Football Study Hall Reading Room
by kleph on Jan 12, 2012 10:00 AM EST
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With the conclusion of the BCS National Championship Game the 2011 college football season has ended and the long dreary haul through the off-season has arrived. Sure there's National Signing Day and the NFL Draft to hold us over till Spring practice but that's about it until the pads are donned again next August.
To survive, we'll get by on the Fulmer Cup and the prognostications over the 2012 season that will begin in earnest mid-summer when the season preview magazines arrive but that's thin gruel after four months of actual on-the-field gridiron action. Yet the long interim is an opportunity to delve a little deeper into this glorious sport we all love and Football Study Hall is ready to help with that.
For the past two years over at Roll Bama Roll we've featured a weekly book review during the off season. There are a lot of books out there about Alabama football and the level of quality can vary pretty wildly. The idea behind the RBR Reading Room is to give folks an idea of if a given tome might be of a persons particular interest or not.
Starting next week, we'll launch a similar series here at Football Study Hall. Each and every Thursday morning we'll be providing articles about books covering all of College Football and, on occasion, using them to touch on specific issues they might address about the sport. Some of these will be recent releases, others will be long out-of-print. All of them will worth at least knowing about if you have an interest in the sport.
Bill and I have put together a working list of books that we'll be looking at but if there is one you might find of interest, please let us know about in the comments.
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I'm sure this'll be in there,
but I just finished Take Your Eye Off the Ball by Pat Kirwin and it was incredibly insightful and easy to read.
@andywittman
Just finished "Three and Out" by John U. Bacon.
It’s a fabulous account of the Rich Rodriguez era at Michigan.
If I hit a hole-in-one on this grand slam the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
Follow @bates_jason
Great book. Just finished it as well.
My only problem is that it was ridiculously pro-Rodriguez. It seems like Rodriguez was usually in the right, but I definitely had an “Oh, come on” moment when Bacon argued that Greg Robinson’s defenses failed because he was using Carr’s recruits.
by hamdenhusky on Jan 12, 2012 11:47 PM EST up reply actions
I love this idea
I have an already growing list of college football books to read. I’m sure this series will add to it.
In all kinds of weather we'll all stick together
The Bunch Attack: Using Compressed, Clustered Formations in the Passing Game
By Andrew Coverdale and Dan Robinson is really, really great. Maybe a little coach-y for your list, but it’s very clear and really does a fantastic job of showing how a tactical concept (in the case, the bunch) can be implemented on a systematic level.
A little late coming to this
But filtering out my “to read, eventually, maybe” list, and doing a casual cross-check with the RBR list, yields the following:
Ken Armstrong and Nick Parry, Scoreboard, Baby
Mark Bernstein, Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession
Furman Bisher, The College Game
Parke Davis, Football: The American Intercollegiate Game (from 1911, available in PDF)
Jim Dent, any or all of Junction Boys, Resurrection, The Undefeated
Woody Hayes, Football at Ohio State
James Johnson, The Wow Boys
Wilbur Jones, Football! Navy! War!
Kurt Edward Kemper, College Football and American Culture in the Cold War
Charles Martin, Benching Jim Crow: Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1920
Willie Morris, The Courting of Marcus Dupree
David Nelson, The Anatomy of a Game
Michael Rosenberg, War As They Knew It
Wann Smith, Wishbone
Barry Switzer, Bootlegger’s Boy
Christopher Walsh, Where Football Is King
John Sayle Watterson, College Football
Richard Whittingham, Rites of Autumn
Obviously, not all of these will be suitable. The list also doesn’t include the books I’ve read, which are on the sidebar of my blog.
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