Very Poor Book on NFL Quarterbacks

 

This is one of the worst football related books I have ever read.  And that’s surprising since the book is written by John Feinstein.  Normally I love his books.  This one is a total miss.  I do not recommend any football fan reading this book.  It’s a total and complete waste of time.

First, the title says “Inside the Most Important Position in the NFL.”  While that statement is true, he never discusses why that statement is true in the book.  One would not have go into a lengthy exegesis to empirically support that statement, but this book doesn’t even try.

Second, he follows five quarterbacks, Andrew Luck, Joe Flacco, Alex Smith, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and the long ago retired Doug Williams (let’s get into the later shortly.)   None of this book explores the football journey of these quarterbacks in a way that is at all interesting, insightful, or something new football fans didn’t already know.  In fact, after reading it, I could not tell you what one said versus another or anything at all that I learned about football or the life of a quarterback in the NFL.

Unfortunately, much of the book is devoted to essentially calling out the NFL and its owners for being racists.  In fact, the book at times seemed to be more about Colin Kaepernick than it was about the quarterbacks featured above.  The author harps on incessantly about Colin Kaepernick not being signed by an NFL team and accuses the league of being racists because owners didn’t like the national anthem protests.  The owners didn’t like the national anthem protests first and foremost because it hurt their brand.  American’s and football fans reacted negatively to it seeing it as disrespecting the armed forces.  And Kaepernick took and incredibly long time to even say why he was kneeling during the national anthem.  My personal opinion is it was more about self-aggrandizement than a protest of anything.  The book is misleading in its title about what to expect in the book.

Finally, it seems he uses Doug Williams as a stalking horse to rail against racism in the NFL and not wanting to draft African American quarterbacks.  Historically that is undoubtedly true for numerous reasons, and very unfortunate.  Warren Moon should have been and NFL quarterback from the very start of his career, not have to go dominate in the Canadian Football League before getting a chance in the NFL.  There are many cases like his and I am sure those show never got a chance in the NFL historically.  But again, everything Doug Williams said in the book is old news not new news.

But let’s get to 2019.  I think it would be an awfully hard case to make that the NFL specifically discriminates against African American quarterbacks anymore.  Many have been drafted in the first round of the draft since 2000 and many drafted despite concerns about their character (Jamies Winston), accuracy (Cam Newton, Lamar Jackson, Teddy Bridgewater), or height (Kyle Murray).  Two of the three quarterbacks in the 2019 draft were African Americans, with the number one overall pick being Kyler Murray from Oklahoma, shortly followed by Dwayne Haskins from Ohio State.

It really seemed the book was more about the author’s political agenda at times than it was about modern NFL Football.

I guess that is a long review to say – skip this one – nothing new, political diatribe at times, uninformative, and boring.

Quarterback: Inside the Most Important Position in the National Football League

The Yucks

This is a fun little book about one of the ineptest teams in professional football history, the 1976 and 1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  As an expansion team the Buccaneers were really put behind the eight ball because their ability to gather talent was limited to has beens or never weres from other teams.  And it showed.  They are the first team to go 0-16 in an NFL regular season.

This book is full of entertaining stories and anecdotes about that team, its entertaining coach John McKay, and the many memorable ways the Yucks found to lose games, from the perspective a fan.  Often very funny, but also with some insights on truly great players who were stuck on a bad team, it is an entertaining read for NFL fans.

The Yucks: Two Years in Tampa with the Losingest Team in NFL History

Raymond Berry Football Autobiography

Raymond Berry is 86 years old now and just published a short autobiography of his life in football and beyond.  While the prose is a bit stilted at times it is an easy to read and digest compilation of his career.

Raymond Berry is probably best known, along with Johnny Unitas, for the Greatest Game Ever Played when his Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in the 1958 NFL Championship Game and first ever overtime game in NFL history.  Berry caught 12 passes for 178 yards and a touchdown in that game and was integral in the Colts’ win.  Those kinds of numbers would be incredibly impressive even in today’s pass happy NFL.  The Colts went on to win the NFL Championship the following year and were extremely competitive throughout Berry’s 12 year Hall of Fame career.

What stands out most about Berry is he was not the most athletically gifted athlete, although he was fast and had great hands.  He persevered and became one of the greatest receivers of all time through hard work and practice, practice, practice.  He and Johnny Unitas were the linchpins of what could have been an NFL dynasty had it not been for the roadblock of the Green Bay Packers under Vince Lombardi.

Being a New England Patriots fan I was most interested in his years as the Patriots head coach including their loss to the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XX 45 to 10.  The 1984 Patriots, while they did go 11-5, really played over the level of their talent in my opinion, which attests to how good a coach Berry was.  He makes the assertion that the reason the game was so lopsided is he was a new head coach and installed a new offense that year, whereas the Bears defense under Buddy Ryan had been running the same system for five years.  Thus, had he had more time to install his offense, the level of play would have been more equal.

While the writing is somewhat uneven and the book jumps around subject wise a good bit, it is a worthwhile read for football fans.

All the Moves I Had: A Football Life

Meet Bill Parcells, Bill Walsh, and Joe Gibbs

Guts and Genius tells the saga of the three heads coaches that truly did dominate the NFL in the 1980’s.  The author walks through the football lives of Bill Parcels (New York Giants), Bill Walsh (San Francisco 49’ers), and Joe Gibbs (Washington Redskins).  Between these coaches, through the 1980’s into the early 90’s, they won 8 Super Bowls and left an indelible print on the NFL.

There are a few key common themes that tie these coaches together besides their winning ways.

First, they were football savants.  While each had their philosophies and systems, especially Walsh with the West Coast Offense, they were also flexible enough to adjust their approach to meet the strengths and weaknesses of their own teams and that of their opponents.  Of the three Walsh probably has the most long-term impact on the game with this short passing game designed to stretch the field horizontally and allow playmakers to get the ball in space and move the ball the down the field.  He also left a much more extensive and successful coaching three than Gibbs or Parcells.

The second theme is leadership.  While each coach had extremely different personalities, they each found ways to connect with and motivate their players to play as a team and achieve more as a unit than they could as a collection of individuals.  They each formed lifelong connections with many of the key players and coaches during their eras.

A third theme is that each started off slow trying to rebuild moribund franchises and had many insecurities and self-doubt.  Even when they were successful, the stress and insecurities almost doubled because the standard was always winning the Super Bowl.  Anything else was almost considered a failure.

Finally, and most disturbing, is the extreme stress and unfathomable hard work it took to accomplish the perfection each chased.  Reading about the extreme stress each felt to win it all, with Gibbs basically living at the football facility to such an extent he missed his sons growing up, and the health, mental, and physical toll football took on these men is profound.

While there is probably nothing profoundly new in this book, it was extremely well written, told in a concise, efficient, and lively prose, and frankly it is hard to put down.  For some reason, at least for this reader, it even provoked emotion and remembrances of the great teams these men led.  And while it goes from one coach to the next from chapter to chapter, that approach worked very well here, and facilitated understanding how these coaches interacted with each other, their teams, and how their journey’s unfolded.

I found this to be a very interesting and worthwhile read.

Guts and Genius: The Story of Three Unlikely Coaches Who Came to Dominate the NFL in the ’80s

What It’s Like to be an NFL Player

If you want to know what it’s like becoming and being an NFL football player then this book is a great start.  The author takes an ethnographic approach by interviewing hundreds of players and spending a great deal of time with others at different levels of the journey.  While it is an academic approach to the topic, the writing is clear, concise, and illuminating.

The author has a few key themes he puts forth to describe the process from high school to the pros.  First, football at all levels he describes as a “totalizing institution.”  That means if you truly aspire to go from one step to the next the player has to be all in and the institutions that control football also end up controlling the players life.

This leads to a second theme which the author calls the sports industrial complex.  At each step of the journey the player’s life is dominated by the game and those that control it.  Big time NCAA football profits greatly on the unpaid backs of all the athletes in profit generating sports and professional football is controlled by a club of billionaires who want to pay the athletes as little as they can get by with.  There is a clear undercurrent that college and NFL athletes are exploited by these respective institutions, especially more marginal players who will never see the multi-millions of the uber gifted athletes.

He also describes the journey as a “tournament” that a player goes through to get to each level from high school to college and then the pros.  Very, very few make it all the way to the pros and the more marginal players that do have to hang on desperately to stay in the game.

The author also touches on masculinity and the fear of admitting weakness, which cause many to ignore injuries or concussions and tough it out at their own detriment.  It is also why players who may be suffering from mental illness may avoid seeking help at their peril.

For those that not only make it through the tournament but have longer than average NFL careers, much of the reason some suffer emotionally and in other ways (not including nagging injuries) is because their entire lives have been consumed and controlled by the game and upon exit there can be a cataclysmic void.  Players who are unprepared emotionally and financially for it face a tough road after they exit the game.

Finally, there is a chapter about racism and how black athletes are disadvantaged (and black coaches more so) in the process.  I won’t go into the arguments he makes here but if you think about the plight of Colin Kaepernick, whether you agree with him or not, that sheds some light on the issue.  It’s a good chapter with some things I totally agree with and some a bit more questionable.

Overall, this was a illuminating look into the journey of the NFL athlete.

Not for Long: The Life and Career of the NFL Athlete