Shameless self-promotion

In addition to writing this blog, I have also spent the offseason working on several longish pieces for actual, real, in print publications. (Insane I know.) All told I wrote five pieces for four publications, all put out by Maple Street Press. Maple Street specializes in "annuals" dedicated to specific sports teams, and the editors of several of those annuals were kind enough to invite me to write for them. Each annual is about 125-130 pages of dewey, well-written hardcore football goodness (compare the depth of these books to say, Athlon sports), and each of the editors are great writers as well as editors.

I thought I'd go ahead and link to the books here if anyone is interested in my articles. The tables of contents for the books have not been released yet, but as readers of this site can guess my pieces are on the coaching/technical/strategic side of things. Each are generally quite long: the Tennessee one is about 1100 words, but the others range from 3500 to over 6000. And each has plenty of diagrams.

If you decide to order them, the pre-orders ship by July 7, and they will be available on newsstands on July 21, though I think only in relevant areas, i.e. the Michigan guide will be found in the surrounding area, but likely not California.

[Note: I have no financial incentive for anyone to buy these; I do not receive royalties on their sale. But it may be good for people to buy them and tell the editors how good my pieces were if I hope to be invited to do any again, since I routinely skirted against crashed right through deadlines, much to everyone's chagrin.]

Gridiron Gators 2009 - edited by Spencer Hall/Orson Swindle of Every Day Should Be Saturday. This gets top billing because I wrote two fantastic articles for it. Check out others who wrote for the book here.

Hail to the Victors 2009 - Edited by Brian Cook of mgoblog. I did one, very strategy and scheme intense piece for this one, with lots of material that has never made it on this site.

The Eyes of Texas 2009 - Edited by Peter Bean of Burnt Orange Nation. Another long piece, this time aided by some information from Dan Gonzalez, a former UT letterman.

Rocky Top Tennessee 2009 - Edited by Joel Hollingsworth of Rocky Top Talk. My piece for this book is somewhat shorter (thanks to Matt Hinton of Dr Saturday for splitting some of his space with me so I could join in the fun), but check out the full roster, which includes the Good Doctor and Bruce Feldman of ESPN, here.

I do want to thank all the editors for their hard work and (especially) for their patience with my procrastination and various diagram formatting issues. I'm excited to see the books in final form.

Finally, I did not write anything but I did take a look at one of the pieces for Yea Alabama 2009, put on by Todd Jones of Rollbamaroll.