Four pounds of everything collegiate

With twirling pompoms, cheering mascots, blaring bands and grandstands packed with fans, college football kicked off its 2010 season in rah-rah style last week. To catch up on any minutia I might’ve missed over the past 55 years, I’ve been reading the four pounds worth of college football history recorded in The USA Today College Football Encyclopedia (1380 pgs, $24.95). Like the old Buick commercials, this is not your grandfather’s encyclopedia—this is entertaining, fact-filled sports journalism at its best.

Authors Bob Boyles and Paul Guido spent the past 15 years researching 4,000 college media guides, watching old game films and reading everything they could get their hands on. The result is a Yellow Pages of college football with recaps of more than 7,000 games, reviews of 56 college football seasons, plus season-by-season award winners, All-American teams, NFL draft picks and personality profiles. They’ve even squeezed in a new item dubbed "College Football Performance Formula" to help bettors compare teams within a given season as well as compare teams from different seasons.

The first section of this tome is arranged chronologically starting with the 1953 season, with catchy titles for each: "1958, The Year of Chinese Bandits, Lone End, and Two-Point Conversions;" and "1999, The Year of the Distracted Wire-to-Wire Win, the Magical Freshman, and November Nightmare." Section two devotes eight pages to each of 70 football programs arranged alphabetically by college, with stats for wins/losses, coaching, bowl games, annual scores and lineups.

To give you a feel for the authors’ style, here’s their opening line for the 1956 season: "Like a Great Plains tornado, Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma Sooners swept across the nation, destroying 10 foes by an average margin of 41 points." Turning to the stats on my alma mater (Go Trojans!), I found this item noting USC’s Greatest Coach: "While awaiting Pete Carroll’s ascendance, the Cardinal and Gold throne room remains open for John McKay…" Never thought I’d see the day!

In a nutshell, if you like stats and history flavored with journalistic flair – or if you just want to win your next Trivial Pursuit sports-edition game – pick up this four-pounder and dig in.

Tearing myself away from a fun and informative read, I turned to King Yao’s Weighing the Odds in Sports Betting (254 pgs, $19.95) for some solid advice on how to increase my winning percentage in a variety of sports, including the NFL, MLB, the ponies and college basketball. Yao leans on his experience as a former trader (translated "gambler") in financial derivative markets and adapts it to betting on sports. And he does it in a clear and concise style that, although somewhat dry as most statistical analyses are, gives you the mathematical skinny in easy to understand terminology.

After taking you through the basics, Yao goes a step further by explaining Super Bowl props, baseball totals and the specifics of betting parlay cards and first halves in football to betting basketball’s March Madness marathon and racing’s Triple Crown. He also delves into scalping, middling and hedging. In chapter 20, "Tips for Bettors," he offers good advice on finding the best sportsbooks, and avoiding traps such as forgetting the value of money and not admitting your mistakes.

All in all, this book is a valuable tool in general sports handicapping designed to help bettors come out ahead in their search for that magical yet elusive 53-percent winning record.

These books and more are available at Gambler’s Book Club in Las Vegas. You can order them at www.gamblersbookclub.com, by phone at 1-800-522-1777. Opened in 1964, GBC is located at 5473 S. Eastern between Tropicana and Russell.