My immediate thought when I first saw this book was that it would be a sugary glory story about how Teddy Roosevelt dashed in to save college football. In other words, full of more fluff than substance and more myth than reality.

I could not have been more wrong.

The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved College Football is an excellent, well-written book based on an extensive amount of historical research done on the over a ten-year period by author John J. Miller.

The early days of football were marred by extreme violence, with many young men losing their lives because of the brutality of the game. The game was so dangerous that a movement began, lead by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, with the purpose of abolishing football altogether. Teddy Roosevelt, who believed that the game developed character, sought to save the game, inviting the coaches of the three biggest football schools (Harvard, Yale and Princeton) to the White House in 1905 and imploring them to find a way to reduce the violence while saving the game.

Miller's book tells the extensive story of how it all happened. 

Continue reading this post »

Granted, it doesn't take much to convince me that a playoff is superior to the existing bowl system, but "Death To The BCS" by Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports surprised me with their proposal for a 16 team playoff and shooting down almost every reason to retain the existing system. Their proposal makes perfect sense to me once they explain it:  a 16 team playoff with all 11 conference champions and five at-large selections.

Almost immediately, people respond "What?  The MAC champion? The Sun Belt Champion?"

And the answer is, of course, yes.  One of the biggest reasons people reject a playoff system is that it makes the regular season meaningless. The thought is that in a playoff system, you merely have to get into the playoff system, and once you qualify for the playoffs, there is no reason to worry about the regular season anymore.

That argument gets skewered by pointing out that teams who make the playoffs get seeded based on how they finish the regular season, and there are two rewards for getting a higher seed.  First of all, higher seeds host games all the way through the semi-finals.  Second, the #1 seed gets rewarded with a home game against the #16 seed, who almost always will be the Sun Belt Champion.  And when you win that game, you get another home game.  Win that, and the #1 seed gets rewarded with a third home playoff game for the semi-finals, with a reward of a national championship berth.

Tell me again how a playoff system makes the regular season meaningless? If anything, the BCS has made the regular season less meaningful, as schools now avoid non-conference challenges to improve the odds of making the BCS game since you have to be one of the top two teams.

Continue reading this post »

Every once in a while a book comes along that alters how you see the world around you. Scorecasting does that relative to sports by, as the book says, "overturn(ing) some of the most cherished truisms of sports and reveal(ing) the hidden forces that shape how basketball, baseball, football and hockey games are played, won and lost." 

Authors Toby Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim examine the stereotypes in sports, but then use statistics mixed with behavioral psychology to smash most of those stereotypes to bits. Given that explanation, you'd think the book would be as dry as a dead creek bed, but the writing and anecdotes are funny and entertaining. I hate to use the cliche - but this is one you'll have a hard time putting down because it's sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, and sometimes downright infuriating. 

Continue reading this post »

I originally wrote this review before the 2010 season began, but then forgot all about it. Suddenly, Oklahoma history is in fashion again! 

This is a review of a DVD of the 1959 Nebraska - Oklahoma game, available from Husker Video for $19.95.

This is not a review of the actual game action, but a review of the earliest footage of an entire Husker football game widely available. On top of that, the 1959 victory over Oklahoma is widely considered the greatest upset win in Husker history. Oklahoma came into the game with an amazing 74-game conference win streak, a span of 13 years (seriously, wow!) Nebraska hadn't beaten Oklahoma in 17 years (those were the days.... before Bob Devaney). 

Continue reading this post »

University of Nebraska press re-released Tom Osborne's More Than Winning a year ago, with the hopes that the book would be taken up by a newer generation of Nebraska fans. The original was written just after the 1983 season. 1983 was a magical year, the year of the "Scoring Explosion" offense that featured the triplets of quarterback Turner Gill, running back and Heisman Winner Mike Rozier, and wide receiver Irving Fryar. It was the season in which Nebraska could have won a national title had Osborne elected to kick a PAT in the 1984 Orange Bowl, but instead went for the win and failed in the attempt, giving Miami a national title in a 31-30 Nebraska loss. 

The introduction has been updated, with some notes from Osborne on how much collegiate athletics has changed in the years since the book's first release. One comment struck me as something that most people may not think true (keep in mind Osborne is talking about the early 80s). 

Continue reading this post »

In the interest of full disclosure, I recently received a copy of Draft Season - Four Months on the Clock from author Bobby Deren who was kind enough to autograph it for me. Deren is a senior writer for Rivals.com. He also makes frequent radio and television appearances, sharing his expertise on college football.

The book chronicles the lives of four potential NFL draftees - Florida Atlantic linebacker Frantz Joseph, Michigan cornerback Morgan Trent, South Carolina wide receiver Kenny McKinley and Nebraska offensive tackle Lydon Murtha - during their four-month preparation for 2009 NFL draft. Deren does a good job of detailing their diverse backgrounds

The NFL Draft process - particularly the NFL combine -  has a reputation as a meat market atmosphere. Most college fans wonder why the NFL bothers grilling players the way they do when they've already got at least a couple years of game film they could use. While I knew that players kept themselves in shape before the combine, I never realized the extent to which they go. By the time you're done you realize why the NFL does to these guys what they do with all the testing, poking and prodding. You end up discovering that, yes, the NFL draft process is a meat market, but because they're trying to buy  incredibly expensive steak they're extra picky.

Continue reading this post »

(CN community members note - I'll be reviewing college football books again this off-season. They obviously won't be all about Nebraska, but I believe that Husker fans more than anyone are students of the game of college football. I certainly am.)

A while back, like before the beginning of the season, I received a book called "The Pro Football Historical Abstract" by Sean Lahman. I didn't request it, so someone must have sensed that I needed it. Being the curious type, I opened it and it didn't take long before I understood why.

I'll get to that, but first, a review.

Let's first look at the author, Sean Lahman. Lahman is a pioneer in sports statistics. From his Wikipedia entry:

He is most noted for the Lahman Baseball Database, a collection of baseball statistics for every team and player in Major League history. Starting in 1995, he made this database freely available for download from the Internet helping to launch a new era of baseball research by making the raw data available to everyone.

Continue reading this post »

The title of When March Went Mad: the Game That Transformed Basketball is misleading.  It's not a book about the 1979 NCAA Basketball Championship Game between Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores and Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans, which is still the highest-rated college basketball game of all time.  That's probably a good thing, since the game wasn't that great.

First and foremost, WMWM is instead a book about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, Coaches Jud Heathcote and Bill Hodges, and both teams' supporting casts.  Like a documentary, the story in WMWM recounts the roads Magic and Bird took to their respective schools, and the roads their teams took to the Final Four.  It's a great narrative, and does a good job of painting the world of college basketball in the late 70s (the Big 8 Coaches of the 80s make guest appearances: Johnny Orr at Michigan, Billy Tubbs at Lamar, and Danny Nee as a Notre Dame assistant).

Of course, the history lesson is only the framework of the real themes of the book.  At its heart, WMWM is about two things.  One is stated, and provides the framework of the narrative.  In the prologue, Davis recounts the production meeting before NBC's broadcast of the championship game, where Don Ohlmeyer recognized the birth of spectacle: Magic and Bird were far bigger than anything else about this game.  1979 was a year that transformed the way America watches sports.  ESPN was born, the NBA was about to erupt into the biggest thing around, and the NCAA Tournament went from a niche event to the biggest month in sports.

The other theme present through the book is leadership.  Magic and Bird were great players not because they were scoring machines (though they were) but because they could do so much.  The best game skill either possessed was their ability to pass -- distributing the ball to where their teammates could do the most damage.  They were great on-the-floor leaders, and it showed.  Likewise, the coaches, Heathcoate and Hodges, demonstrate highly contrasting styles, but both achieving the same results.

Seth Davis, a college basketball analyst for Sports Illustrated and CBS, adds his own touch to the narrative.  His connections throughout the college basketball world are a big asset, as he is able to connect with all the people who played major roles in the 1979 season, and his ability to connect the world of sports before the Game and after makes it an informative and entertaining read.  Moreover, his focus on the human aspects of the season, especially the stars, makes it an enjoyable and relatable read, highly recommended for any fan of college basketball, or sports in general.