Skip to footer

Football books: 6 great titles to check out this season

As football teams duke it out, check out these titles about everything from Peyton’s picker to Spurrier and the SEC.

6. 'Spurrier: How the Ball Coach Taught the South to Play Football,' by Ran Henry

Lyons Press

  • By Ross Atkin

This account follows Steve Spurrier from his years as a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at the University of Florida to his college and pro coaching experiences, including as a leader of a Southern football resurgence at his alma mater, where the Gators won two national championships, and now at the University of South Carolina. 

“What could Coach Spurrier do that very day, at the Southeastern Conference Spring Meeting in Destin, Florida, to help his quarterback, and every other college football player in America? He stood before the league’s coaches, and reporters, and put forth a modest proposal. Why couldn’t he pay each of his players $300 a game, out of his pocket?

“‘We make too much,’ he said, eyeing his fellow coaches. The players should get a share of ‘that big pie that’s out there.’ Then he pulled out a document signed by six other SEC coaches who supported his proposal. Naming the coaches, in case recruits were wondering.

“The Spurrier Proposal would surely splash across the next day’s sports page – leaving less space for reports of his ‘embattled’ quarterback returning to the practice field.”

6 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.