MICHAEL MacCAMBRIDGE has written extensively about sports, music, movies, and popular culture. His award-winning book America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation is considered by many the definitive modern history of pro football. He edited the critically acclaimed ESPN College Football Encyclopedia, hailed by Sports Illustrated as “the Bible” of the sport, and the retrospective SportsCentury, a New York Times bestseller. His first book, The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine, was a New York Times Noteworthy Book of 1997, and his 2016 biography Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work was described by Bill James as “the best sports biography I’ve ever read.”

For eight years a columnist and critic at the Austin American-Statesman, MacCambridge was later a contributor to A New Literary History of America, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and GQ. He has worked as an adjunct instructor at Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Texas. The father of two children, Miles and Ella, he lives in Austin.