[close] Noted Washington Post sports reporter and columnist Mark Maske has written the Moneyball of professional football, a behind-the-scenes account of a year in the life of the on- and off-field competition between four of the NFL's bitterest rivals: the New York Giants, Washington Redskins, Philadelphia Eagles, and Dallas Cowboys.

The NFL's NFC East is perhaps the most storied division in all of professional sports. The rivalries are ancient and bitter, the markets are sports mad, media saturated, and very impatient with failure, and the owners, coaches, and players include many of the most outsized egos in the game. How better, then, to understand the big competition and big business of pro football today than by spending a year with a behind-the-scenes pass in the cockpits of all four organizations, chronicling the strategy and tactics employed over the course of an unrelenting four-season struggle?

To place the story of the NFC East within its larger context, Mark Maske has secured extraordinary access to the new league commissioner's office as well as that of the players association head, Gene Upshaw, and the most important agents in the game. But the heart of Maske's story is his relentlessly reported account of the view from the leadership level of each of these four franchises, all in their way struggling with dramatic personality conflicts and unexpected changes in personnel and fortune. The result is nirvana for sports fans, an engrossing ride through a competitive free-fire zone in which the pressure is unremitting and the punishment for failure is swift and sure.

The NFL is the most successful professional sports league in America, and its influence on the culture enormous: Through the story of these four organizations locked in a steelcage match with one another over the course of this one year, Mark Maske takes the measure of this league in a way no one before has and few others could. [close]