The Why is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution by Michael Silver. W. W. Norton, 448 pages. 2024.
Innovation has come for the NFL, America’s most popular sports league. As the writer Chuck Klosterman once pointed out, football presents itself as conservative but is incredibly liberal in terms of the competition’s evolution: the introduction of the forward pass, nearly 120 years ago, remains one of the biggest rule changes to any modern sport.