5 best college football books to help fill your sports void

4. The Opening Kickoff: The Tumultuous Birth of a Football Nation by Dave Revsine

Well as we move through our list we’ll no doubt pass through many layers of the great, colorful history of the game of football—and now we’ve gone from the new generation of mobile quarterbacks and recruiting, back in time to the huddled-in formations, broken bodies and hulking, rugby-like physicality of the original game.

In The Opening Kickoff: The Tumultuous Birth of a Football Nation, Dave Revsine chronicles the brilliant and glorious, but awful dark, corrupt and bloody history of America’s favorite game. A game that was described in such derogatory ways as “a social obsession,” “boy killing,” football was almost shut down at the time. To put the danger in a fair perspective—the “flying wedge” was still legal at the time.

Thankfully there was hope, and the game was rescued by its many innovators and supporters.

Revsine, who spent more than a decade as a studio anchor at ESPN and is currently the lead studio host for the Big Ten Network, breaks down this saving of the game, and the adaptation that brought it into the expansion of the first 20 years of the 1900s. He brings to real-life this story of the huge spread of American football in the late 19th and early 20th century, and details the game’s first superstars, rivalries, scandals and legends.

This book lands on our list as a fantastic read for anyone who is even remotely interested in the history of the game, and how our beloved college football came to be—with both the good and the bad.