Moen, weaved through the band and wound up scoring the touchdown, plowing over a trombone player while doing so. That play is now known as The Play, because it needs no further embellishment; it is such a wondrous thirty-second encapsulation of the screwball nature of college football that even the trombone player (Gary Tyrrell) has achieved a measure of immortality. There have been other Cal-Stanford-like plays in both pro football and small-college football, but none as patently absurd as Cal-Stanford, and none ever will be.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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