William D. Cohan
"In a damning, taut narrative, Champions Way shows how easy it is for college athletes to game the legal system for their own benefit. In merciless prose, Mike McIntire exposes how nuisances like sexual assaults and fake classes are no match for the big dollars associated with a winning football program."
John U. Bacon
"College athletic programs are prisms revealing the priorities of our schools, and our society. In Champions Way, Mike McIntire focuses his first-rate reporting skills on Florida State’s football team—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and tells us what he found in a fast-paced detective story. Whether you’re interested in college athletics, higher education, or just a damn good story, you’ll love Champions Way."
Jeff Benedict
"Relentlessly reported, Champions Way is a rich, powerful, and at times chilling page-turner. More than giving us an exposé, McIntire serves up a first-rate narrative that will forever change the way readers look at one of the top college football programs in America."
Booklist (starred review)
"A deeply unsettling exposé."
New York Times Book Review
"McIntire paints a grim picture of a culture of malfeasance, particularly in its treatment of women, at the heart of college athletics."
Gilbert M. Gaul
"Investigative reporter Mike McIntire has written a smart and fearless exposé of the madness and corruption undermining college football. From widespread academic fraud to the sexual predators to the hypocrisy of college presidents, it's all here in shocking detail and highly readable prose. A timely and important book."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-06-14
Digging into the massively successful football program at Florida State University and finding the whole project nearly irredeemable."College football is deadly serious business, nowhere more so than Florida State," writes award-winning New York Times investigative reporter McIntire (Journalism/New York Univ.) in this examination of the Seminoles dominant yet often academically and legally troubled football team. "How else do allegations of rape, attempted murder, academic fraud, domestic abuse, and other scandals…go unnoticed, uninvestigated, and unpunished?" As the author clearly shows, coaches, administrators, staff, boosters, and even local police have often looked the other way when it comes to rationalization or excuses for reprehensible player behavior—not to mention the demonization of anyone who might reveal the abuses or get in the way of the coverups set in motion to protect star athletes. According to the author, these myriad, multiplying sins seem to be the hallmarks of FSU athletics, especially the football program. In his deep dive into this cesspool, FSU comes to represent the situation throughout much of big-time college football, which brings in hundreds of millions of dollars at top schools such as FSU, Alabama, Ohio State, and elsewhere. Indeed, readers will get the impression that FSU is not even an outlier, which might be the scariest element of all. McIntire shows that FSU is not the only school pursuing the "champions way," as his diversions to similar case studies in other athletic programs make clear. Naturally, the author ran into resistance nearly everywhere he turned, so he was unable to get the complete story of any of the many cases he investigated. While this may provide grist for detractors to try to pick apart his reportage, any honest reader will come away appalled—and rightfully so. A depressing but eye-opening and important book about the deteriorating heart of college athletics.
