Skip to footer

7 football books for midseason reading: Brady, Manning, Montana, and more

Here are seven new interesting football titles.

3. ‘Above the Line: Lessons in Leadership and Life from a Championship Season,’ by Urban Meyer and Wayne Coffey

  • By Ross Atkin

Urban Meyer has earned the right to tout his approach to life and football and expect many people will listen. At the University of Florida he led the Gators to two national championships, then, after a short absence from coaching, he returned to the sidelines, this time at Ohio State, In just his third season at the helm in Columbus, he guided the Buckeyes to victory last January in the inaugural College Football Playoff Championship over Oregon. He did this despite an early-season loss to Virginia Tech and having to use a third-string quarterback in the championship game. In sharing his principles and philosophies, Meyer points to what he calls an “Above the Line” response to challenges in football and to life more broadly.

Here’s an excerpt from Above the Line:

“If you are a leader who has been brought in to take over a program, before you even start building the culture, you need to do one thing: show respect and move on. Too often, when coming in to a new program or organization, people make the mistake of criticizing, directly or indirectly, the previous regime. Whatever business you are in, do not disparage your predecessors. Aside from being the wrong thing to do, there’s no gain in it. You want everything to be about moving forward. Whoever you just took over for will have constituencies within the organization and will not appreciate your criticisms, compromising your ability to influence and lead.

“You’ve been hired to do a job, and that job is to lead and coach – not to assess or dissect your predecessor’s shortcomings.”

3 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.