Next Man Up

A Year Behind the Lines in Today's NFL

Contributors

By John Feinstein

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$11.99

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$15.99 CAD

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  1. ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD
  2. Trade Paperback $25.99 $33.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 3, 2007. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

In the NFL there is only one certainty: that every day, someone will have to be the Next Man Up. Football is an unrelentingly punishing sport, played and practiced at undiminished intensity, and it devours its players. Confronting injuries, trades, and the grim reality of competition, every NFL team prepares constantly for the likelihood — the certainty — that even franchise players can go down at any time. And someone new must be ready, trained, and primed to step in at the highest level.

Bestselling sportswriter John Feinstein persuaded one NFL team to lift the extraordinary secrecy that shrouds the sport and let him see how a team operates at the closest level. One team let him join every practice, every coaches’ meeting, every players’ gathering, every strategy debate. From the give-and-take of draft day, into the grinder of summer training camps, and from 100-degree practice games to the last game in frigid conditions, Feinstein reveals how a football team works — or fails to work — as no writer has done before.

Next Man Up unveils rituals (what a coach tells a player at the moment he cuts him); rules (the inanities of league-appointed “uniform Nazis”); conflicts (the scouts vs. the coaches, the general managers vs. the agents, the offense vs. the defense, the special teams coaches vs. everybody); money (how much a journeyman makes, and how his life differs from the multi-million-dollar-a-year star players)-every nuance of a team’s life, from the owner’s goals to the coach’s day-to-day travails to the feeling of the sleet-soaked ball in the hands of a receiver on artificial turf.

The access John Feinstein enjoyed allows him to discuss with equal understanding the owner’s management strategy, the coaches’ and coordinators’ plans for each new game, and how it all affects the players themselves. Anyone who loves football — any team, in any era — will savor the thousands of details revealed here for the first time, and the extraordinary drama that goes into following week after week, the most sensational sport in America.

Genre:

On Sale
Sep 3, 2007
Page Count
512 pages
Publisher
Back Bay Books
ISBN-13
9780316028110

John Feinstein

About the Author

John Feinstein is the author of forty-five books, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers, A Season on the Brink, and A Good Walk Spoiled. His mystery novel, Last Shot, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for mystery writing in the Young Adult category. He is a member of six Halls of Fame and is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. Additionally, he does color commentary for VCU basketball, George Mason basketball, and Longwood basketball. He is also does commentary for the Navy radio network and is a regular on The Sports Junkies in his hometown of Washington, DC.
 

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