Customer Reviews

Game Changers: The Greatest Plays in Dallas Cowboys Football History

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This is a great book for Dallas Cowboy fans everywhere! There are lots of awesome, colored pictures/photos throughout the book. Many memorable plays and stories of Dallas Cowboy football history. A MUST-HAVE for any Dallas Cowboy fan. An excellent coffee table book and a great conversation piece. Fun to scan the book for your favorite game plays/"game changers" or just to read all the way through. Not all of the stories are about Cowboy wins, but also losses that could have easily been wins had a certain instances occurred or not occurred. It's a really exciting book. You feel as if you are there for the first time or all over again. A great gift for Christmas, birthdays, etc for that special Dallas Cowboy Fan on your list.

Review: "Game Changers: The Greatest Plays in Dallas Cowboys Football History", by Ed Housewright

Housewright, Ed. Game Changers: The Greatest Plays in Dallas Cowboys Football History. Chicago: Triumph Books. 2009 154p, illus. 24.95 (list) ISBN 978-1-60078-220-6

There's a lot to like about this book: it has great photographs sprinkled liberally throughout, including on the dust-jacket, cover, end-papers, and chapter pages. It includes a bibliography, which I always appreciate. It is printed on thick glossy stock, and it even smells like a coffee-table book (although at 8-1/4 x 9-1/4 it's a bit smaller than the size of a typical coffee-table book).

The first thing I noticed about this book, other than its great appearance, was that it did not include the '50 greatest plays' in Dallas Cowboys history, regardless of how you define them. In fact, the book includes only 30 plays. However, I noticed that nowhere does the book itself claim to include any specific number of plays. It is referred that way only in certain (but not all) online listings. I'm not sure where those listings got their information, but I don't fault the author for that.

And I won't quibble with the 30 plays the author does include. Many of them are obvious: The 'Hail Mary', The 'Catch', Bart Starr's sneak in the Ice Bowl (the author rightly includes both positive and negative plays in Cowboys history). Given the rather odd number of plays included (instead of a nice round number like 50), I assume the author was working under a page count limit rather than a publisher-imposed limit on the number of plays.

Page limit or not, the plays that didn't make the list are some of the most memorable in Cowboys history: Roger's winning TD toss to Tony Hill in the 35-34 comeback thriller in the '79 regular season finale against the Redskins, and Larry Cole's earlier tackle of John Riggins for a loss on a key third down which made Roger's final comeback even possible, or Roger's final TD pass to Ron Sellers in the '72 playoff game against the 49ers, as well as Mel Renfro's earlier recovery of an onside kick, again without which Roger's first fabled comeback would not have been possible. The author chooses several plays from the Cowboy's 13-3 season of 2007, but he completely ignores Romo's miraculous comeback against the Bills.

But setting aside what didn't make the cut, even the 30 plays that are included are problematic in that they exhibit a clear bias toward more recent teams (90s and 00s) vs. the teams of the Landry era (60s-70s-80s). The 60s get two plays, the 70s get eight, the 80s get two, the 90s get eight and the 00s get ten, in a decade in which they hadn't even won a playoff game prior to the publication date of the book!

As Dallas Morning News reviewer Rick Gosselin notes, Tony Romo made the cover of the book, three-time Super Bowl champion Troy Aikman gets one picture within the book, and two-time Super Bowl champion Roger Staubach isn't pictured at all! Again it's hard to know how much input the author had in editorial decisions about photography, so I won't blame Housewright for that.

This is Housewright's second book about the Cowboys. Although the author is a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, he isn't a sports reporter and the Cowboys are not his regular beat. His lack of knowledge of Cowboys history may have been the cause of several errors in his earlier book ('100 Things Cowboys Fans Should Know & Do'). He does a better job getting his facts straight this time around, but a few errors still crept in (e.g. on page 65, he writes that Jimmy Johnson made the guarantee and boast of three-inch headlines before the NFC Championship Game in SF in January, 1993, when in fact, Jimmy made that prediction & boast before the NFCCG in the friendly confines of Texas Stadium in January, 1994).

On page 124, he describes Barry Switzer's 'load left' debacle in Philadelphia but omits the fact that the failed 4th down attempt was waived off due to the two-minute warning. Fans might've forgiven Barry for the bad call, but it's the fact that he called it again and failed again, that so incensed Cowboy Nation. Housewright completely omits that context. But despite the bias towards the Cowboys teams of the 90s and 00s, and the occasional error creeping in, the book is generally well written, well illustrated and a worthy addition to the bookshelves of Cowboys fans everywhere.

Housewright's next Cowboys book is a 50-year history to be published by the Associated Press. I hope he has better editors at AP than he had at Triumph (publisher of Housewright's first two Cowboys books). It's odd that AP chose Housewright for this anniversary project, picking him over their own Cowboys beat reporter, Jaime Aron, who is also writing a 50-year history of the Cowboys. Hopefully the choice of authors works out well for both publishers and for Cowboy fans.

© Copyright Fred Goodwin, June 12, 2010
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Surely "Greatest" is in the eye of the beholder. I expect that every Cowboys fan can think of at least one play they think as Great that did not make the cut. Still, I don't see how any fan can fail to get a charge out of this book. It's the kind of book you leave out on the coffee table, and glance through when you need a smile and a fond memory.

The only realistic criticism is that the book isn't 1000 pages long. Too bad, maybe Ed will write Volume 2.