A Texas sports legend, Dave Campbell started his annual fall football preview magazine, Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, in 1960. Widely referred to as “the bible” by coaches, fans, and sportswriters, the magazine’s July arrival in supermarkets, convenience stores, and sporting goods suppliers across Texas is a yearly event eagerly awaited by thousands of high school and college football players and their families, friends, and fans. In Dave Campbell’s Favorite Texas College Football Stories, Campbell has gathered columns and articles about those college contests he considers the all-time greatest over the course of his career, from 1953 and continuing through 2016. Accounts of storied players, classic rivalries, revered coaches, and unforgettable games are illustrated with historic photographs of athletes, teams, and on-the-field action. Readers will relish this guided tour of Texas collegiate football history, presented by a writer who is a walking trove of Lone Star sports lore. Dave Campbell’s Favorite Texas College Football Stories, which also features full-color reproductions of more than five decades of magazine covers, is sure to become a collector’s item for Texas football fans of all ages. Seasoned enthusiasts will delight in reliving their favorite pigskin memories, and younger readers will enjoy experiencing this press-box view of the state’s gridiron greats.

Texas is a diverse state. But the one thing that binds Texans more than their state pride, even more than religion, is football. For the many towns and cities of Texas, high school football is more than a sport or an extracurricular activity—it’s the glue of their community. Author Gray Levy, a high school football coach for more than two decades, became disillusioned with the state of the education system nationwide and traveled to Texas, a place where high school football still matters, to see just what schools and communities were doing right. What he found will both confirm and debunk common presumptions about high school football in Texas, a complex phenomenon that varies by region, school size, and the ethnic diversity of the Lone Star State.

Winning the state championship in football-crazed Texas is the holy grail for high school coaches. Newton, Texas, is a sleepy little town nestled in the piney woods of southeastern Texas where the residents live for what they lovingly call "Friday night church." In December 2018 a video of the Newton Eagle coach went viral on sports and non-sports platforms as millions of people watched. In his emotional postgame interview, W.T. Johnston recounted how he had been given only a few months to live. But during his long coaching career, every one of his teams heard the same message. "I told them I was going to teach them football, but I was going to teach them something more important. How to live until you die." This is the story of a remarkable coach and the miracle that allowed him to pursue championship dreams. Between the White Lines is a story of courage, faith, and community that will inspire and challenge you.

Anywhere football is played, Texas is the force to reckon with. Its powerhouse programs produce the best football players in America. In The Republic of Football, Chad S. Conine vividly captures Texas’s impact on the game with action-filled stories about legendary high school players, coaches, and teams from around the state and across seven decades. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Conine offers rare glimpses of the early days of some of football’s biggest stars. He reveals that some players took time to achieve greatness—LaDainian Tomlinson wasn’t even the featured running back on his high school team until a breakthrough game in his senior season vaulted him to the highest level of the sport—while others, like Colt McCoy, showed their first flashes of brilliance in middle school. In telling these and many other stories of players and coaches, including Hayden Fry, Spike Dykes, Bob McQueen, Lovie Smith, Art Briles, Lawrence Elkins, Warren McVea, Ray Rhodes, Dat Nguyen, Zach Thomas, Drew Brees, and Adrian Peterson, Conine spotlights the decisive moments when players caught fire and teams such as Celina, Southlake Carroll, and Converse Judson turned into Texas dynasties. Packed with never-before-told anecdotes, as well as fresh takes on the games everyone remembers, The Republic of Football is a must-read for all fans of Friday night lights.

Across America in the wake of World War I, college football entered a time of prominence, often referred to as a “Golden Era.” This same period saw the origins of many beloved traditions of Texas A&M: cadets became known as “Aggies;” the “Aggie War Hymn” penned by J. V. “Pinky” Wilson ’21 was officially adopted; maroon and white emerged as the sanctioned college colors. And in 1922, a lanky Dallas athlete named E. King Gill stepped up and agreed to be the “12th Man” at a football game that may have been the greatest ever played. Today, the 12th Man tradition is one of the most cherished parts of A&M heritage. The 1922 Dixie Classic, precursor to today’s Cotton Bowl, featured a contest between two championship coaches with strong ties to Texas A&M: D. X. Bible, who led the Aggies from 1916 to 1928, and Centre College’s “Uncle Charlie” Moran, who coached at A&M from 1909 to 1914. Historian John A. Adams Jr. ’73 uncovers enthralling details: the pregame conversation between Bible and E. King Gill that helped place Gill in uniform on the sidelines, the wedding celebration involving the Centre College team at the historic Adolphus Hotel the morning before the game, the diagram of the play the Aggies used to score the game-winning touchdown, and so much more. Sports fans and historians, especially those interested in the early days of American football, will savor the rich, previously unknown details surrounding this storied contest between two renowned coaches and their steadfast squads.

Coach Emory Bellard spent a remarkable 43-year football coaching career at both the high school and college level, where he helped teams win 12 district championships, five regional titles, and three state championships in 21 seasons as a high school coach in Texas. He also won five Southwest Conference crowns and two national titles during his collegiate career as an assistant coach at the University of Texas and as a head coach at Texas A&M and Mississippi State. Bellard collaborated with veteran sports writer Al Pickett, to tell the remarkable story of his career for the first time, including how he invented the wishbone offense when he was an assistant to Darrell Royal at Texas and why he resigned in the middle of the season as head coach at Texas A&M. Coach Emory Bellard spent a remarkable 43-year football coaching career at both the high school and college level, where he helped teams win 12 district championships, five regional titles and three state championships in 21 seasons as a high school coach in at Ingleside, Breckenridge, San Angelo and Spring Westfield in Texas. He also won five Southwest Conference crowns and two national titles during his collegiate career as an assistant coach at the University of Texas and head coach at Texas A&M and Mississippi State. It was during his stint at Texas in 1968 that he invented the wishbone, an offense that revolutionized college football and produced seven national championships between 1969 and 1979. Al Pickett, a veteran Texas sports writer and sportscaster is the author of two other books, "Team of the Century," which chronicles the seven years that Chuck Moser spent as the head football coach at Abilene High, and "The Greatest Texas Sports Stories You've Never Heard." He is the host of "Let's Talk Sports with Al Pickett," on ESPN 1560 Radio in Abilene, Texas, and the play-by-play voice for Abilene High and Hardin-Simmons University athletics. He is also a regular contributor to "Dave Campbell's Texas Football" magazine and "Red Raider Sports," magazine. He was named the recipient of the Outstanding Media Service Award from the American Southwest Conference in 2004. Pickett is chairman of the Big Country Sports Hall of Fame in Abilene and also serves on the selection committee for the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco.

In 1954, a wide-eyed youngster named Gareld Rollins arrived on the campus of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas as a freshman, slated to work as a student manager for the football team. The head coach, who had just arrived at A&M the previous February, was Paul “Bear” Bryant, who was already in the process of becoming a sports legend. Bryant had brought with him Charles “Smokey” Harper as head athletic trainer, who not only taped ankles and administered first aid to injured players but was also Bryant’s most trusted advisor on the topic of his players’ ability, potential, and, above all, their grit. In Return to Junction: Smokey and the Bear and Other Aggie Football Stories, Rollins tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the Bryant era in Texas A&M football, a time that began amid “the goat-head stickers and dust” of a practice field in Junction, Texas, and ended with the shocking news that Bryant intended to “go home to Mama,” taking the head coaching job at the University of Alabama. In fact, as Rollins relates, he had the job—as both a trusted athletic trainer and the student editor of the Texas A&M campus newspaper, the Battalion—of secretly helping Coach Bryant draft the news release that would officially announce his departure from A&M. Featuring interviews and recollections from many of those who lived that time along with him, Rollins gives readers a firsthand view of what has come to be seen as a golden time in Texas A&M football.