It’s very interesting to see what books Smart Football readers purchase. I get very minor referral revenues from Amazon purchases and, as a result, I am able to track which books readers purchase. The data is totally anonymous but it provides, in aggregate, some useful data.

The 20 Most Popular Books Bought by Smart Football Readers in 2011

Below is the broken out list. I thought it was quite interesting and I am curious if anyone thinks any particular trends emerge; there are definitely a few surprises in there. Note that I only included the top 20 books in the chart above; it would’ve been too tedious to create an “Other” category.

• Concept Passing: Teaching the Modern Passing Game, by Dan Gonzalez.
• Swing Your Sword: Leading the Charge in Football and Life, by Mike Leach and Bruce Feldman.
• The Bunch Attack: Using Compressed Formations in the Passing Game, by Dan Robinson and Andrew Coverdale.
• The Hurry-Up, No-Huddle: An Offensive Philosophy, by Gus Malzahn.
• Arnsparger’s Coaching Defensive Football, by Bill Arnsparger.
• Blood, Sweat & Chalk: The Ultimate Football Playbook: How the Great Coaches Built Today’s Game, by Tim Layden.
• Coaching the Under Front Defense, by Jerry Gordon.
• 2011 Offensive Line Coaches Handbook: Featuring Lectures From the 2011 C.O.O.L. Clinic, edited by Mitch Browning.
• Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, by Ward Farnsworth.
• 2011 Coach of the Year Clinics Football Manual, edited by Earl Browning.
• Developing an Offensive Game Plan, by Brian Billick.
• Attacking Coverages With the Passing Game, by Steve Axman.
• Football Scouting Methods, by Steve Belichick.
• Football’s Eagle and Stack Defenses, by Ron Vanderlinden.
• Finding the Winning Edge, by Bill Walsh, Brian Billick and James Peterson.
• From Headset To Helmet – Coaching the R4 Expert System (Accelerating Quarterback Decision-Making under pressure), by Dub Maddox and Darin Slack.
• The Complete Handbook of Clock Management, by Homer Smith.
• The Hidden Game of Football, by by Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer, John Thorn and David Pietrusza.
• Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance, by Perry Mehrling.
• Coaching the Multiple West Coast Offense, by Ron Jenkins.

I am frequently asked to recommend books for coaches or just people interested in learning more about the game. There really is no single one source — and I’m not sure there could be — but here are some suggestions of books I’ve enjoyed that tackle the strategic side of football.

- Finding the Winning Edge, by Bill Walsh. The bible.

- The Bunch Attack, by Andrew Coverdale and Dan Robinson. Probably my favorite passing game book of all time; don’t be scared off by the reference to the “bunch” only. Although that’s the theme, the book is really a comprehensive look at the passing game as a system, understanding defenses and coverages, protections, and how to build variations off of the passing game to make it all go. Coverdale and Robinson’s books on the quick pass game are essential as well.

- 2011 Offensive Line Coaches Handbook, edited by Earl Browning. all of the fancy stuff about the passing game and building a “pro-style” gameplan go out the window if you can’t block on some fundamental run plays and on pass plays, and the COOL Clinic lectures remain one of the best sources of information. I enjoyed this year’s edition, though you can find valuable information in almost all of them.

- Coaching the Under Front Defense, by Jerry Gordon. There are lots of good books on defense — including the all-time classic, Coaching Team Defense by Packers legend Fritz Shurmur — but I think Gordon’s book is a great overview and introduction not only to the 4-3 Under but the concept of team defenses generally. I also found it very helpful as a reference work, as out of the various other books and materials I have I kept pulling this off the shelf to see about defending runs pulling guards, certain pass concepts, and so on.

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Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football, by John U. Bacon. I actually read this long ago when it first came out**, so I am late to the party. I thought it was a surprisingly entertaining and brisk read, as I finished it in a matter of days during an otherwise busy time. And many of the insights — particularly centering around Rodriguez’s time at West Virginia, the immediate transition, and the agendas of some of the local Michigan media — were fascinating both purely on the level of gossip and as an insight into the weird world of college sports. And if I have any complaint is that it is a profoundly Michigan book: I didn’t go there and I don’t have any particular affinity to the school, so some of the detail is relevant only to someone who deeply cares about the minutiae of the school (as Bacon clearly does) and, less generously, the narrative voice often veers into an extremely fan-centric view where everything Michigan is “proud” or “dignified” or “respectful” while every other Big 10 schools’ fans are “unruly” or “rude” or their coaches manipulative, and so on.

For a book that attempts to (and often succeeds) at telling a rather nuanced story about a complicated coach during a complicated time, that the book resorts to such tropes is not a plus, at least for those of us who didn’t spend four years in Ann Arbor. More interestingly, of course, is the portrayal of Rodriguez. He comes across generally well though rather naive — “What, you mean I must say the right thing and play some internal politics at Michigan?” — and then as the losses mount he basically appears to lose it, alternatively throwing furniture or crying after games. And yet he still comes across better than those around him, including Lloyd Carr. So I recommend the book if you have an interest in Rodriguez or Michigan (especially if you care about Michigan and can handle that perspective), and if you ever plan on being the head coach of a BCS school, there are many good lessons of the what-not-to-do-variety embedded in here.

- The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. This melancholy novella was the winner of this year’s Man Booker prize. I am unsure if I would say it deserved the prize, but I completely understand why it won: the writing is crisp and, at times, beautiful; and the story, which centers around a man and his immediate circle during their school days and his attempts to remember certain details some years later under unique circumstances, is generally tightly wrought and even has some (sort of) plot twists. It also felt extremely manipulative at times, as Barnes set me with mysteries, threw out some bizarre and somewhat implausible plot details, and then purposefully left the ending completely fuzzy (I have a particular interpretation which is, without giving anything away, that I still do not completely believe the narrator’s final account of the events at the end of the book). The best thing I can say is that at a short 140 or so pages, it was the perfect length for what it is, whatever that may be: I don’t regret at all buying or reading it, and, true to the book’s theme, I’ll probably remember the book more fondly than I initially experienced it.

- The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.
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The Assembly Line, by Milt Tenopir. Tenopir was the offensive line coach at Nebraska under the great Tom Osborne, and was thus the architect of some of the greatest rushing attacks — no, greatest offenses — the game has ever seen, particularly in their heydey in the mid-1990s. (400 yards rushing and 52 points per game is not too shabby.) The book focuses on how Tenopir and Osborne focused on a few blocking schemes like the inside and outside zone and the counter trey and added multiple run actions and many, many options off of those looks. It’s nothing revolutionary, but in football, what’s great rarely is.

- Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik. I didn’t put a lot of thought into this before I bought it, but all I wanted was some easy-to-read travel reading as I’ll be heading back to France in the coming months. The other factors were that I generally like Gopnik’s writings in the New Yorker and the book won some kind of awards or whatnot, and that was that. So far, so good, though it does read a bit like it was from an earlier time (were the late 1990s really so long ago?). Overall, I recommend it, but I’m still plowing through.

- The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, by Michael Lewis. I love anything Lewis writes — and this is no exception — but I wouldn’t put this book on the same level as The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Moneyball, and Liar’s Poker. It’s a thoroughly entertaining story about dotcom maven Jim Clark, which is a story surprisingly relevant today given the surge of new would-be internet billionaires from the likes of Groupon, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. The book drags a bit, however, as it follows Clark in his expensive and time consuming quest to build a (nearly) fully automated mechanical yacht.

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This is a new book by John J. Miller, and it is very interesting so far. Roosevelt’s perspective is not unlike our own today, as he loved football but understood its dangerous. His interventions in the game were to save it from its fiercest critics. And the debate reached the highest levels, as the great Judy Battista observes in her review in this past weekend’s New York Times book Review:

[Roosevelt] convened a White House summit with football’s leading coaches and thinkers; even Elihu Root, the secretary of state, attended. Miller argues that this was the moment when Roosevelt put his stamp on the sport by imploring the men to crack down on dirty play and reform the way the game was coached. With Roosevelt’s encouragement, Miller says, a series of rules changes was set in motion — among them, increasing the number of referees and strengthening penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct — that ultimately quieted the critics enough to allow the colleges to play on.

Nike Coach of the Year Clinic – 2011 and the 2011 Offensive Line Coaches C.O.O.L. Clinic Handbook, each edited by Earl Browning. These simply must be purchased every year. I’m just now getting into the C.O.O.L. clinic handbook, but the C.O.O.L. clinic is the best offensive line coaches clinic out there. And the Nike Coach of the Year Manual, as always, has some great stuff, including great information from Chris Ault of Nevada on the Pistol and Gary Patterson of TCU. With these you always know what you get: an accessible, digestible breakdown of discrete topics by great coaches in the “hot” areas among coaches.

- Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, by Michael Sandel. This is one of those books I passed by at least ten times before I finally bought it at one of those Borders going-out-of-business sales. I didn’t buy it because I knew it would cover a lot of territory I was already familiar with, including the 1,000th spin on the infamous trolley problem. But of course that is also the reason I eventually bought it, and I haven’t been disappointed. The book is based on Sandel’s famous philosophy course at Harvard (which was filmed and reproduced by PBS), and has the accessible, even-handed tone of a good instructor. The book doesn’t break any new ground (it isn’t designed to) and if you’ve read all the source material — Kant, Mill, Rawls, Nozick, and of course Plato and so on — then maybe this book isn’t so necessary, but I enjoyed it a great deal and do recommend it.

- Women, by Charles Bukowski. And now for something completely different. This is a filthy book by a filthy old man (this seems like a common genre these days) but, though tedious in parts, is highly entertaining and Bukowski does both have a simple, elegant way with words and an eye for good set pieces. But parents, don’t buy this one for your kids.

- The American, by Henry James. If you enjoyed the Bukowski book but feel like you need an intellectual shower to clean off, then the old don himself, Henry James, is typically a good, safe and sterile choice. I downloaded this on my Kindle about a week ago when flying and devoured the whole book. The American has a rather preposterous plot but James somehow makes almost everyone in the book thoroughly likable.

- The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley. This book looks, sounds, and reads like it was written by an economist, except that it is more entertaining (and probably more informative too). This actually makes some sense given that the author is Matt Ridley, a trained biologist who happened to be an editor for The Economist for close to ten years. The upshot of the book is that we often underestimate humanity’s ability for upward progress, naming a few different causes, most notable among them being job and task specialization throughout history. The book itself is excellent and while I generally agree with his premise that our trajectory is upward, it’s not clear that all of the credit (or blame) can rest on the causes he names. But these are quibbles; if not exactly spectacular, it’s a solid book.

My first experience with Mike Leach came during a film study session at the University of Kentucky. It was a camp for high school quarterbacks, of which I was one, though I wasn’t one of the guys they were heavily recruiting. The coaches — particularly head coach Hal Mumme and his recruiting coordinator, Claude Bassett, who would later be banned from working for an NCAA school for recruiting violations — focused most of their attention on Jared Lorenzen, who would later start four years at Kentucky (though only one for Mumme) before bouncing around the NFL. But the camp was a small one, much smaller than your typical college camp, and the coaches didn’t farm you off to local high school guys like too many of the big name college camps did then and still do. And the film instructor was some receivers coach — “Hey, where is Coach Mumme?” — named Coach Leach.

To make matters worse, we watched the same play, a flood route everyone has in their playbook (he just called it “94“), over and over again against every SEC team they ran it against. And then we got a quiz. “How far is this throw here?” he asked, as he pointed to the 10 yard out. As the route had a “10″ next to it to show where the break point was, one hapless soul raised his hand and offered, “ten yards?” I didn’t know where this was going but I knew that wasn’t the right answer, and Coach Leach just made a face like someone had broken some serious wind.

But he didn’t miss a beat and moved onto the next question: “Hey, how many of you remember the Pythagorean theorem?” No one was going to answer that question in a room full of football players, and certainly not after the last offer. “Okay, how many of you guys took geometry?” I sheepishly raised my hand, as did Lorenzen and a couple of others. Most did not. We clearly were a lame audience, so our teacher decided to push us along a little bit more quickly.

“Fine. The deal is that you can figure out how long these throws are using the pythagorean theorem,” he said, as the light went off in my head (oh yeah, that pythagorean theorem). He quickly showed us how to calculate how far each throw was based on the quarterback’s drop, the depth of the route and how far it was from the quarterback or how close to the sideline. And then we were on to another pass play.

This Mike Leach — analytical, odd (especially in a football context), but ultimately incisive and creative, shines through in his new book, Swing Your Sword. The book, edited by Bruce Feldman of ESPN**, is a highly readable and enjoyable look at the former Red Raider coach’s upbringing, influences, and experiences as a coach on the fringe who made it to the big leagues, and within one year went from the highest of highs (his team upsetting #1 Texas in November) to being dismissed and finding himself in the midst of a massive battle with ESPN and ESPN personality Craig James.

But the James fiasco aside, Leach’s legacy is as a pass-first maven who, along with Hal Mumme, created the Air Raid offense, which that took over the high school landscape and won Leach a lot of games (not to mention fans) during his times at Kentucky, Oklahoma and most significantly Texas Tech. The book does a nice job showing how Leach became the kind of coach he would become, as he was particularly drawn to the passing game. It’s actually a bit hard to remember now, but for most of football history if you were a “throwing coach” you were more of a trickster than you were a real coach. Leach says that when he and Mumme got to Valdosta State in Valdosta, Georgia in the early 1990s, he was often approached by enthusiastic and supportive but concerned fans:

Sometimes people would come up to me at the coffee shop and say, “I hope you guys do well, but you know you’re gonna have to run the ball up the middle here.”

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The Complete Handbook of Clock Management, by Homer Smith. Maybe football’s only true genius, Coach Smith — of UCLA, the University of Alabama, of decades of major college coaching experience to go with his economics degree from Princeton, MBA from Stanford, and PhD in theology from Harvard — spent most of his time dabbling plays and recounting football history, but he also made big contributions to clock management. This book, like all of his others, is cryptic but great. (Famously, Georgia went 8-4 in Mark Richt’s first season, dropping several close games. Richt, unhappy with his own clock and down management, met with Smith that summer and the next year Georgia won almost all of those close games to go 13-1.) The only downside to the book is that there has been so much dabbling in the rules governing late game situations and when the clock stops — and those rules differ from high school, to college, and to the pros — that it’s impossible for this one book to provide definitive answers on everything, but, like everything else Smith wrote, it’s provides lots of food for thought.

Of course, Coach Smith recently passed away. (See also here and here.) Corky Simpson, of Tucson, wrote:

“Homer was grossly overqualified to be a football coach, let alone somebody’s assistant … the man was worthy of a higher calling — teacher or author or minister. But come to think of it, he was all those things rolled into one amazing professor of football.”

- A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One, by George R. R. Martin. I bought this due to its excessive popularity. I am not a big fantasy guy, though I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings however many years, ago, like everyone else. Strikes me as a bit heavy handed early on, but is beginning to pick up. Will report later. (I was also told by a friend in the publishing industry, for what it’s worth, that they have the manuscript for the next book in hand. Is that news? Or has it broken yet? I know the next volume is heavily awaited.)

- The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway. I had never read this until recently and I’ve always liked Hemingway but I was shocked at how good this was. For Whom the Bell Tolls was good but I’m still not sure the love story was believable, and the short stories are fantastic but they are, well, short and sometimes unnecessarily cryptic, but this was just unreal. I read it over a weekend. I know this isn’t exactly news (“Thanks for recommending Ernest Hemingway,” signed Your Seventh Grade Teacher), but do read it.

- Money. The rest of the reading list is a bit different than — and not quite as fun as — Hemingway or Coach Smith:

1. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story, by David Einhorn. Einhorn is the hedge fund manager who is investing in the Mets, and is doing so on terms befitting a hedge fund manager: $200MM for a minority stake and to shore up the finances, and if in two years Einhorn wants to buy majority control of the Mets the only way the Wilpon family can block him is to give his $200MM back, but he’d get to keep a one-third interest in team essentially for free. Einhorn is well known in the fund and investing community for dramatic bets that have tended to pay off, his most famous one being his call to short Lehman Brothers in the spring and summer of 2008 (a call for which he was told was both stupid and immoral — yeah well how did that work out). This book is essentially a treatise explaining one of Einhorn’s short bets, this time against a company named Allied Capital.

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The Games That Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays, by Ron Jaworski, Greg Cosell and David Plaut, was not a bad book, but in no way was it a good one. Among the good things in the book: the subjects — the zone blitz, the Sid Gillman’s passing game, Bill Belichick’s methods — are all of interest to me; Jaworski, as a general matter, is a pretty knowledgeable guy when it comes to NFL concepts, and they obviously interviewed a number of relevant people (mostly other former coaches and players turned analysts, like Jon Gruden); and there are not many good books that really get into the depths of the game, so I will cut any good faith effort some slack.

But then there’s the bad. First, the format was extremely cumbersome and dull: each chapter, typically about a discrete topic or figure, begins with a brief introduction — the only redeeming part of the chapter (leaving aside such incorrect assertions like the idea that Don Coryell’s San Diego Chargers were the first team to move their tight-end, Kellen Winslow around the formation). But then the chapter launches into a text-only play-by-play description of a specific game that I found tiresome if not unreadable. Seriously, it’s 2011, even if the game is fifteen or twenty years old I’d rather watch the game than read what is effectively a transcript of someone describing it. Although Jaworski occasionally offers interesting tidbits — as I said, he is generally knowledgeable – it was clear how this book got written, and it was to its detriment: the writers (Plaut and Cosell) sat in and recorded a discussion with Jaworski while he watched these games, and then they went back to write up his stream-of-consciousness thoughts. This never should have been a book, it should have been released as DVD commentary.

But leave the format aside: Is there anything of value in the substance? Yes, with qualifications, as it took a lot of work to get to the few gems in here and there really aren’t that many, and the book’s exceptionally narrow focus gives a false picture of each idea’s place in football history (more on that in a moment). Among the interesting nuggets, Bill Belichick states that he watched every down of Navy from a few years ago (I think when Paul Johnson was still there) as he constantly looks for advantages and they led the nation in rushing “obviously without much talent”. Belichick goes on to say not much of it was useful as Tom Brady wouldn’t be running the option, so Jaworski cites this in his ending unnecessary excursus on Why The Spread Offense Is Bad (more on this shortly), but the lesson I took was that Belichick studies these kinds of advantages where ever they may be; what other NFL coach would watch every down of Navy?

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of these moments to salvage this book, and what other meat there is has been covered better elsewhere: the Dick LeBeau/zone blitz, Buddy Ryan/46 defense, and the Coryell/Zampese/Troy Aikman vertical passing game chapters were all covered with better interviews, background, and more color (and more substance!) in Tim Layden’s Blood, Sweat & Chalk, and the chapter on Bill Walsh’s pass protection scheme is — by the authors’ own admission, bizarrely, though at least honestly — a straight rip-off of Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side (and that’s saying something).

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Wing-T: The Wing-T From A To Z: The Base Plan, by Dennis Creehan, and 101 Delaware Wing-T Plays, by Harold “Tubby” Raymond. Both look promising — if a bit overkill (101 plays?) — and the Wing-T is my offseason project. I’m convinced Wing-T blocking schemes will make (or are making) a comeback, as the hegemony of zone blocking cannot last forever. Any recent leads on Wing-T developments would be much appreciated.

- Lern 2 Rite: How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish and On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (yes that Stephen King). Somewhat surprisingly, King’s book is the better of the two, and I bought it (i.e. downloaded for my Kindle) essentially on the strength of this recommendation. The first part of King’s book, a very well told (and brief) autobiography of his writing life, is moving and, dare I say, inspiring. Fish’s book aspires to be a more academic contribution to the concept of building and deconstructing a sentence, and while it is written as a narrative, it exists in a netherworld between being an entertaining and enlightening contribution on writing (as King’s book manages to be) and an academic text. If you’re interested in the subject (and I mean seriously interested), get this book instead.

- On the shelf, at the store: I recently bought The Handbook of Loan Syndications and Trading and Leveraged Finance: Concepts, Methods, and Trading of High-Yield Bonds, Loans, and Derivatives, but don’t even ask. The Economist recommends this book, but I’m skeptical. And I am finally almost done with The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk, which I’ve been reading off an on for over a year now.