Author: Brad Schultz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1612345026
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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A landmark year in the history of the game

Author: Joe Horrigan
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1635653606
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
From the former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame comes a sweeping and lively history of the National Football League, timed to coincide with the NFL’s 100th anniversary season. “I can think of no one better qualified—or more enthusiastic—to chronicle the National Football League’s century-long history than Joe Horrigan.”—Marv Levy, Hall of Fame NFL coach The NFL has come a long way from its founding in Canton, Ohio, in 1920. In the hundred years since that fateful day, football has become America’s most popular and lucrative professional sport. The former scrappy upstart league that struggled to stay afloat has survived a host of challenges—the Great Depression and World War II, controversies and scandals, battles over labor rights and competition from rival leagues—to produce American icons like Vince Lombardi, Joe Montana, and Tom Brady. It is an extraordinary and entertaining history that could be told only by Joe Horrigan, former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and perhaps the greatest living historian of the NFL, by drawing upon decades of NFL archives. Compelling, eye-opening, and authoritative, NFL Century is a must-read for NFL fans and anyone who loves the game of football. Advance praise for NFL Century “Joe Horrigan takes the reader on a delightful tour of the seminal moments of the NFL in the past one hundred years—the players, owners, coaches, executives, and historical events that made the game of football the most popular in America. It’s a wonderful walk down memory lane for any football fan, young or old.”—Michael Lombardi, author of Gridiron Genius “There is no one—and I mean no one—who knows more about the history of the NFL than Joe Horrigan, the heart and soul of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As the gold standard of sports leagues celebrates its one hundredth season, it’s appropriate that the gold standard of sports historians has written NFL Century, an entertaining and educational journey.”—Gary Myers, New York Times bestselling author of Brady vs Manning

Author: Brad Schultz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 161234965X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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For many football fans, the National Football League season of 1970 was a landmark year in the history of the game. The NFL and the American Football League finally began playing as a merged league--one that featured such legendary figures as George Blanda, Tom Dempsey, Vince Lombardi, George Allen, Sid Gillman, Lamar Hunt, and Al Davis. The NFL, Year One focuses on several key games throughout this thrilling initial season. One saw the Raiders and Browns play in Cleveland. This contest serves as the backdrop for the story of forty-three-year-old Oakland kicker Blanda, who went on that season to win or tie four consecutive games in the last seconds, becoming a hero to middle-aged American men. Among other notable games that Brad Schultz examines are the Browns-Jets game that marked the debut of Monday Night Football with commentators Keith Jackson, Howard Cosell, and "Dandy" Don Meredith; the Chiefs-Vikings game that served as a rematch for the Super Bowl IV competitors; and the Colts-Jets game that ultimately set the scene for the 1970 players' strike. Schultz also demonstrates how the season continues to influence the NFL today. Meticulously researched and thoroughly entertaining, The NFL, Year One is a riveting account of one of the most important and compelling seasons in NFL history. Any fan will surely enjoy Schultz's revisiting of the game's amazing 1970 season.

Author: Ryan Kalil
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 168245035X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Congratulations, you just got drafted into the NFL. Now what? Here’s what’s ahead of you: rigorous training, complicated playbooks, financial conundrums, intense pressure to perform—and temptation. Welcome to the big leagues. Informative, smart, funny, and beautifully illustrated, The Rookie Handbook has everything NFL rookies need to know to survive their first season of pro football, straight from veterans Ryan Kalil, Jordan Gross, and Geoff Hangartner. The three authors have a combined thirty years of NFL experience, but they too were rookies themselves, once upon a time. Much like rookies, NFL fans only know what they see on TV or read—obsessively following Rich Eisen and scouring obscure blogs for fantasy football info. But when it comes to what goes on in the inner sanctum, behind the locker room doors, it’s a mystery. The Rookie Handbook is the insider’s guide to that exclusive club, pulling back the curtain to reveal how players act and think—and what they do when no one is watching.

Author: Ian S. Kahanowitz
Publisher: Sunbury Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781620064610
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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After years of competing against each other, the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL) merged to form one football powerhouse in 1970.Considered by the media, sports fans, players, and coaches as a more "amateur league," the AFL emerged as a true contender when the New York Jets upset the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969. The AFL took home its first Super Bowl trophy that year and forged a path for what would become the NFL as we know it.After the merger, the league split into two conferences: the AFC and the NFC. In the year 1970, thirteen teams would battle in each conference to meet in Super Bowl V. After a history of tough losses in big games, two teams rose to the top-the Dallas Cowboys and the Baltimore Colts. NFL 1970 also includes stories and anecdotes about:?43-year-old Quarterback/Kicker George Blanda leading the Oakland Raiders into the playoffs with several heroic come-from-behind wins?A new playoff format introducing a "wild card" slot?The creation of Monday Night Football and how it changed prime-time television sports forever?The clashing of legendary players and coaches like Larry Czonka, Bubba Smith, Terry Bradshaw, Johnny Unitas, John Madden, and more

Author: Mark Bowles
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781797436241
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Like the iconic Roman numerals of the Super Bowl, American football is a sport in which many games and seasons are branded into fan memories. Perhaps the most significant of them all --the founding of the league in 1920--is ironically the most obscure and least well known.Despite the passion for football and its history, few people have inquired about what happened during the first year of the league's existence.Complicating this story is the fact that there are no films of its games to transport us visually to that time. Radio was also an emerging technology, and there are no play-by-play broadcasts for us to hear. Furthermore, there is no one alive today who remembers watching these first teams battle in the mud and snow. As we now approach the 100th year of the NFL's existence in 2020, it is time to unveil the mystery of its first season. Certainly, some of the legacies of this era remain prominent today. Jim Thorpe is remembered as the "greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century." His team's city, Canton, Ohio, is honored as the birthplace of professional football and is the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. However, along with Thorpe and his Canton Bulldog legends, there is a great deal more to the story of the first season of the NFL. This forgotten year is about to emerge from obscurity as every football player will wear a patch for the 2019-2020 season with the logo "100NFL" on his jersey. The centennial of the most popular American sport is upon us. It is time to find out what happened in year one.

Author: Matthew Sherry
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1474613675
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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An authoritative 100-year history of America's National Football League from its founding. The NFL has become the most lucrative sports league in the world, yet it has not always been a roaring success story. It is a rocky road filled with detours and wrong turns; with heroes and villains; and, most importantly, with thousands of games. Any Given Sunday recounts twenty of the biggest of those, starting with the first contest ever played in 1920 and working through to key fixtures in the recent past. Each chapter is complemented by interviews with some of the game's true stars; first-hand accounts from games, including multiple Super Bowls; and, finally, full access to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Matthew Sherry, founder of Gridiron, the UK's only NFL magazine, takes readers from the boardroom to the field, into the locker-room and inside the journeys of legends, providing a full snapshot of the NFL's epic first century.

Author: Johnny Anonymous
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062422421
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Meet Johnny Anonymous. No, that’s not his real name. But he is a real, honest-to-goodness pro football player. A member of the League. A slave, if you will, to the NFL. For the millions of you out there who wouldn’t know what to do on Sundays if there wasn’t football, who can’t imagine life without the crunch of helmets ringing in your ears, or who look forward to the Super Bowl more than your birthday, Johnny Anonymous decided to tell his story. Written during the 2014–2015 season, this is a year in the life of the National Football League. This is a year in the life of a player—not a marquee name, but a guy on the roster—gutting it out through training camp up to the end of the season, wondering every minute if he’s going to get playing time or get cut. Do you want to know how players destroy their bodies and their colons to make weight? Do you wonder what kind of class and racial divides really exist in NFL locker rooms? Do you want to know what NFL players and teams really think about gay athletes or how the League is really dealing with crime and violence against women by its own players? Do you wonder about the psychological warfare between players and coaches on and off the field? About how much time players spend on Tinder or sexting when not on the field? About how star players degrade or humiliate second- and third-string players? What players do about the headaches and memory loss that appear after every single game? This book will tell you all of this and so much more. Johnny Anonymous holds nothing back in this whip-smart commentary that only an insider, and a current player, could bring. Part truth-telling personal narrative, part darkly funny exposé, NFL Confidential gives football fans a look into a world they’d give anything to see, and nonfans a wild ride through the strange, quirky, and sometimes disturbing realities of America’s favorite game. Here is a truly unaffiliated look at the business, guts, and glory of the game, all from the perspective of an underdog who surprises everyone—especially himself. JOHNNY ANONYMOUS is a four-year offensive lineman for the NFL. Under another pseudonym, he’s also a contributor for the comedy powerhouse Funny Or Die. You can pretty much break NFL players down into three categories. Twenty percent do it because they’re true believers. They’re smart enough to do something else if they wanted, and the money is nice and all, but really they just love football. They love it, they live it, they believe in it, it’s their creed. They would be nothing without it. Hell, they’d probably pay the League to play if they had to! These guys are obviously psychotic. Thirty percent of them do it just for the money. So they could do something else—sales, desk jockey, accountant, whatever—but they play football because the money is just so damn good. And it is good. And last of all, 49.99 percent play football because, frankly, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Even if they wanted to do something “normal,” they couldn’t. All they’ve ever done in their lives is play football—it was their way out, either of the hood or the deep woods country. They need football. If football didn’t exist, they’d be homeless, in a gang, or maybe in prison. Then there’s me. I’m part of my own little weird minority, that final 0.01 percent. We’re such a minority, we don’t even count as a category. We’re the professional football players who flat-out hate professional football.

Author: Jerry Argovitz
Publisher: Sports Publishing
ISBN: 9781613210680
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Super Agent. Maverick. Reformer. Iconoclast. Dealmaker. Dentist? Jerry Argovitz has worn many hats in his remarkable life, both inside and outside of the world of sports. As a player agent representing and advising some of the biggest names in the game, Argovitz challenged the NFL both at the negotiating table and in the courtroom, earning a reputation as one of the most powerful men in professional sports. He successfully negotiated the first milliondollar guaranteed contract in NFL history, wrote the language for career-ending insurance policy underwriting for Lloyds of London, and brokered the deal that brought Heisman Trophy–winner Herschel Walker to the upstart USFL as a junior, which opened the floodgates for all underclassmen to follow. As the owner of the Houston Gamblers of the USFL, Argovitz helped to implement several rules which were subsequently adopted by the NFL, and served as a principal figure in a lawsuit against the NFL that proved the league was guilty of Sherman Antitrust violations. Now, Argovitz has a plan to reform the corrupt world of college sports, a plan he will share in this eye-opening book.

Author: Larry Felser
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1599217627
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The year 1966 marked the birth of the National Football League as we know it, when owners in the NFL and the upstart American Football League agreed to an unprecedented merger, to take place at the start of the 1970 season. They also agreed to play, beginning at the end of the ’66 season, a game between each league’s champion—a game that came to be called The Super Bowl. The Birth of the New NFLtells the story of that historic season, leading to the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. It also tells the off-the-field story, the one between warring owners and cities—a story often more brutal than the one on the field. Larry Felser has interviewed the leading men of the day, from Al Davis and Jack Kemp, to Wellington Mara, Art Modell, Lamar Hunt, Gene Upshaw, Dan Rooney, and many others. He presents the struggles of top teams for the chance to represent their respective leagues in the biggest game ever, while also offering a behind-closed-doors view of the wheeling and dealing it took to reach the agreement.