Faith in the Game: Lessons on Football Work And Life

What surprised me was the incredible business value of the book, especially chapter 5 on Goal Setting. His process for setting and acheiving goals is simple, easy to implement and it works!
I keep buying it and sending it to managers and business executives I work with, it is a great foundation for anyone serious about growing their ability to be more productive and to acheive more.

Great book!


Old Values and Chronic Success   August 10, 2003
Tom Osborne is one of the most successful college football coaches in history. His book is a wonderful treatise on how coaches and people can improve their lives and chances of success by simply preaching and practicing the basic values of our society. This book is a breath of fresh air in an increasingly fragmented and confused society.

It is noteworthy that Tom Osborne's success is particularly remarkable because he never had the advantages of recruiting from a deep talent pool in Nebraska, and many of his players came from high school programs where 8 man football was common. Osborne overcame these obstacles with basic hard work, religious faith, and teamwork.

This is a great book for any coach, manager, or parent. Highly recommmended. The only reason I didn't give 5 stars is because the book is relatively short, and I would've loved to read on for several more chapters.


Okay, so the style isn't Nabokov. But it's sound stuff.   December 5, 2002
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

The premise of Faith In the Game is simple: It's a conservative primer for life.

Now, whether you agree with everything within or not is your call, but Osborne successfully states his cases while interweaving stories of his own football team over the years. His transition from society to football is pretty effortless, quite frankly, and the book serves as a nice, non-confrontational entry into conservative living and philosophy. For all those people out there who are fed up with the liberal world -- and I am not one of them, mind you -- I'd suggest this book a thousand times over before I'd let them within 20 miles of Ann Coulter's rants.

Unlike Coulter and other conservative zealots, Osborne starts at the ground level of living -- for the coach, it's character -- and builds from there. In other words, the book is more a plan than an argument. And plans are generally quite a bit more persuasive.

Osborne always worked in the here and now, so this is not much of a grand memoir. He's still into trying to turn it all around. Frankly, I think some of these societal problems are beyond his grasp -- Osborne is too kind and sympathetic to consider our society as anything more than a collection of misguided folks, it seems -- but you won't find a lot of sports coaches who have actually considered these issues the way Osborne has.

Faith in the Game is the work of a thoughtful man.


Good, solid story of how Nebraska does it right   October 10, 2001
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This is a neat book. It is fascinating, it has scores of information about how the Huskers built their program, and it is written in exactly the right amount of detail, including the technical details.

If you are a coach in any sport, if you are a Husker fan, or if you are a Tom Osborne fan, this book is a good read. It is also an excellent gift. It is one of the five best sports books I have read in the last few years. You can't miss with Faith in the Game.