My Favorite NFL Books

What if I told you that there is a NFL book that is signed by 33 Super Bowl MVPs and weighs almost 100 pounds, would you believe me? I'm a little worried how we're going to get it off the shelf because it's the heaviest thing here in the library. But we called in an expert.

Sam.

Sat is a wood cover.

It's actually very well done. The rest of the book, I don't know that it's executed as well as it could be. It's certainly.

Not a Tashin, that's for sure. But as you can see.

These books don't age well in a sense like they're. They're cracking. There's quite a few pictures, I guess, in here that. That have not been published before.

You know, the NFL does such a great job. NFL film.

Some of the more famous super bowl ads. The apple one. One of my favorites.

Lombardi.

Look at these images.

So great. Reggie White.

Joe.

Jerry rice.

That's when the. The Steelers beat my Seahawks in the Super Bowl. Painful.

They don't make football stadiums like that anymore.

These images in person, like, they look incredible here on the camera, but.

They'Re nuts in person.

This is when Joe Namath guaranteed a win. Right.

It.

Look at that.

It's a great quote. The thing I cannot quite decide is this. Have I just watched one of the greatest football games ever played or the worst?

America's team, the Cowboys.

That's a great quote. Miami running back Mercury Morris. They came to win. We came to play.

So this was the year I was born. That's them with Sinatra. But isn't this the.

1972, I believe is the year that the Dolphins went undefeated. Right.

That's like the perfect season, I think.

Oh, look at that.

Old Rose bowl in Los Angeles.

It.

Good old Don Shula. I wonder when this picture was taken if he knew that he would own a bunch of steakhouses.

The only adjective you could put on this team today is great. You just can't deny football players of the type that I have on the Dolphins. That's cool.

Probably a lot of you are young and you never went to a football game where the. Where you had to bring your own pad. Like that used to be a revenue stream for stadiums is they would sell you a pad to sit on because the benches were so uncomfortable. I think maybe you still have that in college a little bit today. But that literally was the case for NFL stadiums when I was a kid. I remember.

So I'm going to flip these a little bit quicker. But if there's one here that you really like. I will try to give it enough time that you could pause it on the image. Pause the video if you wanted to.

Oh, it's Bruce Springsteen.

This is when the super bowl is becoming a bigger event.

Now.

We're not at the point yet where the super bowl is. Halftime show is produced by Disney, but.

It'S more of an event.

This is now. We're at 1977.

We. We here have interacted with Terry Bradshaw a couple times for some stuff, and he is a great guy.

This is when the Rams were, I think, in la, right? Well, they were technically in Orange County, I believe, but.

They said they're the Los Angeles Rams. Kind of like the Angels say they're the Los Angeles or the Angels of Los Angeles.

But they're really in Orange County.

Wow. These images are just stunning.

Look at all the padding. That looks like a weapon.

Raiders.

I think Raiders fans are my favorite fans, so I have quite a few.

Friends and family.

That are Raider fans.

There he is. Joe montana.

The west coast offense.

People didn't believe we'd make the playoffs. We started winning big games and people still didn't believe us. Even the coaches around the league, most of them picked against us in the Super Bowl. People didn't start to believe in us until, oh, about two minutes ago. Joe Montana.

That's funny. Historically, Joe Montana is not. You would not call him an extrovert.

Not. Not a lot of charisma.

Wow.

Rose bowl again.

I'm gonna guess those pictures from overhead are from a blim.

Dan Marino. It's a great picture.

When I was a kid, I used to have a Dan Marino jersey.

So I lived in Tijuana, Mexico, when I was younger and so was the Chargers. And we would go to Charger games. Sometimes I was allowed to watch the Chargers on tv. So I was a Dan Fouts, Kellen Winslow, but.

I never had their jerseys. But I had a Dan Marino jersey.

The Bears.

The greatest defenses of all time.

Their offense wasn't. Wasn't bad. So this is one of the special things about this book is that it has these.

20 by 24 Polaroid land camera, which is a special camera, I'm assuming. I don't know, but I think at the time when they had them sign this, and I'm sure they had them sign the page before it was in the book, I'm guessing, but they took these pictures of them and they're pretty cool.

It's great. Yeah. And then you have these fold outs, so it's the book is signed here. So these are signatures in the book. Joan Namath signed it. And then.

You got Joe Montana and Tom Brady, which is pretty cool. The Tom Brady is pretty awesome. So it's kind of, in a sense, it's signed by them twice, which is really, really cool.

I know there's other versions of this book, but what makes this one special is all of the, the signatures of the MVPs and then these shots. Look at that Jerry Rice.

Shot. Just look at his eyes.

I met Jerry Rice once and he.

He just has that.

That energy of just somebody who.

Is on another level. I don't know. He.

He'S, he's not one for small talk, I guess is the best way to put.

Oh, how great was that? Lawrence Taylor and Bill.

It's crazy when you look at how many times the Redskins were in the super bowl. And then to think now they're the Commanders, which I personally, you know, whether they, they should change their name or not is one debate. But the other one is the Commanders is a, isn't a very.

I don't know, it sounds like a racehorse to me.

Doesn't sound like a football.

Lots of 49ers. It's painstaking being a Seahawks fan. How, how much the 49ers have won and also.

Just like even this year, just how fun they are to watch. They're a fun team to watch.

Cherry rice.

I have friends that will debate whether. Well, they, it's not even a debate. They're adamant that Joe Montana is the greatest quarterback of all time.

But.

I, I think that the numbers tell a different story. I get being a fan and, you know, I don't know that it has to take anything away from Joe Montana. That Tom Brady is just one more like.

I, I think it's funny too when some of these quarterbacks, I always thought this with Russell Wilson with the Seahawks, where these guys say they want to win a Super Bowl. Aaron Rodgers, to a degree, is the same also. And then they're signing these 50 million dollar a year contracts with. When Tom Brady, you know, the guys that have won Super Bowls consistently.

Usually take a more team friendly contract because, you know, it's hard to pay your quarterback 40, 50 million and have a line and a defense and just hard. So.

I always think that's kind of a funny contradiction is like.

Russell Wilson's agent would do all this stuff in the press and create all this turmoil and put out lists of who they wanted to be traded to and this and that, and then he'd sign a huge Contract and then kind of look at what he did to Denver, too.

Think if you want to win Super Bowls, it can't be just about the money.

And frankly, a lot of these. A lot of these quarterbacks have great careers after football and make a lot of money. So.

Once you've made $100 million, I don't know that you need 200 by your early 30s. Just my opinion. I'd rather win Super Bowls personally.

If I have 50 million or if I have 100 million, I can still live in the same house. There's not much you can't do. And I get some of you like, well, you pay the agent and taxes and all that.

Yeah, I guess. But.

Like, in a sense, this book is a history book, right? And look, look at all of these face playing and winning the Super Bowl. Like, I. I'd rather be in the history books than.

Have 200 million in the bank versus 100 million.

Personally. But I guess I have a different view of money. I don't. I don't.

See it the same way.

Steve Young, not Montana. Great quarterback, though.

Good old emt.

Dion.

That was a team that was fun to watch, too. The Cowboys.

What year is this? Let me see.

Well, that was 90 16.

Brett favre.

That's his locker.

I'm guessing that's something that his kids made him.

The champions. They spell like I.

Shannon Sharp.

Funny if you went back then and asked him if he thought he'd have a crazy podcast with Cat Williams and Lynch and all kinds of controversy, what he would say, he would probably.

Not understand what you were asking him because nobody knew what a podcast was back then.

Hot lanta falcons.

Here we go. Where the halftime shows are starting to become nonsense and crazy.

Oh, man. How good were the Rams back then? Greatest show on turf.

Ravens. Giants.

I met Ray Lewis once at Believe it or not, the Playboy Mansion at an SB Warren Moon's SB party.

And two things. One is he wasn't as big as I thought. To you. Really, really nice guy.

So that was Christian, age 2.

God. How good was he?

Just his presence.

On the field.

Another one of those great defenses. It's hard to.

Hard to say who was the best defense of all time.

But.

They were.

They were one of them, that is for sure.

Tom brady, Mr. Football.

Oh, I think this is when.

Yeah, so this was the halftime where YouTube played and they put up all the names from 9 11.

Everybody that was killed in that. I guess we could call it an attack. What a touching moment that was, man.

So when Gruden right I think leaves the Raiders, goes to Tampa, and then beats the Raiders in the Super Bowl. Beats his old team with his new team.

Groundhog Day Brady again.

Oh, this. This is the super bowl where we got to see Janet's nipple. And then the FCC went crazy and.

Created a bunch of Dr.

I love watching the mic'd ups of Tom Brady.

So crazy. Okay, so here's this. My. My beloved Seahawks. That is. I. That's Sean Alexander. He was our running back. I used to call him Sean right through the heart of the hot dog. Alexander. He was. He was incredible until he, I think, tore his acl. And then he was never the same, but, man, he was fun.

I think that's where we're at. Maybe not yet. That's where we lost to the Steelers. I remember I had a Super bowl party that year.

That was epic. Here we go. Steelers, 21, Seattle Seahawks, 10.

I mean, being a Seahawks fan, just the fact that we were there was crazy. And then you started to kind of think, oh, we could win, but we couldn't. We didn't.

No. I guess the Rolling Stones were the halftime show.

Oh, so painful.

So painful.

Heinz Ward, he was the mvp, I think that year.

The signatures of all the 40 years of MVPs.

It's pretty crazy. You got Joe Montana, Steve Young, Brady again.

Bart Starr, Joe Namath. I think it was. There's 33, I think, because some of them passed away.

So great.

There's a few things about this book that are really, really special. One is that it is a very collectible book because there. I think there's only 15,000 of them in circulation or something like that. They didn't make a huge run of them. And. And I do not believe until this day that it's been republished or reprinted. The second thing is that a lot of coaches from the NFL all the way to Pop Warner consider this book to be the bible of how to run a team, basically. And then the. Probably the third one, and the most evident to me is what a labor of love this book was in the sense that the curation of it is incredible. It's not an easy book to pull off. The. The detail and.

Content is. Is incredible. So. And then I guess maybe if you wanted to have a fourth one, just that. The other part of this is the mindset that Bill Walsh had. That created the west coast offense and kind of his ideologies on things is, you know, groundbreaking at the time. So one thing to kind of understand about this is that this is Bill Walsh's book in a Sense, but I think Brian Billick and James Patterson did more of it. I think. I don't know. I know Billock had a big part in the book. And then the Forward is by M. Mike Holmgren, former Green Bay packers head coach and the. The Seattle Seahawks. But the book is called Finding the Winning Edge. There are some of these online for sale. I've had this one a while. They usually in not great condition, sell for about 500, and then you can see them all the way up to a couple thousand bucks. But it literally goes through, like, how to run it, how to run a team, how to run a practice, traveling, how to evaluate players, acquire talent, develop them, the handling of a pro athlete. It's just incredible. The. Just that the idea to create this book.

Is, you know, incredible. Like I said, it's nuts. So this. This is a. A really, really fun one in the library. Next is. When I was a kid, I played Pop Warner football in Washington State, and we got to play during halftime at a Seattle Seahawks game in the Kingdome, and we got to meet the Seahawks, and I don't know, we played for five minutes at halftime, but it was just incredible to be able to be on the field. And we got to sit to the side and behind the Seahawks during the game. So you got to see the logistics, you know, how everything kind of worked. And after Steve Largent came up to us and handed us his sweatbands and I got one of his sweatbands. And so this is a signed book by Steve Largent, Seattle hall of Fame player and.

You know, great Seahawk. And then this one, I mean, this is. This is. This book has so many feelings for me. So this is a signed edition of Pete Carroll's Win Forever. The COVID of this changed when he went to the Seahawks, but this is the COVID of when he was with usc. And it's live work and play like a champion. And I love Pete Carroll so much, like, for. For so many reasons. One is his philosophy and just his overall attitude on things. But I also, being a Seahawks fan, have so many.

So many things that I feel like could have been done better. And, you know, at the time of filming this, he's no longer with the Seahawks. And I, when, when they announced that he was leaving the Seahawks, I felt literally like.

My father had been fired. It's just weird because, you know, I've never really had a father, but I used to watch every one of his press conferences and yeah, I mean, there's so many things that I wish he would have adapted in his leadership because he, he gets so much of the part that most people don't get. And he's one of those rare coaches that doesn't believe that you can't care about people and still manage and lead them in a sense, you know, that, hey, it's just business. I don't Pete doesn't think that way, which I, which I admire and agree with. But I feel like he allowed things to get too loose in a sense and didn't have enough, you know, discipline and clear boundaries with a lot of stuff which ended up being the downfall, I think of what they had going there which was so special at the Seahawks and now is over.

But those, those are my favorite NFL books. If you're watching this before the Super Bowl, I hope you have a great time watching it with friends and family. And it's an American tradition. It's a holiday. And thanks for hanging out with me.