Coaching Matters: Leadership and Tactics of the Nfl's Ten Greatest Coaches

Rating:
Summary: Wow, a great in-depth look at football's greatest coaches!
Review: I went into this expecting just a long opinion piece, but wow does this book rock! He's got stats, facts, and yes opinions. But it gets all put together into a great, great read on the ten best coaches (says Adler) of the NFL since the 1950s.

He doesn't just pick them out of thin air either; he takes a look at what defines success in football and comes up with a set of parameters that the coaches must all meet. There are a couple additions based on extenuating circumstances, but I think he explains that well.

A great look at football coaches, including two that are still active -- Parcells and Holmgren. Get it!

Had to add this edit -- with Joe Gibbs one of the coaches profiled, this book is GREAT to show you just how awesome a coach he is and look at back his first career as he tries to bring the Redskins back to success.

Rating:
Summary: Could Be Better
Review: What's wrong with this book:

1) The book follows a fairly formulaic pattern for each coach covered, an effective one but it also makes the book become dull, especially when trying to read more than a chapter at a time.

2) The author's cheesy asides are too infrequent and too lame to be included. He either should have tried to be more consistently humorous or just cut them all out, preferrably the latter.

3) The book lacks purpose. I wasn't looking for a grand theory of coaching or anything, but at the end it just seems like the author was saying, yeah, here's a lot of great coaches. Perhaps the author was trying to disprove critics who said that coaching doesn't matter? Perhaps he was trying to quantify how much it matters? Perhaps he was trying to argue that coaching in football matters more than in other sports? Who knows? If all the point is that coaching matters, then the reader is left saying, "Yeah I figured. So what?" There isn't a system to this book that gives it a reason for existing.

The book is however a successful anthology of the careers of great football coaches and some amusing anecdotes from their tenures. It just seems like there should have been more given all the hefty number crunching.