Ten football books for the season’s home stretch

From a 50th anniversary retrospective of Joe Namath’s Super Bowl Jets to a multigenerational look at one family’s experiences in the Ivy League, these releases deliver a rich variety of gridiron reading. 

1. ‘The League: How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched a Sports Empire,’ by John Eisenberg

Today it can be hard to imagine the National Football League as anything but the corporatized, billion-dollar enterprise it has become. The phenomenal growth of the league is commonly said to date to the late 1950s when an overtime championship game catapulted the NFL into a premier TV attraction. To get to that point, however, it took five team owners who helped found the league decades of persistence to keep it alive through their ability to innovate and work together. “The League” pays tribute to these visionaries (George Halas, Art Rooney, Bert Bell, Tim Mara, and George Preston Marshall), all of whom have been enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

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