A super Bowl nod to football novels

Taking a moment on Super Bowl Sunday to honor all the great American novels written about that great American sport, football. What? There aren't any? You have to be kidding. I'm not counting the nonfiction books about football, of which there are plenty, or the great TV series derived from one of those books, Friday Night Lights, which I would recommend to anyone, whether you know or care about football in the least - it's about families and teenagers and schools and race and class in America, with football as only the vehicle. But football novels - only two come to (my) mind. First, a childhood book - today would be called a YA novel (not a YA Tittle) - that I loved in about 4th grade was called Touchdown Twins. I've never seen it mentioned or referenced in the many years since, but I remember being so moved by it that I thought it would be a terrific movie and actually, nerd that I was (am), began typing the whole thing out as a "screenplay" (I wouldn't have known the word or concept), which is to say, just taking all the dialogue. I think I quit at about page 6 - my first Hollywood failure. The only other great football novel I can think of is Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes - and though it's now considered a classic, I wonder how well it would stand up to re-reading today (and I don't plan to find out): this novel was as close to memoir as it could get, and by pushing that boundary was very advanced and unusual for the 1960s; it's also kind of an anti-football novel, as the hero, Frederick Exley, is most known as a failed football player, not living up to his father's high expectations, and worshiping from afar NFL heroes, notably Frank Gifford. Exley, like self-named character, was an alcoholic writer and a tragic genius and wrote little else. Don't know what else is out there - but it may not be the fault of football. Though the old adage goes that the smaller the ball, the better the writing, there are very few great novels about baseball (beyond The Natural and the Universal Baseball Association, plus Bang the Drum Slowly I guess though I haven't read it) and certainly very few about golf (golf is a motif in the later Rabbit novels, but they're not about golf; one obscure example of a fine golf novel is Sea View, by Toby Olson). And what's smaller than a golf ball? Ping-pong? Marbles? Ball bearings in roller skates?