Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach's Daughter »

Jennifer Allen is a freelance journalist and the author of Better Get Your Angel On, a collection of stories. She has contributed pieces to numerous magazines, including Rolling Stone, Mirabella, and The New Republic. Allen lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the author Mark Richard, and their sons, Roman and Deacon.

George Allen was a top-ranked NFL coach throughout the sixties and seventies, coaching in turn the Chicago Bears, the Los Angeles Rams, and the Washington Redskins.

Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

In [Allen's] loving but candid portrait, George Allen emerges as a vastly more interesting and sympathetic man than he ever was in his glory days. If he was an inflexible perfectionist (and indeed he was), he was also a goofball, an eccentric, living out there on Planet Football and only occasionally touching down on Mother Earth. When she quotes his mantra--"I just want to coach. All I want to do is coach"--she illuminates his innermost soul and gives us not a football coach but a human being. Her account of his last years in involuntary retirement, writing notes meant to boost his own spirits and guide him to some new coaching jobs, is heartbreaking. Fifth Quarter is a wonderful book.