The Why Is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution PDF Download

Author: Michael Silver
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324093617
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
From an award-winning journalist, the inside story of the brilliant, hypercompetitive young coaches who threw out decades of received wisdom to fundamentally remake America’s most popular sport. When Kyle Shanahan became the NFL’s youngest offensive coordinator in 2008, he had one prevailing rule: Tell me the why. If a colleague couldn’t justify his position by providing the unassailable reasoning behind it, he was told to get the hell out of Shanahan’s office. Shanahan and the members of his coaching tree—including Sean McVay, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris, and Matt LaFleur—came up in a sport where innovation was the exception, not the rule. There had been brilliant football minds before, from Paul Brown to Bill Walsh to Bill Belichick. But for the most part, coaches learned a particular system and stuck to it no matter what—no matter the players on their team, no matter what the opponent might do. This group of young coaches would change all that. The Why Is Everything is the story of old dogmas falling before astonishingly creative new strategies and game plans. Drawing on unmatched access across the league, longtime NFL reporter Mike Silver takes us into the key moments in this still-unfolding revolution, from the education of Mike Shanahan, Kyle’s father and a two-time Super Bowl champion, in the 1980s; to the Washington Redskins’ football laboratory in the early 2010s, where the coaches first worked together, shocking the league with their cutting-edge scheme for rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III; to McVay’s Super Bowl victory in 2022 and Kyle Shanahan’s Super Bowl agony in 2019 and 2024. Less than a decade after their emergence, these men are the stars of their profession and have helped propel the NFL to new heights of viewership and drama. With The Why Is Everything, Silver reveals how it all happened, and in the process gives us a timeless account of friendship, rivalry, and the never-ending pursuit of perfection.

Author: Bart Wright
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496209206
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
For the last twenty-five years, the most dominant offensive strategy in college football has been the spread offense, which relies on empty backfields, lots of receivers and passing, and no huddles between plays. Where the spread offense started, why it took so long to take hold, and the evolution of its many variations are the much-debated mysteries that Bart Wright sets about solving in this book. Football Revolution recovers a key, overlooked, part of the story. The book reveals how Jack Neumeier, a high school football coach in California in the 1970s, built an offensive strategy around a young player named John Elway, whose father was a coach at nearby California State University, Northridge. One of the elder Elway’s assistant coaches, Dennis Erickson, then borrowed Neumeier’s innovations and built on them, bringing what we now know as the spread offense onto the national stage at the University of Miami in the 1980s. With Erickson’s career as a lens, this book shows how the inspiration of a high school coach became the dominant offense in college football, prepping a whole generation of quarterbacks for the NFL and forever changing the way the game is played.

Author: Sid Lowe
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568584512
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Fear and Loathing in La Liga is the definitive history of the greatest rivalry in world sport: FC Barcelona vs. Real Madrid. It's Messi vs. Ronaldo, Guardiola vs. Mourinho, the nation against the state, freedom fighters vs. Franco's fascists, plus majestic goals and mesmerizing skills. It's the best two teams on the planet going head-to-head. It's more than a game. It's a war. It's El Cláco. Only, it's not quite that simple. Spanish soccer expert and historian Sid Lowe covers 100 years of rivalry, athletic beauty, and excellence. Fear and Loathing in La Liga is a nuanced, revisionist, and brilliantly informed history that goes beyond sport. Lowe weaves together this story of the rivalry with the history and culture of Spain, emphasizing that it is "never about just the soccer." With exclusive testimonies and astonishing anecdotes, he takes us inside this epic battle, including the wounds left by the Civil War, Madrid's golden age in the fifties when they won five European cups, Johan Cruyff's Barcelona Dream Team, the doomed Galáico experiment, and LuíFigo's "betrayal." By exploring the history, politics, culture, economics, and language -- while never forgetting the drama on the field -- Lowe demonstrates the relationship between these two soccer giants and reveals the true story behind their explosive rivalry.

Author: Tony Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351709674
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.

Author: Michael Silver
Publisher: Rodale Books
ISBN: 1609616707
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The story of Natalie Coughlin's remarkable battle back from injury and burnout to be-come America's Golden Girl—a two-time Olympic Gold Medal winner in swimming and the most decorated female athlete at the 2004 Olympics Five years ago, Natalie Coughlin's promising swimming career was all but extinguished when a devastating shoulder injury ended her dreams for the 2000 Olympics. After becoming, at age 15, the first person ever to qualify for all 14 women's events at the U.S. Nationals, she seemed destined to follow the path of so many other young swimming stars—devoured by an oppressive training schedule. In Golden Girl, Sports Illustrated's Michael Silver—coauthor of many bestselling sports memoirs—including Dennis Rodman's, Kurt Warner's, and Jerry Rice's—tells the story of Natalie's remarkable journey back from the brink. With complete access to her family, friends, coaches, teammates, and adversaries, Silver details how she made the crucial choice to train with University of California coach Teri McKeever. Together the two, star and coach, have defied long-standing training methods, forcing the swimming community to rethink the ways in which it treats its talent. An inspirational story of a complex and courageous young athlete, Golden Girl is also a fascinating portrait of the fractious world of competitive swimming.

Author: Mike Shanahan
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780066620404
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Coach Shanahan knows about achieving bid goals. In three years, he has transformed to Denver Broncos from a "mediocre", "aging" frannchise into the most feared powerhouse in the league, with back-to-back Super Bowl victories in 1998 and 1999 to prove it. Now, in "Think Like a Champion"m Shanahan opens his playbook to show tghe X's and O's of winning, a detailed game plan to help you storm the field of life with foolproof strategies, confidence, and the indomitable will to win. From preparation and scarifice to competition and leadership, his practices of success are simple yet challenging. Everything in Mike Shanahan's life has prepared him to write this powerful book. Armed with his innovative vision, you can improve your chances on Game Day-or any day of the week.

Author: Allen Barra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254577
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
The explosive biography of the greatest college football coach in history. When Paul William "Bear" Bryant died on January 26, 1983, it was the lead story on the all three networks' evening news. New York City newspapers reported his death on their front pages. Three days later, America watched in awe as an estimated quarter of a million mourners lined the fifty-five mile stretch from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery to pay their respects as his three-mile long funeral cortege drove by. Bryant's passing was noted with the kind of reverence our country reserved for statesmen or military leaders, though Paul "Bear" Bryant had insisted for much of his life that he was "just a football coach." For millions he was much more, he was the greatest coach the game ever saw, the heir to the tradition established by Knute Rockne. He took his Alabama Crimson Tide teams to an unmatched six national championships. But to the players, journalists and fans whose lives he touched in his more than half a century as a player and coach, he was the last symbol of values that transcended football—courage, discipline, loyalty, and hard work. To his critics, Bryant represented the dark side of big-time college football—brutality, fanaticism and blind adherence to authority. The real Bear Bryant was far more complex than either his admirers or detractors knew. While maintaining a public friendship with Alabama governor George Wallace, he continually sought ways to undermine the governor's segregationist policies, finally forcing a legendary football game in Birmingham with the University of Southern California that opened the floodgates to the integration of football at the University of Alabama, including its coaching staff. Old fashioned in his politics, he was nonetheless an admirer of Robert Kennedy, whom he planning to vote for in 1968. Allen Barra's The Last Coach traces Paul Bryant's rise from a family of truck farmers to recognition as the most successful and influential coach in the game's history. Through it all, Bryant's influence has not only endured but prevailed as his former players and assistants continue to define the best in not only college but professional football. A USA Today and Washington Post Best Sports Book.

Author: Phil Ball
Publisher: WSC Books Limited
ISBN: 9780954013462
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Author: Jeff Benedict
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0345803035
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year NCAA football is big business. Every Saturday millions of people file into massive stadiums or tune in on television as "athlete-students" give everything they've got to make their team a success. Billions of dollars now flow into the game. But what is the true cost? The players have no share in the oceans of money. And once the lights go down, the glitter doesn't shine so brightly. Filled with mind-blowing details of major NCAA football scandals, with stops at Ohio State, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, BYU, LSU, Texas A&M and many more, The System explores and exposes the complex, and perhaps broken, machine that churns behind the glamour of college football. With a New Afterword.

Author: Christos Kassimeris
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739119600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
European Football in Black and White offers an engaging interpretation of a disturbing phenomenon in Europe's favorite sport: football violence fueled by racism. While many fans across Europe have used football to further destructive ethnocentric agendas, there are also pan-European initiatives in the football stadium to combat the almost endemic problem. Christos Kassimeris analyzes political ideologies that have influenced football supporters, drawing attention to the increasing politicization of football and the footballization of politics. He also considers the contributions of nationalism, social class, and media coverage before assessing attempts by various groups, from the Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) network to the European Union, to rectify the problem. Ultimately, he concludes that football needs to be dissociated from both racism and politics for the sport to flourish. Unlike more traditional attempts to explain football violence and racism, this book seeks to establish a Europe-wide as well as a national explanatory framework for racism from a political perspective. This study will draw the interest not only of scholars across the humanities and social sciences, but also of ordinary football supporters. Book jacket.