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The AFC East: The Buffalo Bills, the Miami Dolphins, the New England Patriots, and the New York Jets (Inside the NFL)

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Notice that the cover of this look at the "AFC East" for the Inside the NFL Series has Travis Henry, still a running back for the Buffalo Bills when this photograph was taken, being tackled by linebacker Tedy Bruschi of the New England Patriots. Bruschi is not in uniform this season, having suffered a mild stroke after the Patriots won their third Super Bowl in four years. The irony that neither player is playing for these teams this year is not what makes the cover appropriate, but that these are the two northern most teams in the division. The only thing that would make the picture more appropriate would be if Bruschi was tackling Henry in the snow up in Buffalo with each team wearing red, white and blue. The New York Jets know what it is like to play in the snow, but the Miami Dolphins have to wonder what they are doing in this cold weather division. In this introduction to the four teams of the AFC East, Bob Woods helps to explain why the Dolphins belong but the Baltimore Ravens do not (although the explanation may well be less than satisfactory).

The story of the AFC East begins more with the AFL than the NFL, since three of the teams were original members of the AFL (guess which one was not). Woods overviews the division as providing some memorable first in pro football history: the Jets were the first AFL team to win the Super Bowl, the Patriots were the first team to win the Super Bowl on the final play, and the Bills had the first 2,000 yard rusher. The Dolphins? They are the first and only team to have a "perfect" record. This sense of history is what important in these books, because the assumption is that young fans know about Tom Brady and Chad Pennington, but they might not know the legacies of Joe Namath, Bob Griese, and Jack Kemp. The team histories are also more important because Travis Henry is not the only "current" player who is shown in the uniform of what is now his former team (although, as in the case of Ricky Williams and Vinny Testaverde, sometimes they actually come back).

Because these teams "only" go back to the old AFL, Woods does not have to go way back in the history of professional football, just to the days of "Cookie" Gilchrist, Babe Parilli, and Gino Gappelletti. Hopefully young fans will enjoy reading about the great players and teams of the past, and fans of the Buffalo Bills will learn about the back-to-back AFL titles they won in 1964-65 and not just the four consecutive Super Bowls they lost in the 1990s. More knowledgeable fans will find it ironic that besides Don Shula the only member of the undefeated Dolphins who gets his picture in the book is not Griese or Larry Csonka but Mercury Morris. But there are still plenty of familiar names from Jim Kelly and Dan Marino to Curtis Martin and Tom Brady.

The back of the book contains several pages of Stat Stuff, where you can see the relatively similar Team Records (the four teams have won 288 to 399 wins). There is a list of the Members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and AFC East Career Leaders (through 2002) for each team, where names from the past like Steve Grogan, Gary Yepremian, and Don Maynard are listed. There is also a Glossary of terms from "Achilles tendon" to "wild card," a Time Line from the AFL being formed in 1960 with the Bills, Titans, and Patriots to New England winning Super Bowl XXXVI in 2001, and a list of books and web sites where young fans can go For More Information about the AFC East and the NFL, with the emphasis on the latter (so if you want to find a book about the history of one of these teams, unless you are a Dolphins fan you have to keep looking). Still, this series does provide a solid starting point for young football fans to learn about the history of the game through the stories of these teams.