American Football History

As the coach during professional football’s most storied era, Tom Landry transformed the gridiron from a no-holds-barred battlefield to the highly-technical chess match it is today. With his trademark fedora and stoic facade, he was a man of faith and few words, for twenty-nine years guiding “America’s Team” from laughingstock to well-oiled machine, with an unprecedented twenty consecutive winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles.

When Bill Belichick talks, smart people listen. This book contains Belichick's own words on topics like two point conversion strategy, preparing for Peyton Manning, and what he looks for when evaluating each player on the field. Belichick has spent a lifetime in the NFL, and as a result has a perspective on the game and its greatest competitors that few can match. Learn what he has to say about the history of the game and those who built the foundation of the modern NFL.

In Mad Ducks and Bears, George Plimpton's engaging companion to Paper Lion, Plimpton focuses on two of the most entertaining and roguish linemen and former teammates: Alex Karras ("Mad Ducks") and John Gordy ("Bears"), both of whom went on to achieve brilliant post-football success. A more reflective, less madcap audiobook than Plimpton's other work, Mad Ducks and Bears is no less truthful and searching.

The stunning victory of the upstart New York Jets over the stalwart Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III transformed the NFL and established the Super Bowl as America s premier sporting event. While attending a banquet at the Miami Touchdown Club honoring his selection as the AFL s MVP, the brash Joe Nameth guaranteed a Jets victory in the forthcoming Super Bowl III and invoked a maelstrom of media attention.

Tom Brady marching the team upfield in the final minute of the 2001 Super Bowl. Troy Brown playing offense, defense, and special teams. The Tuck Rule. A rogue groundskeeper plowing a path for kicker John Smith at the end of a scoreless, snowy game. Gino Cappelletti setting the AFL record for points in a game against the Houston Oilers. These are the moments Patriots fans love to remember, now retold by the players who lived them.

With extensive reporting and engrossing storytelling, Jim Baker and Bernard Corbett give us the scenes of one of the NFL's most successful and popular franchises.

How Football Explains America is a fascinating, first-of-its-kind journey through the making of America's most complex, intriguing, and popular game. ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio explores just how crucial football is to understanding the American psyche. Paolantonio tackles varying American themes from Manifest Destiny to “fourth and one” as he goes deep in order to answer the age-old question: Why does America love football so much?

Comprised of exclusive interviews with Jets players, coaches, and other figures surrounding the organization, Sack Exchange: The Definitive Oral History of the 1980s New York Jets is an eye-opening account of a memorable era in one team's history, which also takes a step back and looks at the state of the National Football League as a whole during the 1980s.

The most popular college football team in the early 20th century 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.

The New York Yankees. The Boston Red Sox. For a hundred years, no two teams have locked horns as fiercely or as frequently, and no two seasons frame the colossal battle more perfectly than 2003 and 2004. Now, with incredible energy and access, leading sports columnist Mike Vaccaro chronicles the history of the greatest rivalry in sports, and the two stunning American League Championship Series that define a century of baseball.

From Klopp to Slot, from pressing to precision, Liverpool Football Club: Premier League Winning Formula 2024/25 charts the Reds' triumphant return to the top. A NEW ERA BEGINS WITH ARNE SLOT. Slot didn’t try to replace Jurgen Klopp’s legacy. He refined it. His first season brought a transformed team—controlled, tactical, yet fiercely Liverpool at heart. APRIL 27, 2025 – A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.

A story of faith, family, and determination, this book chronicles Notre Dame’s legendary football coach Terry Brennan and the intense, comeback season of 1957....

In the 1960s, on the heels of the “Greatest Game Ever Played”, professional football began to flourish across the country - except in Texas, where college football was still the only game in town. But in an unlikely series of events, two young oil tycoons started their own professional football franchises in Dallas the very same year: the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and, as part of a new upstart league designed to thwart the NFL’s hold on the game, the Dallas Texans of the AFL. Almost overnight, a bitter feud was born.

Very few institutions in American sports can match the enduring excellence of the University of Alabama football program. Across a wide swath of the last century, the tradition-rich Crimson Tide has claimed twelve national championships, captured 25 conference titles, finished 34 times among the country's top ten, and played in 53 bowl games.

To most of us "mainlanders," the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are resort destinations, summer homes for the Kennedys, the Obamas, and Patriots coach Bill Belichick. But after the tourists and jetsetters leave, the cold weather descends, and the local shop owners, carpenters, and fishermen ready themselves for the main event: high school football. For over 50 years, the local teams have been locking horns every November. They play for pride, a coveted trophy, and, very often, a shot at the league championship.

There was never a player quite like Dudley before he came and there will surely never be another one. He was the most versatile player in football history, college and pro. An NFL team today suits up eight men to play the positions Bill played by himself in a single season. He won the only Quadruple Crown in NFL history, leading the league in rushing, punt returns, interceptions, and lateral passes in 1946. He also won the NFL MVP award in 1946 with the Pittsburgh Steelers, even though he played in the NFL at five-foot 10, 175 pounds.

The first fifty years of America's most popular spectator sport have been strangely neglected by historians claiming to tell the "complete story" of pro football. Well, here are the early stories that "complete story" has left out. What about the awful secret carried around by Sid Luckman, the Bears' Hall of Fame quarterback whose father was a mobster and a murderer? Or Steve Hamas, who briefly played in the NFL then turned to boxing and beat Max Schmeling, conqueror of Joe Louis?

Game of My Life: Dallas Cowboys takes you inside the most memorable game of 24 players and of head Coach Jimmy Johnson that earned each of them a place in the history and lore of America’s Team. Each chapter provides colorful detail on the player’s favorite game and its significance to the history of one of the world’s most recognized franchises. Learn how these men joined the Cowboys fraternity.

In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, they established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators — yet there was little hope.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.