Football books: 6 great titles to check out this season

As football teams duke it out, check out these titles about everything from Peyton’s picker to Spurrier and the SEC.

5. 'Beating Goliath: My Story of Football and Faith,' by Art Briles and Don Yaeger

St. Martin's Press

Art Briles lost both parents in a car accident en route to seeing him play football in college. Since that tragedy, he has drawn on his faith and lessons from his father to achieve success as both a high school and college coach, presently for the Baylor Bears.  

“The fact is that on any particular play in a football game, there are going to be plenty of mistakes. You make mistakes all the time. That’s not just in football, that’s life. It’s particularly the case in football because you have twenty-two people on the field at the same time trying to figure out what’s going on. 

“Or worse, your players aren’t comfortable running a particular play. One of the things I did all the time with players was talk to them about what they liked to do. Obviously, you’re going to do that with the quarterback all the time. I would also do it with the other players.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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