Made a board game sale list for Prime Day, figured I'd share. Bolded prices indicate all-time low on CCC:

• 7 Wonders | $28.99 | 3-7 players | ~30-45 Minutes | 7.8 on BGG - This is a fantastic game to introduce people to "tableau building" and "card drafting." If you're not familiar, a tableau is the cards in front of you that are part of your "engine" going forward, usually you will add cards to it that add synergy to your strategy. Card drafting is when players have a hand of cards, choose one, and then pass to the person next to them. This game can fit up to 7 and it doesn't really bog the game down. I'm not in love with this game, but at this price I think it's a very fair offering for a game that once taught and played once, flows really nicely and makes for a great game to drink and talk while playing rather than being buried in thought about what to do.
  
  
• 7 Wonders: Duel | $17.81 | 2 Players | 20-30 Minutes | 8.1 on BGG - This is a 2 player adaptation of 7 Wonders and it's quite a great version. Instead of card drafting by passing hands, there is a "market" that opens up further as more cards are chosen in which players take turns choosing from. It offers an intense 2 player back and forth of "chicken" in a way that flows nicely and culminates in a satisfying, even if sometimes mean, ending. Often credited as one of the best 2 player games out there, especially with expansions.
  
  
  
• Agricola | $32.89 | 1-4 Players | 30-150 Minutes | 8.0 on BGG - I have never played this but you can find lots of excellent discussion about this on BGG and /r/boardgames. Ultimately it's a beefier board game about managing your farm to take care of your family. Sounds thrilling right? Well apparently it really is. It's currently rated the 25th bestboard game of all-time, and is often mentioned among some of the great games out there. This is an excellent price for this game new, so if there's any interest, go watch a review of two.
  
  
• Carcassonne | $19.99 | 2-4 Players | ~30 Minutes | 7.4 on BGG - This is an excellent tile laying game for gamers and non-gamers alike. It's simple to teach, takes almost no time to set-up, and can easily be expanded to fit 5 players. If you end up loving this, there are many expansions for it to add depth, or silliness, whichever you prefer. This has become a staple in my circle of friends who don't really play board games because it's so approachable.
  
  
• Isle of Skye | $24.35 | 2-5 Players | 30-50 Minutes | 7.5 on BGG - I've never played this, but it's been on my list for a while as a tile laying game with more complexity than Carcassonne. I don't know much about it, but this is a great price and those with Irish heritage might love the theme. Edit: Well this is embarrassing, Isle of Skye is in Scotland, sorry for that.
  
  
• Pandemic: Fall of Rome | $27.99 | 1-5 Players | 30-60 Minutes | 7.8 on BGG - This is a variation of the much beloved game Pandemic. In this variation, you and up to 4 other players are taking control of Roman armies to defend against the oncoming tribes attempting to take over a weakened Rome. You will use your unique powers and randomly drawn cards to work together with the other players in this cooperative game. If you've played base Pandemic you will know what to expect, but this version has some cool thematic changes that have many reviewers calling it the second best iteration of the Pandemic series.
  
  
• Patchwork | $17.84 | 2 Players | ~20 Minutes | 7.7 on BGG - This is an excellent 2 player game using spacial skills to build out your quilt in a sort of "Tetris" way. You need to manage buttons (currency) and time to efficiently build your quilt with as little empty spots as possible. It's a darling of the community and designed by the great Uwe Rosenberg. People meme about it because it's often recommended, but there's a reason why it is.
  
  
• Photosynthesis | $21.11 | 2-4 Players | 30-60 Minutes | 7.2 on BGG - I've never played this, but it's quite a nice looking game on the table. It's about growing trees while using a limited amount of sunlight - or that's how it's been described to me anyway. I've heard that this game can get pretty cutthroat, especially at higher player counts, because of how limited the board space gets.
  
  
• The Castles of Burgundy | $19.20 | 2-4 Players | 45-90 Minutes | 8.1 on BGG - One of the finest board games I've ever played in spite of the ugly art and theme of it. Visually, I find nothing about this appealing, but the gameplay is so fantastic that I fell in love with it immediately. You have 25 turns in which you are using two dice each turn which are used to make decisions on how to build out your board to gain victory points. The actions are mostly easy to understand, and you're never screwed over by a bad roll because bad rolls can be mitigated via worker resources. There is a good amount of strategic depth to it, minor "meanness" in "screwing over" opponents, and I mostly feel happy with every round - it's a rare game of satisfaction each turn. My only complaint is that the yellow tiles are all unique which turns into a lot of, "What does that one do?" which is mitigated with player aides you can find on BGG. Warning, new print coming out this year that may or may not make the art look better, but the new print will have all expansions. With that said, for $19.20 this is a no-brainer if you want something more complex than something like Catan.
  
  
• The Quest for El Dorado | $19.99 | 2-4 Players | ~45 Minutes| 7.6 on BGG - This is a great deck-building racing game to get to El Dorado first. It's simple to learn and honestly my only complaint is that the game takes up a lot of space. The map is completely variable and there are some official variants in the book, as well as many others on BGG on the files section. If you enjoy the concept of building a deck to race through the treacherous lands to get to El Dorado, this is a great game. Warning, there is a new edition coming out with new artwork, so you may want to hold off.

You joke, but it's very much true. Consider what John Madden did to influence TV coverage of football and how Gruden approaches it.

Also worth mentioning that John Madden was compulsive about preparation and study. He was found to be studying tape deep into the night and would sometimes be leaving the film room as guys were getting in. Madden never gets much credit for his game prep or his focus and fixation, but he was as maniacal as Gruden if not moreso.

Now compare this (long) excerpt with this Real Sports on Gruden

Excerpted from Madden: A Biography by Burwell, Bryan (2011-08-01). Triumph Books.

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As early as May 1981, Madden expressed this concern during a conversation with [CBS Sports Producer Terry] O’Neil over lunch. Madden was upset that everyone on the production team was thinking of his precious game of football rather cavalierly as “a show.” It was that same description that had angered him the first time he heard it seven years earlier when Howard Cosell had approached him after a Monday Night Football game that the Raiders had just lost 21–20 to the Buffalo Bills.

“John,” Cosell gushed. “You gave us a great show!”

“Show? A great show?” Madden exploded. “To you it’s a show, but to me it’s a goddamned game we just lost! And there’s nothing great about it!”

During his lunch meeting with O’Neil, Madden conjured up that same contempt. “Our people are always saying, ‘The show this and the show that.’ Hell, this isn’t a show. Kukla, Fran and Ollie is a show! Laverne and Shirley is a show! This is a game!”

O’Neil promised to change that attitude with the troops. “What else?” he asked. “Well, they don’t know anything about the game. Don’t know and don’t care,” Madden said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, football. They don’t know whether you blow it up or stuff it…take defense. Simple things, like showing what a zone coverage is. Or showing a pass rusher coming onto the field on third down.”

“Yeah, so?” O’Neil asked.

“So the producer and director tell me they can’t show it. Say they don’t know it’s going to happen until it’s over.”

“Well, don’t they pick these things up when they watch game film?”

“Game film? Game film? Hell, some of these guys don’t even show up until the morning of the game,” Madden retorted.

The industry critics agreed with Madden’s brutal assessment. They too were convinced that “old” CBS Sports had a problem, but unlike the coach, who was coming at it from a football sense, the newspaper critics shaped their evaluations from a technical point of view. They saw uninspired people who were just showing up and putting out a product that was “produced in a stodgy, schizophrenic manner almost, it sometimes seemed, half-heartedly,” according to Television Age magazine.

When Madden and O’Neil arrived at CBS, they were walking into a culture that desperately needed to be changed. To put it mildly, O’Neil (and his new boss Van Gordon Sauter) believed it was an enterprise built on laziness and excessive partying. Pregame preparation was nonexistent. “Before Madden, the way we prepared for a game was showing up on Saturday,” Sandy Grossman says. “With [Pat] Summerall and [Tom] Brookshier, we’d sit down with the PR directors on Saturday, and they’d hand us their press guides, a few newspaper clippings, and that was it.”

The height of this cavalier attitude came during preparation for Super Bowl XIV (Los Angeles Rams vs. Pittsburgh Steelers) when the CBS crew was informed that a meeting had been arranged with Steelers coach Chuck Noll, and Brookshier’s initial response was, “Do we have to go?”

If Brookshier was the class cut-up, then Madden was the teacher who gave homework on the weekends. He brought a coach’s work ethic to television. He wanted the entire production team to study game film and attend practices. He wanted them to interview players and coaches, gain better insight into the broadcast, and better prepare for essential camera shots that would capture important elements of the coming game. The deeper he got into the television business, the more his personality came out. Madden wasn’t upset that they liked to party. Hell, he used to coach the Raiders. But his wild and rambunctious players worked hard, prepared meticulously, and cared deeply about the jobs they were expected to do. Most of all, they knew the game. So Madden had to become a control freak. He had to take charge because if their broadcasts looked bad, that was a reflection on him. So he once again was a coach and teacher, and he was going to have to coach up an entirely new group of students, many of whom weren’t all that interested in learning.

Noted sports television critic Bob Raissman, who has covered the industry at Advertising Age and the New York Daily News for the last 27 years, remembers sitting in on some of those production meetings in the early years. “He would teach these guys football,” says Raissman. “He had longtime producers and director [Bob] Stenner and Grossman, and he was telling them what he was looking for. He was instructing them on what to look for in an important football game. I know some people thought he was overbearing, but I was in the room. He wasn’t necessarily ordering them around, but he was putting out a game plan for these guys. His attitude was like this was his team. They were his players, his coaching staff. They were his team.”

Grossman and the rest of the crew began to feel that “team” vibe almost immediately, even if they weren’t all that thrilled to be sitting there with glazed eyes, entranced by the whirl-click, whirl-click of Madden at the control of the game films. “Yes, it was like we were becoming a part of his new coaching staff,” Grossman chuckled. “We would watch [game film], and we’d go back and forth, back and forth on certain plays and, to be honest with you, it was boring to us. But we kept doing it and listening to him. And as we went along, we did start to see things, and we would then ask questions.”

All of the technical staff would be there for hours. Summerall didn’t always stick around very long. But then again, he didn’t have to because Madden already knew Summerall had built-in credibility. “Pat had been everywhere,” says Madden. “He had been a player, a coach, an analyst, and a play-by-play man. So that [gave me] a lot of confidence that the guy sitting next to [me] knew more about what was going on than [I] did.”

We look back historically and think of Madden and Summerall as the quintessential broadcast partners. They lasted 22 years together, becoming synonymous with every big game in the NFC, from Thanksgiving Day in Dallas to championship duels in San Francisco, from Gatorade baths in the Meadowlands to unbridled celebrations of the Hogs in D.C., to marveling at the Greatest Show on Turf in St. Louis. However, Summerall wasn’t completely sold on his new partner right off the bat. In early September, right before a preseason game they would be broadcasting between the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Oilers, Summerall gave the Dallas Morning News a rather clear picture of how different it was working with Brookshier and surprisingly how apprehensive he felt about Madden’s more serious approach:

“It puts me in a tough position. Deep down, it’s really true that I’d rather be with Brookshier…. It was not like going to work when Brookie and I did games. It was like I couldn’t wait to get there. As he is fond of saying, when we arrived we were laughing and when we left on Sunday night we were still laughing. If it were Brookshier and me, we would have had the production meeting, then we would have been out drinking margaritas. Now I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”

...

Board Game Sale List

Carcassonne | 2-5 Players | 30-45 Minutes | Medium luck, light to moderate rules overhead, light to medium strategic depth | 7.4 on BGG | $17

In Carcassonne you are building a shared map one tile at a time and using your meeples (player pieces) to claim castles, roads, churches, and farms, to score points. It's very simple and offers ways to directly affect your opponent. Great fun and considered a key entry-point into the hobby.



Pandemic Legacy Season 1 | 2-4 Players | 45-60 Minutes | Medium luck, moderate rules overhead, medium strategic depth | 8.6 on BGG | $30

Pandemic Legacy is a campaign based version of Pandemic that takes the course over a year. Each game will be consist of a month in this world being threatened of being wiped out by disease and virus. You assume the role of a person trying to help cure the virus and will see permanent changes to the game with each session played. You will play 1 round per month if you're successful that month, but if you fail the first time you will get a second try and thematically the month is split into two. It's a fantastic game and one of the hobby's top rated games.



Patchwork | 2 Players | 15 - 30 Minutes | Low luck, light rules overhead, medium strategic depth | 7.7 on BGG | $17

The goal of Patchwork is to take turns taking one of three available patchwork pieces and places them on their quilt. The goal is to fill up your quilt as full as possible while managing how quickly you race to the finish, and manage your buttons (money). At the end of the game you will be penalized for open spaces and rewarded for coins they have.

This is a fantastic 2 player game. My only complaint is that it takes up more room than you'd think. A standard table will fit this fine though.

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Sushi Go Party! | 2-8 Players | 20-30 Minutes | Low-medium luck, light rules overhead, light strategic depth | 7.5 on BGG | $13

This is a simple card drafting game* with a cute theme slapped on top of it. It can be taught in minutes, and a full game played out in 10-20 minutes among experienced players. This is a great simple card game that's worth keeping around for non-gamers, larger groups, and younger kids.

• Card drafting simply means that you will start with a hand of cards, choose one to play, play it face up at the same time as everyone else, and pass your cards to the person next to you. Repeat this process until the last card is played.

A Fan's Notes while not so much an in depth football book as it is a literary work, A Fan's Notes is still a brilliant read for any football fan. Deals with the authors alcoholism, nihilism, the bizarre relation a fan has to his team, and the fear of spending ones life on the sidelines of the action. An all around excellent read. It does have some nice insight to the 60's Giants as well.

Some other more traditional books I'd recommend would When Pride Still Mattered, Run to daylight, Instant Replay, and for one none packer book: Badasses. All four of those provide excellent looks into storied franchises at their best, and When Pride Still Mattered is the definitive book for the NFLs greatest coach.

Thanks OP, I've been meaning to make this thread for awhile now and I love reading books about football and sports in general. I really do heavily recommend A Fan's Notes though, that novel is excellent.

And while I'm still here I guess, even though it isn't football, I'll quickly recommend A Season on the Brink as one of the greatest sports books ever.

EDIT: On the off chance anyone takes an interest in this I have lots more I could recommend.

The Raiders.

They're just so cool. The uniforms, logo, and name are badass. I don't know what it is, but the fact their colours are silver and black just really sticks with me. I remember watching one of the NFL Super Bowl champ rundown and they mentioned Al Davis always checking the uniforms to make sure they were silver, not grey.

On the topic, Al Davis was such a badass.

> He remains the only executive in NFL history to be an assistant coach, head coach, general manager, commissioner and owner.

• He was also active in civil rights:
  
  > refusing to allow the Raiders to play in any city where black and white players had to stay in separate hotels. He was the first NFL owner to hire an African American head coach and a female chief executive. He was also the second NFL owner to hire a Latino head coach.
  
  
• His motto, 'Just win, baby'.
  
  
• John Madden coached them and reading his book was really fun.
  
  
• Raider nation.
  
  
• The Black Hole. Talk about intimidating.
  
  
• Howie Long is one of my favourite ever players. Started after I read Maddens book.
  
  
• Bo Jackson. I'm 21 and didn't grow up in the States much, and I had vaguely heard of Bo. Watching his 30 for 30 was beautiful.
  
  
• Seen as working class team with an aggressive play style (historically).
  
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  ^^I ^^also ^^think ^^the ^^ ^^49ers ^^are ^^cool.
  
  ---
  
  EDIT: For those interested, John Maddens book is called 'One Knee Equals Two Feet'. Here's a link for it on Amazon. It's quite old, but still a stonking great read.
  
  Also that word reminded me of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Buy it as well.
  
  EDIT 2: "If you're buying any of the books mentioned in these comments, Amazon has a physical book sale today. 30% off, use promo code HOLIDAY30" - thanks to /u/Mandarinez.
  
  EDIT 3: If you're interested in some Raider history check out Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders by Peter Richmond. - thanks to /u/Imaygetyelledat.

Yeah 70/30 80/20 whatever you want to call it in today's NFL it's impossible no matter how good your defense is to hold a top offense to 6 pts and 200 yds without them fucking up plenty on their own.

My general point was more people always try to look for "the secret formula/template a defense laid out that now everybody is going to copy and just stop a top offense". That's not really this was about Bears personnel was just better than the Rams. Kind of the same thing people go overboard with the idea of "Matty P and the Lions came up with the formula for how to stop this offense now everybody's copying it!". If Jared Goff hadn't missed a bunch of open throws downfield that game nobody would be saying it.

You can come up with a couple general adjustments teams have made. Teams aren't really reacting to the Rams jet motion the same way anymore. That's the reason McVay had Robert Woods get 7 carries in a game late in the yr vs AZ was to try and get teams to start respecting it more. Teams also caught onto the fact the Rams in shotgun throw about 90-95% of the time and McVay in the playoff game vs Dallas came out and ran a few times early out of shotgun

But by and large there isn't really any "formula" to stopping this offense the way people want. The Rams run a very select number of plays. Everybody who plays them knows the general plays they'll run. If you want to know which ones specifically I highly recommend this book. But that doesn't help you much you think the Chiefs were actually caught off guard by the sail/flood concept the 3rd time they ran it here lol no. Still doesn't matter. Everything McVay does is tailored specifically to his opponents rules in coverage. That's why they play 11 so much one personnel group means you don't have to decipher through a bunch of different coverage rules based on each personnel group makes it easier to pick up on stuff. This is how you keep getting Anthony Barr in bad matchups in coverage

This is likely what NE will do vs the Rams offense. This Rams offense is built off throwing over the middle of the field especially on play action. But actually not biting on play action fakes and a safety specifically reading the right route combo over the middle on a specific play is always way easier said than done.

The team doctor ultimately has the team's best interest at heart, not the player's. There are many good books that go into this such as Mark Bowden's Bringing the Heat and You're OK It's Just a Bruise.

Percy is protecting himself in seeking out an independent second opinion.

Slow Getting Up by former WR Nate Jackson. Great narrative that looks at the game from a fringe player fighting for roster spots and battling injuries.

A Few Seconds of Panic by Steve Fatsis.
A journalist joins the Broncos in training camp as a kicker and profiles the team. He becomes a pretty good kicker, and shares a lot of insight about the team and the NFL.

I loved reading this and learned a lot from them

http://www.amazon.com/Few-Seconds-Panic-Sportswriter-Plays/dp/0143115472

I enjoyed this one not only because I´m a Broncos fan, but also because I always like to get a look behind the scenes and this book focuses on the bottom half of the roster and it makes you realize that some are basically just playing for a job in the NFL and that not everybody makes a killing.

Fatsis basically was a part of the team for training camp and writes about his impressions, what he encountered, the people he met.

I'm that weird person who's more of a reader than a gamer, and I, too, am trying to get more into the game. I've found the current edition of Football for Dummies to be a surprisingly good resource. Enjoy the journey! Love this sport.

Since this stat is total adjusted yards, the multipliers convert every non-yardage value into yards. So touchdowns = 20 yards, interceptions = -45 yards, fumbles = -50 yards, etc.

All those values have been around since The Hidden Game of Football in 1988. Pretty much every advanced stat today utilizes those same multiplier values.

Fatso: Football When Men Were Really Men -Art Donovan.

It is one of the most honest and easy to read looks into any sport I've read. Donovan's informal and conversational style is like listening to your grandpa tell war stories and his recollection of names and events is remarkably crisp.

One of the easiest and most enjoyable reads I've come across.

• The GM: The Inside Story of a Dream Job and the Nightmares that Go with It
  
  
• Inside the Helmet: Hard Knocks, Pulling Together, and Triumph as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior
  
  First one is about Ernie Accorsi's career. Second one is Michael Strahan. Both pretty good reads.

Watching this, I'm again reminded about how wrong it is to have the doctors that treat the players employed by the teams.

There need to be independent doctors who will give the players medical advice in the player's own interest, not the team or league's interest.

edit - There's a pretty good book by Rob Huizenga about being a team doctor and some of the conflicts. (The whole James Spader Woods subplot and most doctor scenes on Any Given Sunday were pretty much lifted directly from the book.)

Sounds like you may enjoy the Hidden Game of Football and it may help you with your formula.

http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Game-Football-Bob-Carroll/dp/0446514144

When Pride Still Mattered is one of the best football books around.

Also, What it Takes to be Number One.

If you're interested in the early Al Davis and the Raiders, check out the book:


"Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003VIWRFE/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1


Moreso about the team than Al Davis, but still you get a good glimpse into him and the franchise as a whole. It's on Kindle Unlimited right now and I recommend it.

Not sure what you mean about juicy details, but A Few Seconds of Panic is a great read. It's about a sportswriter who decides to try out for the Broncos as a kicker.

If you decided to become a Raiders fan, Badasses is a great read

If you like the writing style of Michael Lewis, you need to check out this book. Lewis wrote a fantastic book on a way to look at baseball that no fan had ever seen before. He based his hugely successful baseball book on The Hidden Game of Football, now out of print but available used.

For pure storytelling, you have to read "When Pride Still Mattered". This biography of Vince Lombardi is nothing short of a masterpiece, and it's no surprise. It's written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in a style very different from most bio works.

Yeah I also heard "You're Okay, It's Just a Bruise" is good too.

http://www.amazon.com/Youre-Okay-Its-Just-Bruise/dp/0312136277

Fatso Art Donovan is hilarious.

The Blindside is so much better than the movie.

Was supposed to be a really nice guy. Juiced like crazy although its questionable whether that contributed to his cancer diagnosis.

If you want to read a really good book about Alzado and the Raiders of the early 80's era, read You're ok, it's just a bruise written by one of the team doctors of the Raiders at the time. Medical treatment back then was way more fast and loose than it is now and cost a lot of players their future health.

Double comment, but Robert Peters is a good person to look at for football strategy stuff.

This is a breakdown of the ram's third down offense from last year, and he's got a bunch of other stuff getting into the bones of how offenses run.

Steroids, or lack thereof.

This book details just how prevalent steroids were back in the day.

>the famous 4th Down study that introduced the idea of expected points

Not sure which study that is, but Expected Points were introduced no later than 1988, when The Hidden Game of Football was published.

I'll have to look for that one. I read You're okay it's just a bruise a long while ago and it was crazy. Author was a team doc for the early 80's Raiders with Lyle Alzado and the rest of the gang. There's some crazy stories in there like how he had to wipe a players ass because he was injured and couldn't.