More Than a Game: The Glorious Present and Uncertain Future of the NFL [Hardcover]

If you want to know what the Cover 2 defense is (and why it is a misnomer), what the zone blitz is (and why it is a misnomer), and what the term "B gap" means, you can find it all here. You can also find out what it is like to be an NFL head coach, after your team loses, and walking into work on that Monday morning ("No one smiles, the coffee doesn't taste as good", etc.). What do coaches think about ? What keeps them up at night ? What defenses in the NFL attack, and which play zone defense ? I liked the mix of history and modern football. Kind of like hanging out for 3 or 4 hours with an NFL coach, and asking him all those questions you have always wanted to ask.

This book is better than you think it will be, coming from another former football coach. It provides a nice overview of the sport, both on the field and off, including a good discussion of the potential labor problems on the horizon. Even for a pretty serious fan, I learned new things about the game, especially offense and defensive strategy. Not a path breaking book, but well written and entertaining. A very good primer for anyone wanting to know more about the NFL.

Billick is terrific in the booth on Fox, and shows here that he has a much better understanding of the game than most NFL coaches currently employed.

Written by former Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick, this book is broken down into chapters that focus on specific topics: Presidents, General Managers, Coaches Quarterbacks, Offense, Defense, and so forth. Then the book ends by tying together a common thread throughout: the future of the game.

The book comes at a critical juncture for the NFL as the owners and the NFLPA attempt to renegotiate the collective bargaining agreement that has served the league well over the past decade plus. Football has never been more popular than it is today, and by and large the NFL has never made as much money as it does today.

Billick does a great job of breaking down the issues at stake in the negotiations. A lot of them are financial in nature: what percentage of revenue should go to players' salaries, what revenue streams should be counted in that calculation, how the salary cap and minimum team salaries should be determined, etc. But many of them are not financial: rules surrounding OTA's, for example. How many can teams have? How often can they have them? What types of practices can they be? What types of drills can be run? What role should the league play in post-career healthcare for players?

Outside of the CBA discussion, Billick does a fine job of showing us what it's like to be an employee of the NFL from an insider's perspective. The differences between owners, GMs and coaches... what a typical week looks like for a coach or for a player... why teams hate Thursday night games so much... how commentators overemphasize the importance of the halftime speech in the locker room (by the time everyone goes to the bathroom and gets to the locker room, there's hardly time for a speech, let alone shifting an entire game plan).

The rest of the book was decent - nothing really earth-shattering that fans wouldn't probably already know, but good stuff. For instance, he writes about the Alpha project, a team of people that were assembled a few years back to examine the possibility of extending the regular season to 18 games. Despite revealing the cool sounding codename, he doesn't give any new information about the project. Turns out the league loves it because it will make them more money but players are absolutely opposed to the idea - something we already knew.

One of the most intriguing sections of the book was toward the end when Billick throws out some pretty revolutionary ideas for additional revenue streams for the NFL. For instance, offering fans watching the games at home the chance to pay to get a live feed from the coach's mic into the quarterback's helmet. How cool would it be to know, a handful of seconds before it actually happens, what play your team is going to run? Or to hear some of the chatter a coach tells his QB? Or offering fans the chance to view the official game film online after a game is over (for an additional charge, of course). This would be the exact same game film used by teams to examine their performance, and the performances of opponents coming up on their schedule. Or, how about an addition to cable packages that allows you to watch the pregame and halftime speeches in the locker rooms, see your team in the tunnel before they run out onto the field, and other behind-the-scenes footage before, during, and after the game? I hope he's pitching these to the NFL and that they make some of them happen, because I'd probably pay for some of them.

If you're expecting truly insider information that will rock your world, this probably isn't your book. But if you just want to learn a little more about the way the NFL works, from someone who worked for the NFL, then you'll really enjoy this quick read.