{"id":2955,"date":"2022-10-22T11:04:39","date_gmt":"2022-10-22T18:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2955"},"modified":"2022-10-22T11:04:39","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T18:04:39","slug":"an-unlikely-success-story-and-the-sorry-state-of-college-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2955","title":{"rendered":"An unlikely success story and the sorry state of college football"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul O\u2019Connor, a fine journalist himself, doesn\u2019t tell us in this review, but I happen to know that he went to a little college in the Midwest, one at South Bend, Ind., that has quite a football tradition of its own. My only connection with the University of Michigan is that my high school (no longer existing) borrowed the tune to its fight song, although we added our own lyrics. Yet I found this review intriguing, as many of you probably will.<\/p>\n

Fans may not want to start reading the book on this college football Saturday in late October, but Paul\u2019s review sounds as though it\u2019s worth adding to a winter reading list.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Paul T. O\u2019Connor<\/p>\n

THE HOT SEAT: A YEAR OF OUTRAGE, PRIDE AND OCCASIONAL GAMES OF FOOTBALL. By Ben Mathis-Lilley. Public Affairs. 240 pages. $29, hardcover. Also available as audiobook, narrated by Peter Berkrot, from Audible.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sometimes a journalist just gets lucky.<\/p>\n

Slate<\/em> writer Ben Mathis-Lilley began researching a book on the University of Michigan football team, its coach Jim Harbaugh and college football in general after the end of Michigan\u2019s miserable 2020 season. While he doesn\u2019t come right out and say it, he was probably expecting to write the history of Harbaugh\u2019s final year at Ann Arbor and a further fall for \u201cthe champions of the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then Michigan went out and had a great season, ending the regular season with only one loss \u2013 albeit to in-state rival Michigan State. The team earned its first victory over Ohio State since most of the players were in preschool and then went on to win a Big Ten championship before losing to Georgia in the national semi-finals.<\/p>\n

What was most likely to be a book about failure turned out to be one about success, and Mathis-Lilley, who does not hide his love for the Wolverines despite not being an alumnus, was delighted. But he is not delighted with the state of college football today, and a majority of college football fans probably share that sentiment with him.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s game is controlled by the sports networks. Whether watching on TV or in person, the fan must endure a game repeatedly interrupted by commercial breaks. A change of possession, a score, an injured player on the field, the end of a quarter, a timeout, it doesn\u2019t matter. The play-by-play announcer says, \u201cWe\u2019re stepping away for a moment,\u201d and thus follows four minutes of Allstate, State Farm and AT&T commercials. And in October, the local ad slot is filled by lying politicians.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s game is also noncompetitive. At the beginning of each season, all fans know that the national champion is likely to come from a small group of teams, the same teams there every year. Many games are blowouts, even games between ranked teams.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Mathis-Lilley\u2019s book is not all anti-college football screed. He spends a good bit of time on the history of the University of Michigan, which, even those of us who root for other Midwestern teams will concede, is a fairly decent school. And he goes into great depth on something I\u2019ve been trying to figure out since I was 11: Why the hell do we care, do I care, about a team of people I\u2019ve never met, who probably aren\u2019t like me, and who charge me a week\u2019s pay just to watch them play in between TV timeouts?<\/p>\n

Mathis-Lilley went to Harvard, also a decent school, and cites a lot of sociological mumbo-jumbo to explain that we all have to have something we identify with and cheer for, and we all want to be considered winners, and we all want our teams to glow in the aura of victory because it makes us feel good.<\/p>\n

There are some great chapters in the book, especially the one on Louisiana State University football and the shift of collegiate football power to the South. He uses census data and other demographics to explain the population shift that has left the South far more populous than the Midwest and touches on the obvious, that the big Southern schools are less academically demanding of their players, more lenient regarding off-field behavior and more likely to have been illegally paying their players for a long time.<\/p>\n

His chapter on the Michigan State rivalry should resonate with residents of states where the flagship and land-grant vie for students and fan loyalty. To the snobs at Michigan, MSU is a cow college, full of people who couldn\u2019t get into Ann Arbor. To MSU fans, UM is just what\u2019s wrong with America\u2019s elite woke population.<\/p>\n

One need not be a fan of Michigan football to enjoy this book \u2013 Lord knows this reviewer isn\u2019t. But it probably does help to be a fan of college football, and maybe better yet a \u00a0fan disgruntled about how the game has been taken over by the networks.<\/p>\n

I listened to Peter Berkrot\u2019s capable narration while on my morning walks and enjoyed it very much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul O\u2019Connor, a fine journalist himself, doesn\u2019t tell us in this review, but I happen to know that he went to a little college in the Midwest, one at South Bend, Ind., that has quite a football tradition of its own. My only connection with the University of Michigan is that my high school (no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,10,93],"tags":[1279,1277,1276,1278],"class_list":["post-2955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-books","category-contemporary-nonfiction","category-sports","tag-ben-mathis-lilley","tag-college-football","tag-michigan-football","tag-the-hot-seat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2957,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2955\/revisions\/2957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}