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.

2. 'My Conference Can Beat Your Conference,' by Paul Finebaum and Gene Wojciechowski

Harper Books

Paul Finebaum, an ESPN analyst, national radio talk show host, and football’s “Mouth of the South,” chronicles the rise of the Southeastern Conference into a gridiron giant.  

“[W]hen it comes to college football, the South has no equal because the SEC has no equal. We have so many trophies, banners and national titles that we rent storage space at the National Archives. Our championship teams have spent more time in the White House than the Secret Service. We’ve presented so many No. 1 jerseys to POTUS, he could open his own Dick’s Sporting Goods.

“Anytime you want to send down your best twenty-two against the SEC’s best twenty-two, I’ll be glad to bet my house against yours. In fact, just to make it a tiny bit more fair, forget about the SEC’s best twenty-two – I’ll take the best of the SEC West or the best of the SEC East against anything you’ve got. And I’ll still spot you a touchdown."

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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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