Book Review: "Meat Market"

Our second installment in what may be a 2 part series of college football book reviews is Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting by ESPN’s Bruce Feldman. I think Feldman is one of the more knowledgeable people in sports writing today because he is one of the few people who can analyze both games and recruiting. In Meat Market, however, he focused solely on one aspect of college football, recruiting, in order to pull back the curtain and give readers some insight into how coaches go through the process of acquiring talent.

In the book, Feldman follows Ole Miss Coach Ed Orgeron from Signing Day 2006 to Signing Day 2007. Orgeron is a living legend when it comes to recruiting. He helped build the defense of the great Miami teams of the 1990s, he was the head recruiter for Pete Carroll this decade as USC became the dominant team in the nation, and at Ole Miss he was trying to build a program more or less from scratch in arguably the toughest conference in the country. In fact, one of the book’s great strengths is that it really captures what it must be like to spend a year with a man like Orgeron: constantly chugging red bulls, driving from country home to country home in search of the next star, and watching tape of high school players every time he sat down. The climax of the book comes during the end of the 2006 season, when Orgeron makes a run at star tailback Joe McKnight.

As a football fan, this book makes one thing abundantly clear to you: college football is still ultimately about talent. While parity may be on the rise due to scholarship reductions and greater national tv access for smaller teams, at the end of the day scheming and coaching means little because the team with the best athletes will almost always win. Orgeron certainly buys into this maxim throughout the book. There isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t spend at least the entire morning watching tape, plotting strategy, and making phone calls to recruits with the rest of his coaching staff. What was most surprising to me was that even the night before games on the road, he insisted the team hotel set up a projector so the coaches could continue to watch tape. While I understand Ole Miss is anything but a power when no one named “Manning” is waking up passed out, naked with a penis drawn on his face out on The Grove on Sunday morning, that obsession with recruiting seemed over the top. I mean, if I was a player on the 2006 Runnin’ Rebs (though based on their record, shouldn’t they be the Runnin’ Deb(utante)s? Snap! Count it! Word plays are fun and insulting!), I would really be pissed to find out my entire coaching staff was preparing for next year rather than the game I was playing in tomorrow. Guess that’s why they went winless in conference that year, maybe good coaches do actually coach. Wait, did Mack Brown and Joe Pa make it to BCS games? Never mind, recruiting is all that matters.

The other amazing thing about this book was the whole Joe McKnight phenomenon. Throughout the book, McKnight is trying to decide between staying in state and going to national power LSU, or to join the up-and-coming Rebs and Orgeron. Then, suddenly and completely out of nowhere, Pete Carroll seems to suddenly realize McKnight is a 5 star recruit a month before signing day. SPOILER ALERT: McKnight ends up at USC. It really just showed how amazing USC’s rep is at this point. While every other school recruits kids for 2 or 3 years, USC waits until the last month because they know they are already every high school kid in the country’s #1 choice. They recruit players as much as Zack Morris “laid groundwork” with women, in the sense that Zack really just walked up to any piece of strange he saw walking around Bayside High and had his way with her.

What is disappointing about this book, however, is that it is more of ethnography than anything resembling muckraking journalism. Feldman paints an entertaining picture, but if you are looking for the chance to learn about the seedy underbelly of recruiting, do not look to this book. Feldman seems solely interested on reporting what he sees without any sort of judgment, to the point that at times, seemed more concerned with justifying his subjects than analyzing them. There is one moment in particular where a player had narrowed his choice down to Ole Miss or Mississippi State the day before National Signing Day. While he was at school, coaches from both schools just sat in the player’s driveway, waiting for him so they could get the last word in before the player made his decision. This seemed to be the perfect moment for Feldman to ask, “Wait a minute, why the hell are 4 grown men waiting like a high school girl on prom night for some 17 year old guy to say he likes them? What is going on here?” Feldman, however, refuses to make any sort of judgments like that at any point in the book.

Overall, it is a solid read and an entertaining book that shows you how coaches obsess over recruiting, but not necessarily the most eye-opening piece you’ll ever read. I’d borrow it or wait for paperback.