Patriot League Books

This bag is great. I got it for my hubby for christmas. Every one who saw it under our tree loved it and asked where I got it. Highly recommend! Also highly recommend amazon!! This is the best site to buy from, super saver shipping was such a big help, and they ship fast. Amazon prices are lower then walmart on some items I purchased.

This is a very nice large gift bag. It is sturdy, colorful and nicely detailed with team logo and name. It was a great b-day bag for my husbands gifts.

Notice that the cover of this look at the "AFC East" for the Inside the NFL Series has Travis Henry, still a running back for the Buffalo Bills when this photograph was taken, being tackled by linebacker Tedy Bruschi of the New England Patriots. Bruschi is not in uniform this season, having suffered a mild stroke after the Patriots won their third Super Bowl in four years. The irony that neither player is playing for these teams this year is not what makes the cover appropriate, but that these are the two northern most teams in the division. The only thing that would make the picture more appropriate would be if Bruschi was tackling Henry in the snow up in Buffalo with each team wearing red, white and blue. The New York Jets know what it is like to play in the snow, but the Miami Dolphins have to wonder what they are doing in this cold weather division. In this introduction to the four teams of the AFC East, Bob Woods helps to explain why the Dolphins belong but the Baltimore Ravens do not (although the explanation may well be less than satisfactory).

The story of the AFC East begins more with the AFL than the NFL, since three of the teams were original members of the AFL (guess which one was not). Woods overviews the division as providing some memorable first in pro football history: the Jets were the first AFL team to win the Super Bowl, the Patriots were the first team to win the Super Bowl on the final play, and the Bills had the first 2,000 yard rusher. The Dolphins? They are the first and only team to have a "perfect" record. This sense of history is what important in these books, because the assumption is that young fans know about Tom Brady and Chad Pennington, but they might not know the legacies of Joe Namath, Bob Griese, and Jack Kemp. The team histories are also more important because Travis Henry is not the only "current" player who is shown in the uniform of what is now his former team (although, as in the case of Ricky Williams and Vinny Testaverde, sometimes they actually come back).

Because these teams "only" go back to the old AFL, Woods does not have to go way back in the history of professional football, just to the days of "Cookie" Gilchrist, Babe Parilli, and Gino Gappelletti. Hopefully young fans will enjoy reading about the great players and teams of the past, and fans of the Buffalo Bills will learn about the back-to-back AFL titles they won in 1964-65 and not just the four consecutive Super Bowls they lost in the 1990s. More knowledgeable fans will find it ironic that besides Don Shula the only member of the undefeated Dolphins who gets his picture in the book is not Griese or Larry Csonka but Mercury Morris. But there are still plenty of familiar names from Jim Kelly and Dan Marino to Curtis Martin and Tom Brady.

The back of the book contains several pages of Stat Stuff, where you can see the relatively similar Team Records (the four teams have won 288 to 399 wins). There is a list of the Members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and AFC East Career Leaders (through 2002) for each team, where names from the past like Steve Grogan, Gary Yepremian, and Don Maynard are listed. There is also a Glossary of terms from "Achilles tendon" to "wild card," a Time Line from the AFL being formed in 1960 with the Bills, Titans, and Patriots to New England winning Super Bowl XXXVI in 2001, and a list of books and web sites where young fans can go For More Information about the AFC East and the NFL, with the emphasis on the latter (so if you want to find a book about the history of one of these teams, unless you are a Dolphins fan you have to keep looking). Still, this series does provide a solid starting point for young football fans to learn about the history of the game through the stories of these teams.

I really enjoyed "The Last Amateurs." I've been a sports fan since grade school and as I write this, I'm closer to 50 than I'd care to be, so it's been a while. The past several years, I've tended to seek books about sports at the more grass-roots level because the games are (usually) purer than where all the money can be found. This is such a book.

If you're a fan of quick and snappy books about major league sports, stay away from this one. It is not a fast read, and there's not a protagonist in it who played in the NBA (okay, maybe Adonal Foyle or David Robinson, but they're abstract figures). That's the point. The Patriot League is all about colleges who expect their athletes to attend class and graduate, and these are good SCHOOLS just below Ivy League status.

I've seen a number of reviewers downgrade "The Last Amateurs" because he spends so much time on so many people. Well, YEAH...who is this book about? As tired as I've become of NBA players with college backgrounds who somehow made it through up to five years of classes without being able to string a coherent sentence together with any sense of intellect, it's kind of nice to get to know D1 players who can actually tell you who the president and is and would likely be able to find Iraq on a map if you asked. When I think of college athletes, these guys are closer to what I'd like to see than the imposters we too often get who would never set foot on a college campus if they couldn't play sports.

If you're a skeptic like me who doesn't buy into the notion that the Final Four is the pinnacle of college basketball, you'll enjoy this one. If you're still held in the thrall of major college sports programs and could care less about schools outside the big conferences like the ACC or Big 10, you SHOULD read it because you've been missing something.

I moved to Indiana roughly 18 months ago, and thus, re-read this book that I had first read a few years back. It was better and more telling the second time, obviously. It's nice to see kids who play for love of the game. You can see that here in the Hoosier State at any Butler University or high school game. I enjoy those tilts/atmospheres far more that IU, Purdue or the NBA's Pacers.

Feinstein has particularly good insight herein, thanks to his fastidious documentation and "all access" passes to the seasons of these teams. I actually follow the Patriot League more now because of this book.
John Feinstein writes a new book each year, and some are better than others. This was perhaps his best.

Remember Feinstein's book when you watch Carolina and Duke and think that's what college hoops is about.

I bought this book since I went to Lehigh and thought it would be extra interesting because of my background and because I played soccer and ice hockey at college. What a let-down!
I found the game by game annayasis drawn out and boring. About the only thing I can recommend to you from the book is the "amaterism" ( if there is such a word) of college sports at Lehigh and the great majority of other colleges in the US that we do not read or hear about on a daily basis.

I see you can purchase a used copy on Amazon for $0.99 - so what the hell - for a buck it's worth it I guess.

I agree with other reviewers who said that Feinstein would've been better off following one team instead of all of them. This could also chop the length down to a more reasonable amount. There's just too much going on to remember everything. I didn't even finish the book because it just took too long to get to the end and it didn't seem like the end would ever come. Feinstein could've told this story in about 250 pages instead of almost twice that. Not terrible, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get it.

I generally enjoy Feinstein's writings and his commentary. 'The Last Amateurs' is Feinstein's best work. Following his standard procedure, Feinstein gets inside access to the teams of the Patriot League, an east coast league of mostly small private colleges. At the time the schools did not offer athletic scholarships. The players played because they wanted to keep playing competitive hoops and they were all required to be real students.

These games are played in small arenas far way from the glare of the big time spotlight. Nonetheless, these players and coaches passionately want to win. The big dream is to make the NCAA post-season tournament. The conference torunament championship that determines which team goes to the the Big Dance is one of the great sporting events on the modern scene.

With very few exceptions, none of these players have the slightest chance of making the NBA. For the coaches, things are a little different because coaching college hoops is their career and they are looking to move up.

Feinstein does a great job of taking the reader behind the scenes. In a way, these players and games are the ideal of amateur competition that has a deep emotional resonance for many fans - and therein lies a danger that too much exposure will ruin the very thing that makes the league attractive.

Highly recommended for college sports fans.

This is a nice quality bag. It is smaller than I expected, but that is my fault for not reading the dimensions.