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Product Description
Review
“I've known Ron Jaworski as a teammate, opponent, and broadcaster. Now you can add author to that list. Jaws brings his contagious enthusiasm and vast knowledge to The Games That Changed the Game—a book that football fans will both love and learn from.”
--Bill Cowher, Super Bowl-winning head coach, and analyst, The NFL Today, on CBS
"If you want to understand the strategic and cerebral part of this very physical sport, this most fascinating football book of the season is for you."
--Library Journal (starred review)
"In a wonderfully accessible format—even for less wonky fans—he provides the lineage of the coaching philosophy that provides the basis for each selection, describes in glorious detail how it was applied in the landmark game, and then adds a postscript describing how the strategy affected the game in subsequent years. This is crazy good football info. The game accounts are great, but even better are Jaworski’s analysis of coaching philosophy...Filled with anecdotes, player recollections, and other wonderful detail, this should be the most popular football book of the season. Terrific reading."
--Booklist (starred review)
"Jaworski sets aside his TV personality, and offers a thoughtful explication in these pages."
--Publishers Weekly
“This is a landmark book about the game of professional football. It is groundbreaking in many ways, and it will change the way you think about and watch America’s No. 1 sport. How did the West Coast offense come to life? Hear Joe Montana tell the story. How was Buddy Ryan’s defense born? Listen to the players who were there when it came to life. Ron Jaworski, Greg Cosell and Dave Plaut have unraveled some of the game’s great schematic mysteries through seven compelling stories on seven historic Sundays.”
-- Sal Paolantonio, ESPN National Correspondent and author of How Football Explains America
“Jaworski, now an analyst for ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” has become widely respected for his work ethic and his ability to put the finer points of NFL strategy in layman’s terms. His attention to detail and willingness to do the heavy lifting is fully on display here. He tracked down coach’s film — which is much more inclusive than the TV angles the public sees each week — for every single play of the seven games.
Considering the first of his subjects is the 1963 American Football League championship, and that all seven games came long before the YouTube era or the advent of 24-hour replays on the NFL Network, that is an impressive feat and makes for fascinating reading. But if you’re expecting nothing more than a dry recounting of Xs and Os, Jaworski will surprise you. Many of the seven games’ participants are quoted at length by Jaworski, enabling him to give each of the contests an interesting backstory unfamiliar even to NFL diehards. Jaworski offers fascinating insight for fans who want to know more than just how their fantasy players are doing.”
---New York Post
“Besides the examination of the coaches and their innovative ideas, Jaworksi takes a complete game from their playbook and demonstrates how those ideas shaped the outcome of one game and the evolution of the entire sport. Even the die-hard Sunday fans will learn a lot from this book, and rookies will come away with a greater appreciation and understanding of the game.”
--Associated Press
“Jaws and his colleagues are filling a real void here, and they are the perfect people to do it. They have done all the homework, spending thousands of hours looking at the “All-22s’’ of not just these seven games (there had to be a huge list to start with), but countless other games over the years.”
---Boston Globe
“Ron Jaworski played 16 NFL seasons, including an appearance as Philadelphia Eagles starting QB in the 1981 Super Bowl. Now Jaws analyzes games as part of the ESPN ‘Monday Night Football’ broadcast team. His book shares many qualities with his broadcast work: It's intelligent, detailed and enthusiastic, while also flavored with a little hype. The Games that Changed the Game would be more accurately titled Seven Games I Picked to Illustrate Changes in the Game. Anyone who really wants to understand the Cover Two defense and the West Coast offense, for example, would do well to dig into his book.”
--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“The book is invaluable because the same level of detail is in every chapter. There is no better strategic timeline for the NFL on the market today. With a keen analytical eye on the past and present, and an intriguing focus on pro football's future, The Games That Changed the Game is everything you'd expect from these particular authors. Any strategy nerd should have all three books mentioned in this article, but if you're just going to spring for one, this contains by far the best, most accurate, and most comprehensive take. This is definitely where you should start -- and probably where you could finish.”
--Pro Football Outsiders.com
Product Description
In The Games That Changed the Game, Ron Jaworski, a one-time NFL MVP turned Monday Night Football analyst and pro football’s #1 game-tape guru, breaks down the film from seven of the most momentous contests of the last fifty years. With an eye toward the brilliant game plans and seminal strategic breakthroughs that revolutionized play on both sides of the ball, Jaworski offers readers a drive-by-drive, play-by-play guide to the evolutionary leaps that now define the modern NFL, as well as portraits of the seven men who exhibited both creativity and courage in bucking established strategies. From Sid Gillman’s development of the Vertical Stretch, which culminated in the San Diego Chargers’ victory in the 1963 AFL Championship Game and launched the era of wide-open passing offenses, to Bill Belichick’s daring defensive game plan in Super Bowl XXXVI, which enabled his outgunned squad to upset the heavily favored St. Louis Rams and usher in the New England Patriots dynasty, the most cutting-edge concepts come alive again through the recollections of nearly seventy coaches and players interviewed for this book.
Writing with the same vivid, passionate, and accessible style that has made him television’s go-to X’s and O’s maven, Jaworski fills in the blanks for fans who aren’t satisfied with merely dropping the terms “West Coast offense” or “46 defense” into conversation, but want to understand them fully, in context, as they were experienced by the men who played the game. You’ll never watch the NFL the same way again.
Foreword by Steve Sabol, president, NFL Films
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The reader is taken through each game quarter by quarter describing in detail relevant plays, their impact on the game specifically and in general, including a few play diagrams. Now, if this sounds very geeky to you - then you're right. Don't get me wrong - the book is no play-by-play box score compilation. Jaworski and his co-authors focus exclusively on one team and the decisions made by that team's coach or coordinator and how each play figured into the overall scheme of that coach.
The book is fun and easy to read, a huge ensemble cast of former and current players and coaches get to have their say, and depending on your age, you either get to gain some insights of the NFL before you were born (Sid Gillman's Chargers and the Steel Curtain were before my time), too young (I only knew about Don Coryell, Dan Fouts and Kellen Winslow Sr. from highlight reels), or you get to re-experience great games that you may have seen but not thought about for some time.
What I really like was the back and forth between offensive and defensive innovations - it demonstrates the arms race in the NFL very well. The offense starts to air it out - the defense catches up. The offense creates ever more complex formations and plays - the defense overloads and blitzes unexpectedly, and so on. The book also offers some refreshingly raw language that you'd expect from players and coaches in football, instead of the highly polished "speaking but not saying anything" in today's media-centric league.
The reason that I'm giving it only 4 stars is that the chapter titles are somewhat confusing sometimes - Sid Gillman's Vertical Stretch, for example is showcased in a game where the Chargers won by relying on their running attack. Which they could do only because the defense expected them to air it out, but still. The Air Coryell chapter is is actually more about Winslow's breakout game, and the begin of the receiving tight ends of the modern era.
But these minor inconsistencies didn't really bother me. The price did. Now, unless you're a die-hard NFL geek looking for something meaningful to do while ESPN is showing skateboarding or oval car races, wait until the price drops. Oherwise - read this book.
The final third of each chapter focuses on a nearly drive by drive account of the highlighted team in their breakout game. This section reads very technical. I enjoy the game but felt lost at times in understanding the strategies and techniques used in the game. I might have rated this book 3 stars, but that would not fairly reflect the quality of the lectures. I understood enough to still appreciate these sections. Those of you more knowledgeable will find these sections quite insightful and stir your own thinking.
Whether a casual or hard core fan, this book is worth reading for the commentary and research that's provided. Also, if your favorite team is included, you won't be disappointed.
However, I should point out this isn't the book for very casual fans. For instance,if you don't know what a tight end does, save your money and buy a football for dummies book. It will become tedious very quickly.
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