Most sports books are written with a clear (and often all too obvious) point of view. As I listened to The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Kateyian, I wasn’t quite sure where they were coming from. They certainly hit upon some of the scandals in the recent history of college football – from a gang rape at BYU (which somehow violates the honor code) to some pretty surprising criminal statistics, but there were also many chapters about the glories of unpaid professional football.
These glories centered on Mike Leach, who seems like the Bobby Knight of his generation. He is not quite as surly as the former Hoosier coach (and we can only hope that Leach doesn’t assail our ears after he gives up coaching like Knight does), but he runs the same kind of tight ship and has come under scrutiny for player abuse. Leach does seem to be an offensive innovator, but he is also prideful and his ending at Texas Tech was embarrassing. Nevertheless, Leach is treated as a key figure in recent college football and his hiring at Washington State (where he is currently 7-14 in two seasons) is given a close examination.
BYU also figures heavily into the book with the aforementioned scandal (which resulted in the players involved being kicked off the team as their punishment), but also the coaching of Bronco Mendenhall, the ascension of Ziggy Ansah from special teams freak to dominant pass rusher, and the recruitment and career of linebacker Kyle Van Noy. There are chapters about Nick Saban, the recruitment of a big-time prospect (Ricky Seals-Jones), and the making of the Michigan brand in a 2012 game at Cowboy Stadium (in which the Wolverines got stomped by Alabama, but it still helped Big Blue’s brand somehow).
It wasn’t until the last couple of chapters that I figured out what the book was exactly. The second to last chapter was a puff piece about ESPN’s Gameday crew, which detailed the genius of Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, and Chris Fowler. This chapter was poor because it made it seem like College Gameday reinvented the pre-game show. I haven’t spent a lot of time watching College Gameday, but it is pretty standard for those types of shows, even if it is popular. Its popularity owes more to ESPN owning college football more than to Corso putting on a mascot head.
In fact, it was in the acknowledgements that I realized what this book was: a bunch of Sports Illustrated articles from the 2012 college football season that were cobbled together (and lengthened) to make a book. I guess that’s all well and good, but it became obvious that this book didn’t have much cohesion to present one viewpoint (which I don’t necessarily need, but this was all over the place).
In the end, the book was a failure for me. I hoped that it would answer one question for me: how do these football players have time to go to class if they are practicing all the time? Academics, which are supposed to be the backbone of college athletics and student-athletes, were mentioned in passing: academic tutors cheated for and hooked up with players, parents mentioned that academics were important for their son’s choice of school, and academics are apparently important to coach Leach. While classes and education might not have been part of the purview of the book, the failure to talk about them directly reinforced my belief that when it comes to the glory and/or scandal of big-time college football, the whole system is just a sad joke.
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Perry Missner is a college basketball enthusiast who writes for RotoWire along with several other outlets. He welcomes your comments on Twitter at @PerryMissner or via email at [email protected]
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