Review
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Title: Season of Saturdays (A History of College Football in 14 Games)
Author: Michael Weinreb
Publisher: Scribner
Genre: Sports
Year: 2014
No. of Pages: 239
Binding: Hardback
ISBN 13: 978-1-4516-2781-7
Price: $25.00
Reviewed by Gary McCary for the Association for Mormon Letters
Have you ever been in love? With a sport? Michael Weinreb has–and he still IS in love with college football. His most recent book, *Season of Saturdays,* reads like a love letter–not TO someone–but ABOUT something, and that thing is college football, which is obviously the great love of his life. This is a fast-paced romp through the entire history of college football, seen through the lens of what Weinreb believes are the 14 most significant games in the sport’s history.
The book’s title is evocative of the glory years of college football. Professional football, historically, has been played on Sunday, while college football was always the day before. In this day and age, regular season college football games are played on Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night, and occasionally even on a Monday night. But for the first 100 years of the sport, regular season games were always and only played on Saturday. It wasn’t until the advent of cable TV that the sport began to regularly schedule games at times other than Saturdays.
Weinreb traces the beginning of college football to November 6, 1869, to a cow pasture in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The ball was round, but it kept deflating and the participants took turns blowing it back up again, and so its shape was often ambiguous. Rutgers was playing Princeton, twenty-five men to a side. The rules were aligned most closely with European soccer, but points were scored by booting the ball between a pair of vertical posts. The game was so rough-and-tumble that a Rutgers professor, riding past the field on his bicycle, shouted to the players, “You men will come to no Christian end!”
Weinreb has a particular genius for getting to the essence of the sport’s popular rise in America’s consciousness. Back when most universities were church related with divinity schools, it figures that the most dominant football school would be a Catholic university–Notre Dame, located in South Bend, Indiana. The most impactful recruit in the school’s history is Knute Rockne, who enrolled at Notre Dame in 1910. Not only was he a great player, but he was a great coach and motivator. Weinreb weaves the tale of Rockne back and forth between legend and reality. The giant statue of Jesus Christ outside the football stadium on campus shows him with arms outstretched, interpreted by loyal fans as signaling a touchdown–hence the statue’s nickname: Touchdown Jesus!
Other great coaches throughout college football’s colorful history are chronicled here. Ohio State’s Woody Hayes, Notre Dame’s Ara Parseghian, Penn State’s Joe Paterno, and the University of Michigan’s Bo Schembechler are given ample treatment. These men coached in the 1960’s through the 1980’s (Paterno into the New Millennium!), which Weinreb characterizes as the greatest era of college football importance. The coaches during this era had to navigate the delicate political waters of campus protests over Vietnam and Watergate, as well as the societal upheaval brought on my drugs, free love, rock music, and anti-authoritarianism.
Wienreb talks about society in general, and shows its influence on the men who coached and played football. He references the Cold War, Sputnik, Hippies, Alabama Governor George Wallace, movies like The Big Chill and Red Dawn, Marcel Proust, Mick Jagger, Nepalese Carpeting, and The Weather Channel. The last 4 games that he chronicles are among the most thrilling and unbelievable football games in professional or college sports. It’s a fitting way to end a wonderful romp through history. Things always get better with time–at least in the realm of football.
Perhaps Weinreb’s most interesting story involves Manti Te’o, the Mormon Hawaiian linebacker who played his college football at Notre Dame. In the fall of 2012, a few months before a muckraking website called Deadspin published a story headlined “Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax,” Weinreb attended a game between BYU and Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. At that point the Irish were undefeated (they would finish the regular season 12-0 and would play for the National Championship). In the game, Notre Dame eked past BYU 17-14, with Te’o contributing ten tackles and intercepting a pass. Te’o, interviewed afterward, told a national television audience that his dead girlfriend and grandmother were with him the whole time, giving him spiritual inspiration. Never mind that the girlfriend was a Stanford coed, had been injured in a car crash, then had contracted leukemia, and had died within 48 hours of Te’o’s grandmother, and never mind that said girlfriend was TOTALLY MADE UP–a figment of Te’o’s imagination. This was Hollywood stuff.
“Season of Saturdays” tells a story about religion, spirituality, and American sports at its wacky best!