The Best Football Books Ever

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Lowe's knows Sundays are for football. So tackle your home improvement projects by Saturday and earn your Sunday with great deals on LG and Bosch appliances, select Bounty and Swiffer cleaning products, and more. Then once your to-do list is done, get ready to kick back, relax, and enjoy the game. shop in store or online now and earn your sunday with help from lowe's official partner of the nfl wasabi is purpose-built to free your business from skyrocketing storage costs and fees wasabi is the go-to provider for professional and collegiate sports teams around the world check out wasabi's ai-enabled intelligent media storage wasabi air to the industry's only cloud storage service with triple protection against cyber criminals.

0:55Wasabi, driving innovation in data storage for up to 80 % less than market competition. Try for free at wasabi.com. Wasabi, hot cloud storage, proud partner of iHeart Podcast Network. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZepBound Terzepatide may be able to help. ZepBound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. ZepBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection.

1:36ZepBound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if ZepBound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop ZipBound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems.

2:11Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills, taking ZepBound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbounds.lily.com. This is Tony A.O. from The Real Report with Tony A.O. and Uncle Murda. You ever notice how everything keeps going up? Rent, streaming, even extra salsa at your favorite burrito spot?

2:46But with Boost Mobile, you don't have to play the Will It's Go Up Soon game. Boost Mobile offers an unlimited talk, text, and data plan at a price that'll never go up. It's the same price you'll pay for life. Switch now for unlimited wireless at a price that'll never go up, only at Boost Mobile. After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay$25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan.

3:13Welcome to NFL Daily, where it's always reading season. I'm Greg Rosenthal, coming to you live from my garage in the middle of the summer. And yes, when I think of summer, I think it's go time for all the books that I want to read. And I get a lot of messages on Blue Sky or X whenever we ask for questions. One of the questions is, what are some of the best football books ever? And I thought, let's finally collect them all in one definitive podcast that I am calling the greatest football books of all time. When I got my first job in football at Roto World, I felt like I needed to catch up in terms of learning the sport.

3:59And I went on a tear trying to read every single football book that I could for about five to ten years straight. And so I feel like I'm in a good position. It's not exhaustive. It's only books that I've read, but I don't think there's that many great ones out there. And I got a little help from our dear friend, Chris Wesseling, who put together his greatest football books of all time document. And I'm going to go in order, roughly. We're going to go from the best books and just the ones that I think you would absolutely love if you are into football books. So let's get going. And I wanted to start with what I consider the Bibles, essentially the greatest football books, if you're going to pick one of all time.

4:46It's called The New Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football by Paul Zimmerman, a.k.a. Dr. Z, who was the longtime Sports Illustrated writer. Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, it's a fun one today because I got all these old books that I'm going to be holding up. If you're listening, that works just as well. In the case of this book, I actually have like three different copies of it because I used to carry around this little paperback to every Super Bowl just to have as inspiration of what great football writing could be. And to me, Zimmerman combined the best X's and O's writing with humor and actually great writing.

5:30So you learn a lot, but he knows how to write. And he's also an excellent reporter. Five-tool writer. I don't know if there's ever been anyone as good as him. I've shown a few different copies. There was an original in the 70s called The Thinking Man's Guide to Football. And then he had an updated version in 1987 called The New Thinking Man's Guide. And so it's a little more modern. But basically, it's him going through position by position and talking to all the players. but the way he just mixes in reporting and just quick quotes about what it really means to play these positions and everything that goes into it was the book that helped me understand how little I really understood about football, but it makes you love the game even more.

6:22The best compliment I could give this book is that I have thought so many times, if someone came out with this book about today's generation of players that I know so well, I would just lose it. There aren't books like this right now. Maybe I'm the man that should be writing this book, but I don't think I could do it. So if you're out there listening and you love football reporting, write this book for me. I want this book, and yet when you read it now, it is just as relevant and modern, and you learn so much about the game. So again, The New Thinking Man's Guide to Football by Paul Zimmerman.

6:59Okay, I'm dividing this into different sections. The next section is going to be if you want a history of the league. If you were going to read one book and teach a college course in football, and you just wanted one book as your document, document. I would go America's Game by Michael McCambridge. It is, to me, the definitive history of professional football. He also wrote a good book on Chuck Knoll. He wrote one with Brian Billick called More Than a Game, a Lamar Hunt book. But this is about how the NFL came to be, what the NFL was like before the Super Bowl even happened, and then well into the Super Bowl era.

7:40and it really helps you get the characters and how pro football ended up taking over baseball and all the other sports and it's really well written. It's exhaustive. I think if you want everything in one place, this is it. My next category would be one with a question mark and the question mark comes at the end of the sentence. Is this the best sports book ever? I'm holding up Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger. It's crazy to me that the show has overshadowed the book for me, too. I mean, the show is one of my all time favorite shows, but the show, as much as it gets how central football is in the life of Texas teenagers and adults, the book is such a banger and gets in depth in a way that I think the show just can't in certain ways.

8:33And it's not like it wasn't popular. This book sold over 2 million copies, which is incredible because it's not necessarily an easy book. Some of the characters from the TV show are very loosely based on the characters here, but not really. It explains in a way that Chuck Klosterman, who joined the show a few weeks back, did really well, that for these kids, this is in many ways the peak of their lives. And I think it explains in a way how football just has a chokehold on us as Americans, and especially in Texas, its next level, but how we kind of like it. I mean, it's not painting it with a negative brush.

9:17It is darker, certainly, at points than the TV show, but it's just incredible. And I go back to it. Again, kind of like Paul Zimmerman, it combines just insanely good reporting with great writing, and the characters are next level. So shout out to Buzz Bissinger, one of the best that ever did it. All right, my next category. And I've lined up a bunch of stacks around my desk of these books. And so hopefully I can keep it all straight. The next category is probably my favorite genre of football books. And so I'm going to go through my favorite season in the life football books. And I tried to pick ones too that weren't as obvious.

9:57And I will start with Bringing the Heat by Mark Bowden. It is about the 1992 Philadelphia Eagles. To me, it was so eye-opening in so many ways. He got such great access. The characters are crazy. Reggie White, Randall Cunningham, Buddy Ryan, Reggie Brown, they are just larger than life, and Bowden brings them to life. But it also got real. There's a lot of stuff about the players and their wives and their girlfriends, and sometimes how the girlfriends and the wives might show up to the same game by mistake and be in the player's section. That leads to issues. So the access that he had is kind of crazy.

10:37It's 500 pages, and yet it reads almost like a thriller. I absolutely love this book as an inside the team type of book. You would never get this type of access now. He also wrote a book, Mark Bowden, about the greatest game of all time, as it's called, the greatest football game ever played, Giants-Colts, that I would also recommend. He also wrote the book Black Hawk Down, which became a badass movie. So a versatile writer, Mark Bowden. But that's bringing the heat about the 92 Eagles. Collision Low Crossers is one of the three books that our producer, Eric Roberts, has tried to read in the last decade.

11:15But he said he didn't finish it. It was only three chapters deep. I think this book, which is about the 2011 Jets, suffered a little bit because Hard Knocks came out at the same time and also suffered. let's be honest, with a terrible title. Collision Low Crossers, it needed to be better. And yet, I've wanted books written about this era of football in depth where you really get what it's like to be inside a team. And Nicholas Dawidoff, who is a Wall Street Journal writer, really nailed it. And I think it's aged extremely well. So many good characters in this book. It's Daryl Rivas. It's Rex Ryan, of course.

11:56There's Mike Tannenbaum. There's a lot going on in this book, and I think if you want to understand what the modern NFL is like, it's a great one. Another one that really stands out to me as a book that would never get written out is called Three Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blunt Jr. This is an all-time classic. If you look at lists of the greatest football sports books of all time, it's very often on it. Blount is just a crazy talented writer and weird and awesome. It is a very druggie book. Blount seems like he's, you know, high half the time with the team. The team is high quite a bit. It's the 1970s Steeler.

12:36And whenever I hear how players today, they just, they don't have as much respect as, you know, back in the day when, you know, it was gentlemen and this and that. And I'm thinking, are you high? Players talked way more trash back then. They were bigger characters because we knew what big characters they were back then because books like this were written. It is with the 1973 Steelers. It's very digressive and goes in different paths that are fascinating sometimes. It's about the ownership there. It's about Chuck Knoll. It's about Terry Bradshaw and how much disrespect he got at the time, what a character he was.

13:20and it's right before they go on their run as a dynasty. So it's a moment in time, but it honestly felt like you are very much in the locker room. He hangs out with the team the entire year. It almost feels like you're smoking weed with them. There's some serious issues that come up in this book, whether it's drug addiction and depression and a little bit of crime. There's a lot going on and there's one of the greatest teams of all time and like countless Hall of Famers who are profiled in depth in a really fun, entertaining way. Not necessarily like the easiest book to read either, but it really rewards you.

13:58And so that's Three Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blunt Jr. As I went through this exercise, I realized some of my favorite books, I don't know where the copies are. So there's a book called The Last Season of Weeb Eubank by Paul Zimmerman, Dr. Z, who I've mentioned before. You're gonna have to find it in a library because I looked for it online. You got to pay like 150, 200 bucks for it right now because it's out of print. It's hard to find. I might have given my copy to Matt Casey, who's a big Jets fan. Matt, if you have my copy, give it back. It's worth a lot now. I feel annoyed that I gave it away.

14:30But since I don't have it in person, I'm just going to hold up one of its biggest characters, which is Joe Namath. This is a book called I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow Because I Get Better Looking Every Day by Joe Willie Namath. That's literally the title of the book. and the book cover is just Joe Namath's face, which is absolutely hilarious, as is the title of the book. The book itself is fine. It's funny. It's with Dick Schaap, but it's a reminder of that team. Weeb Eubank is a guy who I think people have kind of forgotten as among the best coaches of all time. He won three different championships between the NFL and the pre-Super Bowl era.

15:12He coached Johnny Unitas. He coached Joe Namath. John Riggins is in this book. A truly great book about a coach at the end of his career, a player Joe Namath whose body is breaking down and is betraying him, and a team that's already kind of hit the mountaintop and is maybe on the way down, but incredibly written, incredible access for this one. Again, these are the teams, you know, the season and the life type of books. Another one a little more modern is Patriot Reign. And I've mentioned this before on the show by Michael Holley. It was about the 2002 Patriots right after they won their first championship.

15:52And Bill Belichick gave great access to Michael Holley, who is still in the Boston media there. And he has some great scenes inside meeting rooms, some real tough talk about Patriots players by the Patriots coaches that got into this book. He continues it on to get a better ending into 2003 so that they win the Super Bowl at the end of that year, but it's really mostly about the 2002 Patriots, a lot of good Brady Bledsoe stuff, and again, great access in terms of Belichick wanting and accepting a guy being in all their team meetings throughout the season. So for all the people that say Belichick is stingy with access, he's done it a few times for books.

16:35And then the final one in this category, I don't think it's as good a book as the rest of them, but it's called Next Man Up about the 2004 Ravens by the late John Feinstein, who's a great writer. Maybe not as tight and great as some of these other books, but it's got Ray Lewis. It's got Jabal Lewis. It's got Billick. It's got all these Hall of Famers. It's a little more modern, and it is fun going through this season with the Baltimore Ravens. So I would recommend that one as well. All right, the next category I am going to call Adventures in Training Camp. And again, I'm doing these roughly in the order of how great they are.

17:13And this is probably the last section where they're all stone cold classics. Paper Lion by George Plimpton was for a long time one of the most famous, most popular, most sold sports books ever written. I feel like it's probably not known as much. I couldn't find my copy. I don't know where it is. So I'm holding up, if you're watching on YouTube, the sequel to it, which was called Mad Ducks and Bears, which is just more football talk by George Plimpton. But the premise is simple. It's this stuffy, highly educated, political talk show-appearing writer, George Plimpton, very literary, too. who pitched going to training camp as a player with the 1963 Lions, and they let him be a player.

18:06It was eventually turned into a movie. He started doing it in other sports, but Paper Lion is the original. The culmination is he gets, they won't put him in an actual scrimmage or an actual preseason game. That's what he wanted to do. But they do put him in a team scrimmage as like a fifth string quarterback, and that's kind of the culmination of the book. but him just hanging out with all these great pros at just a different time. You see how different the game is. Dick LeBeau is a terrific character in this book. I believe Matt Millen is too. Dick LeBeau is like a long-haired guitar-playing heartthrob in this book, which is hilarious.

18:46And similar to this book, Paper Lion is the one I'm talking about, although his sequel is pretty good too, not as good, is a book called A Few Seconds of Panic, which should have become a modern classic. It's by Stefan Fatsis, who was a Wall Street Journal writer who convinced Mike Shanahan to let him do what George Plimpton did, except at kicker. So it is a training camp where Fatsis gets to be a kicker for the 2008 Broncos. Jake Plummer is here. I believe Champ Bailey is here off the top of my head. And they let him, you know, do some kicking like in the inter-team scrimmage. and it's a great inside look at more of a modern NFL team, but also really hilarious.

19:29Nate Jackson was one of the characters as a bottom of the roster type of guy, and he ended up writing a book called Slow Getting Up, which was a fun from the perspective of a player book if you were looking into that. All right, we're continuing on to a category that I'm going to call the best book to buy as an investment. I'm holding up a book called Finding the Winning Edge by Bill Walsh. When I bought this, and it's basically how to build a football program for other coaches. It's not the most readable thing in the world, but there are a lot of interesting insights into how Bill Walsh ran a team and a lot of good examples from his career.

20:12But it gives you an idea of why every coach had this book. It's on Bill Belichick's bookshelf. Every coach owns it. And I bought it for maybe like 100, 150 bucks 15 years ago because it was hard to find. And now I see it going on Amazon, minimum 350 to 400. A lot of people are selling this thing for like 1 ,000 bucks. So this is worth a lot, Finding the Winning Edge. That's pretty cool. Just more of like a brag than like an amazing book, but it is an interesting document. Let's do biographies. Not my favorite genre. So I just chose the best of the best. When Pride Still Mattered, which is about Vince Lombardi, it's by David Moranis, won a ton of awards.

20:55The title is supposed to be sarcastic in a way, but people totally missed that point. It really punctures the myth of Vince Lombardi while also showing what an incredible coach and man he is. And that to me is the best type of biography. It just makes him a human. He was just a dude. But it makes you appreciate what he overcame to become Vince Lombardi and the demons that he dealt with throughout his career. And it's really great if you want to go to school. There's a lot of literature on the old Packers, but When Pride Still Mattered. Probably my number one biography by a decent amount. Education of a Coach is a book about Belichick and how he became Bill Belichick by David Halberstam, who is one of the best nonfiction writers of his generation.

21:43He wrote The Best and the Brightest about the JFK crew that got us into the Vietnam War. And then this is him focusing on how Bill Belichick became Bill Belichick, largely through his father. And it's a really intelligent and quick look at Belichick. It's really good. And the other one that stood out to me was the Namath book by Mark Kriegel. Really good about Joe Namath, former NFL Network employee, Mark Kriegel, who I see bouncing around Santa Monica every once in a while. I never say hi, though. We didn't really know each other. If you are into biographies, though, I know a lot of people are.

22:17The Johnny Yu bio is pretty good. Tom Callahan, not the same level of the ones I talked about. And The Genius, which is by David Harris about Bill Walsh, is great. Although it made Bill Walsh seem kind of miserable, which bummed me out. But that's how a lot of these guys are. Let's go to more history books. Chris Wesseling really loved the history books. And I can't say I major in those as much, but I've definitely read enough. The Real All-Americans by Sally Jenkins stands out because it's a story that I just would have never heard of in my life and is really significant. How in the early 20th century, around 1912, a team of all natives, Native Americans, led by Jim Thorpe, it was coached by Pop Warner, defeated the Naval Academy, defeated a bunch of Ivy League teams, went on this long undefeated streak.

23:09And you can imagine all the things that they overcame to do that. And it's really the story of a sport just starting and an incredible overcoming of everything stacked against these Native Americans in life. And they're able to essentially become champions on the field in a way that the society at the time were not going to allow them to become in life. Some other good history books. I mentioned all the Packers before. Instant Replay by Jerry Kramer is a good one. This was a sensation when it was released. It's also with Dick Schaap, who was on ESPN a long time. This is like a number one bestseller.

23:52It is really fun, well-written. It was an inside look at the Vince Lombardi Packers. So it's more of a history of the Packers than a biography, and it's really good. If you were ever into the Bill James abstracts back in the day, I think the closest thing football has to it is the Pro Football Chronicles, which is by Dan Daly and Bob O'Donnell, I believe. And it's just a quick history going through in different arguments and sections and stats. I learned a lot from that book, but it's also very entertaining to read. And a more modern book I would throw in this category is Why We Love Football.

24:27It's by Joe Posnanski. It's 100 different moments. It's really quick. It's great for kids. My son loved it, but I think it's great for adults, too, because Posnansky is a great writer. So you basically just get four pages with extra reporting and some insight into, let's say, the Russell Wilson, Malcolm Butler play. And he goes through 100 moments that kind of defined football as we know it. It's modern. It's older ones. It's great. Some other history books, Jeff Perlman, to me, had the definitive Cowboys book from back in the day, Boys Will Be Boys, about the glory days of the Dallas Cowboys.

25:04And then I mentioned the best game ever is that book by Mark Bowden about the championship between the Giants and the Colts back in 1958. We're getting to the end here, but I wanted some X's and O's books on my list. And I'm going to go Blood, Sweat, and Chalk by Tim Layden. kind of an inside look of how coaches build the game. And it's from the early 2010s, maybe 2012. So that's a fun one. The Art of Smart Football by Chris Brown, who had a great website. Shout out to Chris Brown. I used to keep in touch with him back in the day, but it's called The Art of Smart Football, where if you're looking really deep X's and O's, it's some fun insight.

25:49I don't know if you can still find this book or not, but I liked it a lot. The Bob McGinn Super Bowl book called The Ultimate Super Bowl Book deserved to be a classic. It wasn't released on like a major, major publisher, and yet it goes through every Super Bowl. If you can imagine a deeply reported, highly X's and O's game story that you would spend a month on writing and then would come out a month later, it's got one of those breakdowns for literally every Super Bowl. If you really want to find why each team won each Super Bowl with insights from the players and the coaches, it's Bob McGinn's Super Bowl book.

26:28It is really good. And yeah, while we're getting crazy X's and O's, I mentioned Bill Belichick and his dad earlier. I actually bought the book Football Scouting Methods by Steve Belichick, which is more of a historical document than it is, you know, as modern. But it's literally the book a lot of people bought, I think, when they wanted to get into scouting and learning how to scout. And I found it helpful, too, of just charting different things like that. I didn't want to leave here without mentioning at least a few fiction books. I got North Dallas 40 by Peter Gent, which is like a loosely fictionalized story of the Roger Staubach cowboys.

27:06It cranks it up. They made a couple great movies about it, but that's a fun one. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, probably the best modern novel about just the mix of commercialism and football that really has this country in a chokehold, as I mentioned earlier, for decades. It's set at halftime during a Thanksgiving game. It includes a Jerry Jones-like figure, and it's about a veteran who comes back and he's honored at halftime. And it's called The Long Halftime Walk. A lot of the thoughts that go with this, like what am I doing here? It's about America. It's about more than football, but it's very much about football.