September 2006 Cover Courtesy: St. Martin's Press Inside The Missing Ring • Dick Friedman's review | Read an excerpt | Buy it Hot Off The Press Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World By Joshua Prager ($18.96). A look at the unforgettable 1951 pennant race. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game By Michael Lewis ($17.46). The Moneyball author explores the changing nature of professional football. No Excuses: One Man's Incredible Rise Through the NFL to Head Coach of Notre Dame By Charlie Weis, Vic Carucci ($18.16). The man who leads the most storied team in college football explains how he got to that position. Lute!: The Seasons of My Life By Lute Olson, David Fisher, John Wooden (Introduction) ($19.96). The Arizona Wildcats coach tells his story, which includes teaching basketball for the past 50 years of his life. Awesome Bill from Dawsonville By Bill Elliott, Chris Millard ($19.96). The legendary NASCAR driver details his shocking story of becoming Winston Cup Champion. Five Under $5 Think words are cheap? These books won't break your bank (prices from amazon.com): • Go For the Goal: A Champion's Guide To Winning In Soccer And Life By Mia Hamm, Aaron Heifetz ($4.99). Mia Hamm tells her story and gives advice on how to excel at soccer. • The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream By Jim Collins ($4.99). The author chronicles the Chatham A's of the Cape Cod League during the 2002 season. • The Game of Their Lives: The Untold Story of the World Cup's Biggest Upset By Geoffrey Douglas ($4.99). An inside look at the 1950 U.S. win against the British. • October Men: Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees' Miraculous Finish in 1978 By Roger Kahn ($4.99). All the dirt from the Yankees memorable 1978 season. • First Off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers, and Cheaters From Taft To Bush By Don Van Natta Jr. ($4.99). The author shares the inside scoop on presidential golfer -- good and bad.

By Dick Friedman, SI.com

In the last few years we've seen several entertaining books about intriguing college football teams or programs. Among them are two classics from Jim Dent, The Junction Boys (about Bear Bryant's stint at Texas A & M) and The Undefeated (recounting the exploits of Bud Wilkinson's Oklahoma squads of the 1940s and '50s).

Last year, my colleague, Lars Anderson, weighed in with the superb The All Americans, about the Army-Navy game on the eve of Pearl Harbor. You can now add to your literary starting lineup The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize (St. Martin's Press, 324 pages, $24.95), by Keith Dunnavant, author of Coach, a 1996 biography of Bryant.

This evocative and provocative work celebrates Alabama's two-time defending national champions who finished 11-0 but were kept from a three-peat (which no team has accomplished) by what 'Bama fans, even four decades later, deem rank nefariousness. "The 1966 Crimson Tide was not just outvoted [in the polls]," says Dunnavant, himself a Tide alum and former student assistant in the sports information office. "It was robbed, the victim of the greatest injustice in the history of the national championship selection process."

What Dunnavant is decrying are the polls that made Notre Dame the national champion, despite a notorious 10-10 tie against eventual No. 2 Michigan State in what was billed as "The Game of the Century."

In that contest, Irish coach Ara Parseghian ordered his team to sit on the ball in the final moments, preserving a deadlock and thus an undefeated season. Given poll voters' animus against the state of Alabama and its segregationist governor, George Wallace, the fix was all but in, alleges Dunnavant. Parseghian's tactic, he says, "was the most cynical act in college football history." Going for a tie "was like seeing John Wayne parade around the room in high heels and a strapless gown." And because that year most of the influential polls closed after the regular season, even the Tide's 34-7 dismantling of highly regarded Nebraska in the Sugar Bowl was unavailing.

Even now, Dunnavant is rankled: "If the situation had been reversed, and Notre Dame was undefeated and bidding for a third consecutive title, the Fighting Irish most certainly would have been ranked No. 1. Given the chance, Alabama could have beaten Notre Dame, Michigan State, or any of the other contenders for the title. But the Crimson Tide was no match for George Wallace and all he represented."

Well! They do take their football seriously down in Tuscaloosa. You could certainly make a case for the Irish, though Dunnavant does so more in the breach than the observance; Notre Dame shut out six opponents, including Rose Bowl-bound Southern Cal, whom it thrashed 51-0.

And whether because of its surpassing excellence or a soft schedule, the Tide was rarely tested, its biggest gut check being a come-from-behind, 11-10 squeaker in the rain at Tennessee.

But there's no denying that this edition of the Crimson Tide remains special and that it deserves Dunnavant's burnished affection. In 10 regular season games, it allowed 37 points -- still the lowest average since the two-platoon era began in 1964. Its hallmark was the "quick little boys" whom Bryant had recruited during the one-platoon era and instilled with toughness and technique.

"In the age of the one-platoon, sixty-minute man, Bryant wanted players who could be molded into versatile, supremely conditioned cogs, driven, hungry animals who could be pushed beyond their own perceived physical and mental limits," Dunnavant writes. The lasting image that Dunnavant offers is of "the men of the broken plates," emerging from a description offered by fullback David Chatwood, who, when he left home for Tuscaloosa, was told by his father that the older man was smashing his dinner plate. "I didn't need a translation," Chatwood recalled. "He meant that I had made a commitment to Alabama and Coach Bryant...I didn't have a home to come back to if I decided to quit."

Accordingly, while the Tide had talent -- quarterback Kenny Stabler, Dunnavant notes, was "the one great player, the single athlete for the ages" -- they were characterized more by such junkyard dogs as star receiver Ray Perkins ("He inspired his teammates one grunt at a time") and versatile, hard-luck Wayne Trimble, who rallied the Tide at Mississippi State in relief of Stabler. (Everyone was white; the team wouldn't be integrated on the field for five more years.) With the exception of Stabler, there's hardly a flamboyant character in the bunch, which sometimes makes the descriptions a bit dutiful. In fact, the most unforgettable uncharacter is a unit.The starting offensive line averaged 192 pounds -- runty even in that era -- but paralyzed foes with "the 'Bama block," an explosion off the line followed by an attack on the opponent's thigh that spun him in the direction Alabama wanted him to go. (A fine example is shown in one of the book's photos.)

Besides, no player had a chance to loom larger than his coach. Bryant is depicted motivating and manipulating, usually by messing with his men's minds and working them in ways all too familiar to Dent's Junction Boys. He made his biggest impression when the seniors of '66 were freshmen by (temporarily) kicking star Joe Namath off the team for drinking. "You can draw a line between that one event and the discipline that helped make that '66 team so great," said center Jimmy Carroll. But with the irascibility came genius. Bear knew which buttons to push, whether by designing a tricky tackle-eligible play or by exhorting the troops when they were behind. "That was their half, and now this is our half coming up," he told his soggy charges at halftime in Knoxville, instilling the fight that overcame the Vols.

So maybe this book helps right a wrong. You could at least make that argument. The impassioned Dunnavant is only too happy to do so. "In the culture of Alabama football," he concludes, "1966 lives as a monument to injustice, which explains why, forty years later, Bryant-Denny Stadium always erupts in cheers when the public address announcer tells the crowd Notre Dame is losing.

"Forget, hell."

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