NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime: Sport and Society

Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 58 mins)
• By Michael Holley
• Narrated By Dan Woren
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Featuring interviews from Patriots players and coaches, Holley presents a fascinating portrait of the partnership between Tom Brady, the Patriots' star quarterback, and Bill Belichick, the team's prolific coach. Chock-full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and information exploring how they have strategized and weathered controversies, all culminating in four Super Bowl rings, this is required listening for any Patriots fan and students of the game of football.

The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless 70s - The Era that Created Modern Sports

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 57 mins)
• By Kevin Cook
• Narrated By Bob Dunsworth
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The inside story of the most colorful decade in NFL history - pro football's raging, hormonal, hairy, druggy, immortal adolescence. Between the Immaculate Reception in 1972 and The Catch in 1982, pro football grew up. In 1972, Steelers star Franco Harris hitchhiked to practice. NFL teams roomed in skanky motels. They played on guts, painkillers, legal steroids, fury, and camaraderie. A decade later, Joe Montana's gleamingly efficient 49ers ushered in a new era: the corporate, scripted, multibillion-dollar NFL we watch today.

Blood, Sweat and Chalk: Inside Football's Playbook: How the Great Coaches Built Today's Game

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Tim Layden
• Narrated By Dennis Holland
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The modern game of football is filled with plays and formations with names like the Counter Trey, the Wildcat, the Zone Blitz, and the Cover Two. They have become part of the sport's vernacular, and yet for many fans they remain just names, often confusing ones. To rectify that, Tim Layden has drilled deep into the core of the game to reveal how these chalkboard X's and O's really work on the field, as well as where they came from and who dreamed them up.

Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 37 mins)
• By Jeff Pearlman
• Narrated By Barry Abrams
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Gunslinger tells Brett Favre's full, definitive story for the first time, drawing on more than 500 interviews, including many from the people closest to Favre. Jeff Pearlman charts Favre's journey, from his rough rural childhood and lackluster high school football career to landing the last roster spot at Southern Mississippi to a late-night car accident that nearly took his life. Favre clawed back, getting drafted into the NFL, first to Atlanta, then to Green Bay, where he restored the Packers to greatness and inspired a fan base as passionate as any in the game.

The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 52 mins)
• By Tom Verducci
• Narrated By Tom Verducci
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

With inside access and reporting, Sports Illustrated senior baseball writer and FOX Sports analyst Tom Verducci reveals how Theo Epstein and Joe Maddon built, led, and inspired the Chicago Cubs team that broke the longest championship drought in sports, chronicling their epic journey to become World Series champions.

NFL Confidential: True Confessions from the Gutter of Football

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 7 mins)
• By Johnny Anonymous
• Narrated By Jeffrey Kafer
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

A current pro player takes fans on a pseudonymous trip through one of the most infamous years of football - the very long, sometimes funny, often controversial 2013-2014 season - sharing raucous, behind-the-scenes, on-the-field, and in-the-locker-room truth about life in the National Football League.

The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 12 mins)
• By Jeff Benedict, Armen Keteyian
• Narrated By Mark Deakins
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

College football has never been more popular - or more chaotic. Millions fill 100,000-seat stadiums every Saturday; tens of millions more watch on television every weekend. The 2013 Discover BCS National Championship game between Notre Dame and Alabama had a viewership of 26.4 million people, second only to the Super Bowl. Billions of dollars from television deals now flow into the game; the average budget for a top-ten team is $80 million; top coaches make more than $3 million a year; the highest paid, more than $5 million.

The Mannings: The Fall and Rise of a Football Family

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 48 mins)
• By Lars Anderson
• Narrated By Ian Alan Carlsen
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

From New York Times best-selling author Lars Anderson comes a revealing portrait of the first family of American sports. What the Kennedys are to politics, the Mannings are to football. Two generations have produced three NFL superstars: Archie Manning, the Ole Miss hero-turned-New Orleans Saint; his son Peyton, widely considered one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game; and Peyton's younger brother, Eli, who won two Super Bowl rings of his own.

Football 101

• UNABRIDGED (2 hrs and 24 mins)
• By Gilbert Klein
• Narrated By Jack Hicks
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

This is an entertaining, informative beginner's guide to understanding football. Also, I guarantee* that this is the most enjoyable introductory audiobook ever about football, and that after listening to this audiobook you will know and love the game.

NFL Brawler: A Player-turned-Agent's 40 Years in the Bloody Trenches of the National Football League

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Ralph Cindrich
• Narrated By R. C. Bray

NFL Brawler is a raucous first-person account of an NFL under siege by the game's first player turned agent, Ralph Cindrich, the original "Blind Side" agent. This entertaining pro football memoir takes listeners behind the scenes of the game's most important and outrageous drafts, deals, and trades; takes on NFL scandals by telling it like it is; and takes listeners closer to the real action of the sport - from locker rooms to boardrooms and into the worlds of agents and players - than any book to date.

From Darkness to Dynasty: The First 40 Years of the New England Patriots

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 36 mins)
• By Jerry Thornton
• Narrated By Chris Andrew Ciulla
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

From Darkness to Dynasty tells the unlikely history of the New England Patriots as it has never been told before. From their humble beginnings as a team bought with rainy-day money by a man who had no idea what he was doing, to the fateful season that saw them win their first Super Bowl, Jerry Thornton shares the wild, humiliating, unbelievable, and wonderful stories that comprised the first 40 years of what would ultimately become the most dominant franchise in NFL history.

50 Years, 50 Moments Unabridged - The Most Unforgettable Plays in Super Bowl History

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 7 mins)
• By Jerry Rice, Randy Williams
• Narrated By Mirron Willis
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of America's most beloved sporting event - the Super Bowl - an authoritative collection of the most pivotal plays through the decades, compiled by the legendary Jerry Rice.

Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 46 mins)
• By Rich Cohen
• Narrated By Tom Taylorson
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the 1985 Chicago Bears were more than a football team: they were the greatest football team ever - a gang of colorful nuts, dancing and pounding their way to victory. They won a Super Bowl and saved a city. It was not just that the Monsters of the Midway won but how they did it....

The First Star: Red Grange and the Barnstorming Tour That Launched the NFL

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 33 mins)
• By Lars Anderson
• Narrated By Petros Papadakis

In The First Star, acclaimed sports writer Lars Anderson recounts the thrilling story of Harold "Red" Grange, the Galloping Ghost of the gridiron, and the wild barnstorming tour that earned professional football a place in the American sporting firmament.

Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Nicholas Dawidoff
• Narrated By David DeVries
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

We watch football every Sunday, but we don't really see it. By spending a year with the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff explored the game in such an intimate way that he can now put you right inside the NFL. Collision Low Crossers is a story that is part Paper Lion and part Moneyball, part Friday Night Lights and part The Office.

TV (the Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 33 mins)
• By Alan Sepinwall, Matt Zoller Seitz
• Narrated By Alan Sepinwall, Matt Zoller Seitz
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

What's the greatest TV show ever? That debate reaches an epic conclusion in TV (the Book). Sepinwall and Seitz have identified and ranked the 100 greatest scripted shows in American TV history. Using a complex, obsessively all-encompassing scoring system, they've created a pantheon of top TV shows, each accompanied by essays delving into what made these shows great.

Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant

• UNABRIDGED (22 hrs and 2 mins)
• By Roland Lazenby
• Narrated By Ron Butler

Seventeen-time all-star; scorer of 81 points in a game; MVP; and a shooting guard second only to Jordan in league history: Kobe Bryant is one of basketball's absolute greatest players, a fascinating and complicated character who knew when he was a mere boy that he would be better than Jordan on the court. The debate about whether he achieved that is a furious one - but Kobe has surpassed Jordan on the all-time scoring list and has only one less championship than Jordan (five to Jordan's six).

The Foundations of Western Civilization

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 54 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Thomas F. X. Noble

What is Western Civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.

The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 51 mins)
• By Jeff Silverman
• Narrated By Mike Chamberlain, Hillary Huber

At a 1931 barnstorming exhibition game in Tennessee, a 17-year-old pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back to back. Her name was Jackie Mitchell - "organized baseball's first girl pitcher." In July 1970, a stripper rushed onto the field at Riverfront Stadium to kiss Johnny Bench, temporarily disrupting a game attended by President Nixon and his family. These are just some of the great, quirky, and comic moments in the annals of baseball recorded in The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told.

Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 53 mins)
• By Jeff Pearlman
• Narrated By Malcolm Hillgartner
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

At five feet ten inches tall, running back Walter Payton was not the largest player in the NFL, but he developed a larger-than-life reputation for his strength, speed, and grit. Nicknamed “Sweetness” during his college football days, he became the NFL’s all-time leader in rushing and all-purpose yards, capturing the hearts of fans in his adopted Chicago.

League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 46 mins)
• By Mark Fainaru-Wada, Steve Fainaru
• Narrated By David H. Lawrence XVII
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America's most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: A chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players - including some of the all-time greats - to madness.

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific

• UNABRIDGED (23 hrs and 37 mins)
• By David Bianculli
• Narrated By David Bianculli
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Darwin had his theory of evolution, and David Bianculli has his. Bianculli's theory has to do with the concept of quality television: what it is and, crucially, how it got that way. In tracing the evolutionary history of our progress toward a Platinum Age of Television - our age, the era of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and Mad Men and The Wire and Homeland and Girls - he focuses on the development of the classic TV genres.

The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Chris Whipple
• Narrated By Mark Bramhall
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

What do Dick Cheney and Rahm Emanuel have in common? Aside from polarizing personalities, both served as chief of staff to the president of the United States - as did Donald Rumsfeld, Leon Panetta, and a relative handful of others. The chiefs of staff, often referred to as "the gatekeepers", wield tremendous power in Washington and beyond; they decide who is allowed to see the president, negotiate with Congress to push POTUS' agenda, and - most crucially - are the first in line to the leader of the free world's ear.

The Breaks of the Game

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 31 mins)
• By David Halberstam
• Narrated By Brian Troxell
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The tactile authenticity of Halberstam's knowledge of the basketball world is unrivaled. Yet he is writing here about far more than just basketball. This is a story about a place in our society where power, money, and talent collide and sometimes corrupt, a place where both national obsessions and naked greed are exposed.