NCAA Books

I just finished reading the book, "Basketball's Biggest Upset" by Ray Sanchez and I was extremely impressed with the detailed account of how the 1966 Texas Western College Miners really won the NCAA basketball championship.
This is the only account I've read that gives not only the background of each player but a game by game history of that miraculous season that, as the book says, changed the sport forever. It was so unlike the movie, Glory Road, which was more fiction than fact in many places.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and will treasure it forever as the true and wonderful story of the 1966 Miners. I still get chills thinking about it. I give it five stars.

Twelve young men arrived at Texas Western College in 1966, never dreaming that someday they would pull the biggest upset in the history of college basketball and change the sport forever. Texas Western College became known as University of Texas at El Paso in 1967

The author of this book obviously knows this subject very well,being that he was a reporter for the El Paso newspaper during the time of the historic NCAA championship game. Mr. Sanchez's writing style does not make for an exciting read. This book is very dry and sticks to dull statistics. It basically is a game by game telling of the season. I knew a little about the Texas Western- Kentucky game before the reading this book, unfortunately I know very little more after reading this book.

This book is not nearly as good as the book "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" by Frank Fitzpatrick, about the same subject. Ray Sanchez should stick to newspaper articles. He does not do a good job of developing characters or themes, and did not do enough research. There is no bibliography, and most of the book sounds like fan-speak. On the other hand, I am a fan so it is in my library. There are several typos in the book which detracts from it and makes it hard to take seriously. Ray Sanchez was not the reporter who covered the Miners in 1966, but was working for the paper that year and remembers the events personally. This perspective is critical to an understanding of the 1966 Miners, and is why I give the book 3 stars instead of the 2 stars it deserves based on literary merit.

Don't touch this book with an 8 foot poll!!! This book is sadder than a funeral!! What dumb author wasted his time on this!!!

As a person who enjoys basketball stats, I found this one to be one of the best books out there. All three Divisions are covered and almost all possible stats are listed by timeframe, school, etc... I just wish the ACC had a similiar book.

The only noticable fault is that this book lists consensus All-Americans instead of listed how each specific organization voted. I would have liked to have seen an even more indepth view of the voting by the AP, UPI, etc... Furthermore, they do not list 3rd Team All-America for some odd reason.

Finally, this book does NOT go into Conference (ACC, SEC, etc...) records, just NCAA records.

Overall, A GREAT book that I highly recommend!

-DBD

This book was slanted to create confusion. The truth behind this incident was never fully disclosed to the public. Yes, Mr. Tarkanian is a great coach, but the picture that prompted the entire deal was never about him. The reason why the picture appeared in the public is a greater story than you could ever imagine, and no one thought of asking the right questions. Mr.Yaeger missed many of the facts with his own interpretation of reality, but that's what a scandel is all about? Some day the true story will be told!

I enjoyed this book, mainly because I am a fan of Jerry Tarkanian. I would read this again because I found it enjoyable. I did not live in Vegas while Tark was there, so I can't verify if it's truthful or not, but it is a good read.

This is one of the best ways to get your rules from a reliable source. Many others offer the rules but not entirely, which can be confusing as well as anoying. The NCAA wrote the rules, and so there is no better source than this.

First, let me clarify my passion for college football: I visit the websites of other teams just to learn their gameday traditions, I follow the stories and histories that make every Saturday game a 'big game,' -heck, I play college video games to "virtually" visit the 117 stadiums that are out there. So when I bought a book calling itself "An Illustrated Guide" to college stadiums, I expect to read a little more than technical data and some very mediocre B&W photos. This book seems slapped together with information that any halfway intellegent fan could look up on the internet (with color photos no less). Adding an extra layer of insult, the book, although published in 2000, still has stadium pictures that are more than several years out of date (i.e. stadiums built pre-1998 are still shown in their "model" phase).

College Football Fan and Fanatics: Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste your money on this book. Just look up the info on a search engine, you'll get way more information in a much nicer package (or you could buy the latest college football video game and see them all in virtual form). Anyway would be better than this book.

First, let me clarify my passion for college football: I visit the websites of other teams just to learn their gameday traditions, I follow the stories and histories that make every Saturday game a 'big game,' -heck, I play college video games to "virtually" visit the 117 stadiums that are out there. So when I bought a book calling itself "An Illustrated Guide" to college stadiums, I expect to read a little more than technical data and some very mediocre B&W photos. This book seems slapped together with information that any halfway intellegent fan could look up on the internet (with color photos no less). Adding an extra layer of insult, the book, although published in 2000, still has stadium pictures that are more than several years out of date (i.e. stadiums built pre-1998 are still shown in their "model" phase).

College Football Fan and Fanatics: Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste your money on this book. Just look up the info on a search engine, you'll get way more information in a much nicer package (or you could buy the latest college football video game and see them all in virtual form). Anyway would be better than this book.

This book is an information packed encyclopedia for anyone who is interested in architecture and stadiums, or for anyone who just likes college football. 110 stadiums in lively colorful pictures and surrounded with facts such as capacity, dates, the team, the mascot, information about stadium renovations, and little unique facts that people don't ususlly realize. A great book. Extremely detailed. You can sit and just marvel at the pictures for hours. This is a book not to pass by. There are not many about college stadiums, and this one is the best you will find.

Another review for this book contends that you can "marvel at the pictures for hours." Absolutely correct. You can marvel at how poor the picture quality is. You can marvel at the terrible grade of paper used. Mostly, you can marvel at the fact that someone actually deemed this worth publishing.

If you have any understanding of football then this book is of little to no value for you. It has alot of general information, but the NCAA101 on the game is alot more informative on how to do actual plays.

One of the best things about the book was it mentioning to do the NCAA 101. Unfortunately, you cannot do that in the game! Having the information available about the schools (over half of the book) and their favorite plays was helpful. So was the descriptions of the plays. However, the play images did not include player movement, which is crucial -- there is no excuse to "save space" for such crucial information -- one of the big reasons for such books is to be able to carry it and not have to have the game in front of you. The instructions and strategy are good, but not great. Helpful but disappointing.

While the game NFL2K5 is pretty good, the accompanying guide (and the guide for the NCAA game) are remarkable for being so utterly worthless. The author(s) seems to have watched a couple of sports centers and then writes for each team that so and so is good, and so you should use play using these players. The actual plays themselves and the mechanics of the games are hardly dealt with.--Guys, how about, like, telling us what a cover two rotating zone is and why this is useful against certain offenses? Nah, you'd have to do more than skim ESPN sports center.

--Buy the game, but under no circumstance waste your money on these "guides".

This strategy guide was just OK. It wasnt what i was looking for becasue it just gave general advice like 'try to recruit players that are interested in your school instead of those that arent'. It gave me a couple new ideas, but overall it was less than i expected.

This book is interesting and we're glad to have it. However, we sincerely hope there will be another book to come (3peat, anyone?!) but that it will be heavily edited for grammar and tense. It's distracting to find so many glaring grammatical errors when we're trying to read about the beloved Mountaineers.

This product is severely dissapointing on several levels. First off, the item is home published off of a laser printer with an adhesive spine binding.

More problematic is the nature of the questions. Designed as four-choice multiple choice, they often times contain answer choices that are so bogus that they lack any point in including them at all. Its as if the authors couldn't come up with four legitimate options. Additionally, the questions themselves are often so subjective as to suggest multiple correct answers, such as the one about "Nebraska's greatest coach" (it could be the winningest coach in Bob Devaney or the one who won multiple national championships in Tom Osborne). Finally, the "fourth quarter" section, admittedly intended to be the most difficult, is made up of little more than obscure records that hardly qualify as trivia.

This product is of little use after you've read the questions. The authors claim you can keep playing it until you get all the questions correct, but then it becomes little more than an exercise to remember what you forgot the last time. In the end, this is little more than a list of oftentimes poorly worded, sometimes incorrect questions produced on a home computer.

Beware that this isn't an actual hardback book. I thought it would be a fun gift for the jayhawks lover in my family, but it looks so cheap, like I printed off of my own computer and slapped some binding tape on the side. I am embarrassed to give it away.