My Conference Can Beat Your Conference


Book Description

An all-access pass into the powerhouse teams and passionate fanbases of the legendary Southeastern Conference, from one of the most influential men in college football: ESPN’s Paul Finebaum. Proud owner of 14 prestigious college football programs, producing seven consecutive national championships, twelve NFL first round draft choices, and a budget that crushes the GDP of Samoa, the Southeastern Conference collects the most coveted ratings, rankings, and revenue of any conference in college football. With its pantheon of illustrious alumni like Bear Bryant, Herschel Walker, Peyton Manning, and Nick Saban, the SEC is the altar at which millions of Americans worship every Saturday, from Texas to Kentucky to Florida. If the SEC is a religion, its deity is radio talk-show host Paul Finebaum. In My Conference Can Beat Your Conference, Finebaum, chronicles the rise of the SEC and his own unlikely path to college football fame. Finebaum offers his blunt wisdom on everything from Joe Paterno and the Penn State scandal to the relevancy of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron’s girlfriend, and chronicles the best of his beloved callers, and the worst of his haters.




Bury My Heart at Conference Room B


Book Description

#3 New York Times Advice/How-To Bestseller #7 Wall Street Journal Nonfiction Bestseller "This book is game changing in a way I have never seen in a business book. I learned about myself and gained new insights into the work I've been doing for thirty years. It is a spectacular read." – John Riccitiello, CEO, Electronic Arts This is not a management book. This is a book for managers. Ever have the feeling that no matter how rewarding your job is that there's an entirely different level of success and fulfillment available to you? Lingering in the mist, just out of reach… There is, and Stan Slap is going to help you get it. You hold in your hands the book that entirely redraws the potential of being a manager. It will show you how to gain the one competency most critical to achieving business impact, but it won't stop there. This book will put a whole new level of meaning into your job description. You will never really work for your company until your company really works for you. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is about igniting the massive power of any manager's emotional commitment to his or her company-worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. Sometimes companies get this from their managers in the early garage days or in times of tremendous gain, but it's almost unheard of to get it on a sustained, self-reinforced basis. Of course your company is only going to get it if you're willing to give it. Slap proves that emotional commitment comes from the ability to live your deepest personal values at work and then provides a remarkable process that allows you to use your own values to achieve tremendous success. This is not soft stuff; it is the stuff of hard-core results. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is the highest-rated management development solution at a number of the world's highest-rated companies—companies that don't include "patience" on their list of corporate values. It has been exhaustively researched and bench tested with tens of thousands of real managers in more than seventy countries. You'll hear directly from managers about how this legendary method has transformed their careers and their lives. As Big as It Gets Stan Slap is doing nothing less than making the business case for a manager's humanity-for every manager and the companies that depend on them. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B gives managers the urgency to change their world and the energy to do it. It will stir the soul, race the heart, and throb the foot used for acceleration. Buckle Up. We're Going Off-Road. Slap is smart, provocative, wickedly funny and heartfelt. He fearlessly takes on some of the most cherished myths of management for the illogic they are and celebrates the experience of being a manager in all of its potential and potential weirdness. And he talks to managers like they really talk to themselves.




Fourth and Long


Book Description

From New York Times bestselling author and Michigan football expert John Back, an analysis of the state of college football: Why we love the game, what is at risk, and the fight to save it. In search of the sport’s old ideals amid the roaring flood of hypocrisy and greed, bestselling author John U. Bacon embedded himself in four college football programs—Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, and Northwestern—and captured the oldest, biggest, most storied league, the Big Ten, at its tipping point. He sat in as coaches dissected game film, he ate dinner at training tables, and he listened in locker rooms. He talked with tailgating fans and college presidents, and he spent months in the company of the gifted young athletes who play the game. Fourth and Long reveals intimate scenes behind closed doors, from a team’s angry face-off with their athletic director to a defensive lineman acing his master’s exams in theoretical math. It captures the private moment when coach Urban Meyer earned the devotion of Ohio State’s Buckeyes on their way to a perfect season. It shows Michigan’s athletic department endangering the very traditions that distinguish the college game from all others. And it re-creates the euphoria of the Northwestern Wildcats winning their first bowl game in decades. Most unforgettably, Fourth and Long finds what the national media missed in the ugly aftermath of Penn State’s tragic scandal: the unheralded story of players who joined forces with Coach Bill O’Brien to save the university’s treasured program—and with it, a piece of the game’s soul. This is the work of a writer in love with an old game—a game he sees at the precipice. Bacon’s deep knowledge of sports history and his sensitivity to the tribal subcultures of the college game power this elegy to a beloved and endangered American institution.




No Excuses


Book Description

From the legendary Oklahoma coach, a candid and inspiring memoir. When Bob Stoops took over as football coach in 1999, the Oklahoma Sooners were in disarray with back-to-back losing seasons. But in just two years' time, Stoops achieved the seemingly impossible: winning a national championship and returning the struggling Sooners to their powerhouse status, churning out NFL talent, Heisman Trophy winners and conference championships, bowl wins and national title runs on a regular basis. During his 18 seasons at OU, his record was a remarkable 190-48. At only age 56, at the peak of his career, he stunned the college football world by walking away. For the first time, Bob opens up about his career alongside the evolution of the game itself. From his unlikely emergence as a star player at the University of Iowa, to his coaching apprenticeships under giants like Hayden Fry, Bill Snyder, and Steve Spurrier, Stoops recounts how the game he fell in love with as a boy has evolved into a billion-dollar business often compromised by recruiting wars, aggressive agents, overzealous boosters and alumni, and the emergence of the CEO head coach rather than mentor and teacher. Bob holds nothing back while explaining why it was time to step away from the game-and players-he still loves. Told with a rare combination of sincerity, vulnerability, and pure heart, No Excuses is both an engaging and eye-opening football memoir and an unprecedented portrait of a coach of one of the greatest legacy programs in the history of the college game.




Season of Saturdays


Book Description

Presents a cultural history that highlights the key moments, games, personalities, and scandals of American college football, tracing how it grew from a rugby offshoot to a part of the country's national identity.




The Last Lecture


Book Description

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.




I Hate the NCAA


Book Description

Bet you never knew there were so many reasons to have the NCAA! You will laugh out loud as Pail Finebaum goes down the list.




Season of Saturdays


Book Description

From an award-winning sports journalist and college football expert: “A beautifully written mix of memoir and reportage that tracks college ball through fourteen key games, giving depth and meaning to all” (Sports Illustrated), now with a new Afterword about the first ever College Football Playoff. Every Saturday in the fall, it happens: On college campuses, in bars, at gatherings of fervent alumni, millions come together to watch a sport that inspires a uniquely American brand of passion and outrage. This is college football. Since the first contest in 1869, the game has grown from a stratified offshoot of rugby to a ubiquitous part of our national identity. Right now, as college conferences fracture and grow, as amateur athlete status is called into question, as a playoff system threatens to replace big-money bowl games, we’re in the midst of the most dramatic transitional period in the history of the sport. Season of Saturdays examines the evolution of college football, including the stories of iconic coaches like Woody Hayes, Joe Paterno, and Knute Rockne; and programs like the USC Trojans, the Michigan Wolverines, and the Alabama Crimson Tide. Michael Weinreb considers the inherent violence of the game, its early seeds of big-business greed, and its impact on institutions of higher learning. He explains why college football endures, often despite itself. Filtered through journalism and research, as well as the author’s own recollections as a fan, Weinreb celebrates some of the greatest games of all time while revealing their larger significance. “Wry, quirky, fascinating...This surely is one of the most enjoyable books of the college football season...Weinreb wrestles in captivating prose with the violence, hypocrisy, and corruption that are endemic to the sport at its most cutthroat level” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland).




Saban


Book Description

A portrait of the influential and controversial University of Alabama football coach shares insights into his winning "Process," his early coaching years at the college and professional levels, and the defining events that shaped his career.




The Bus


Book Description

He was one of pro football’s most beloved and respected stars, admired not only by NFL fans and his own teammates, but by his opponents as well. Super Bowl champion; six time Pro Bowler; NFL Comeback Player of the Year; NFL Man of the Year; fifth all-time leading rusher in the NFL; future Hall of Famer; now NBC Sports commentator. You may think you know Jerome Bettis, but you don’t. In The Bus, Jerome Bettis tells his full, unvarnished story for the first time--from his sometimes troubled childhood in inner-city Detroit to his difficult transition at Notre Dame, to a pro coach who almost caused him to quit the game, to a trade for the ages that resulted in ten glorious seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers. As a chunky child wearing glasses, Jerome’s only sports-related aspiration was to become a professional bowler. But growing up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Detroit, he eventually found his escape on the high school football field, thanks to the devotion of hard-working parents, a concerned coach, and his prodigious talent. He arrived at Notre Dame as one of the nation’s best prep players, but despite his incredible performances, he never stopped worrying that he would somehow blow his chance to make good. Drafted and later discarded by the Los Angeles Rams, it was in the football-obsessed city of Pittsburgh that Jerome found his home and became a legend. The Bus captures the sweetness and honesty of Bettis, but also details the jaw-dropping, violent nature of the game he loved, the mind-boggling injuries he endured, and the cut-throat NFL business tactics he overcame and later mastered. Through it all, Jerome was also a loving son, an adoring father, and the ultimate teammate and mentor. The Bus not only takes you under the helmet, but inside the huddle, the locker room, the practice field, the negotiating table, the owner’s office, and the Super Bowl sideline. You’ll learn how Bettis became The Bus, how he helped engineer the greatest trade in Steelers history, how he almost cost Pittsburgh a conference championship, and how sweet it was to win—finally—one for the thumb.