John Feinstein

An up-close look inside an NFL powerhouse, from the onlywriter in America who players and coaches would trust with theirsecrets.

A Year Behind the Lines in Today's NFL

Next Man Up

Dave | Storyphoria

At the end of the day it’s a fun trip down memory lane for football fans sure to stoke the fires of nostalgia as you read. And while it is incredibly well written and researched, ultimately I found myself feeling fairly bored pretty early on and it quickly turned into a slog to get through it.

I can appreciate and respect the amount of access Feinstein had as he researched this project, it would have been truly amazing to read in say… 2008 or so. But right now it falls into that dead zone where it’s a great historical look at the Baltimore Ravens season, it’s also not QUITE far enough back to feel truly historical.

I’d recommend this book for any super fans of the Baltimore Ravens or hardcore fans of the NFL. It’s very well written and a great look behind the scenes at the sport you know and love, plus the level of access he had is still truly impressive. Just beware that it reads like the longest edition of a Sports Illustrated Monday Morning Quarterback article that you’ve ever read and as such is probably best taken in small chunks… perhaps read it over the course of an entire NFL season?

Mat Connor

In the NFL there is only one certainty: that every day, someone will have to be the Next Man Up. Football is an unrelentingly punishing sport, played and practiced at undiminished intensity, and it devours its players. Confronting injuries, trades, and the grim reality of competition, every NFL team prepares constantly for the likelihood -- the certainty -- that even franchise players can go down at any time. And someone new must be ready, trained, and primed to step in at the highest level. Bestselling sportswriter John Feinstein persuaded one NFL team to lift the extraordinary secrecy that shrouds the sport and let him see how a team operates at the closest level. One team let him join every practice, every coaches' meeting, every players' gathering, every strategy debate. From the give-and-take of draft day, into the grinder of summer training camps, and from 100-degree practice games to the last game in frigid conditions, Feinstein reveals how a football team works -- or fails to work -- as no writer has done before. Next Man Up unveils rituals (what a coach tells a player at the moment he cuts him); rules (the inanities of league-appointed "uniform Nazis"); conflicts (the scouts vs. the coaches, the general managers vs. the agents, the offense vs. the defense, the special teams coaches vs. everybody); money (how much a journeyman makes, and how his life differs from the multi-million-dollar-a-year star players)-every nuance of a team's life, from the owner's goals to the coach's day-to-day travails to the feeling of the sleet-soaked ball in the hands of a receiver on artificial turf. The access John Feinstein enjoyed allows him to discuss with equal understanding the owner's management strategy, the coaches' and coordinators' plans for each new game, and how it all affects the players themselves. Anyone who loves football -- any team, in any era -- will savor the thousands of details revealed here for the first time, and the extraordinary drama that goes into following week after week, the most sensational sport in America.

Next Man Up A Year Behind the Lines in Today's NFL

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