Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines)

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Saturday Rules: Why College Football Outpasses, Outclasses, and Flat-Out Surpasses the NFL (eBook) Pub. Date: 10/13/2009 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
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Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) Pub. Date: 9/4/2007 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

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Overview

Austin Murphy knows a thing or two about football. His twenty-three years at Sports Illustrated include six covering the NFL and a decade chronicling the college game. In Saturday Rules, Murphy leaves no doubt as to which beat he preferred. Does the NFL have better athletes? Yes. Does it entail more direct flights? Undoubtedly. Which game is better, more entertaining, less predictable? It's not even close--college football wins by two touchdowns.

With rich traditions and deep passions--marching bands and menageries of living, breathing animal mascots; arm-long lists of ancient blood grudges--college football is far more captivating, fan-friendly, and, frankly, more fun than the corporate, clinical, risk-averse, imitation-intensive, hermetically sealed game they play on Sunday.

No two programs are more storied than Notre Dame and USC, headed by those ex-NFL rivals and philosophical (and physiological) opposites Charlie Weis and Pete Carroll, perhaps the biggest names in the college game. With the inside scoop on these top-ranked teams, Murphy closely follows their arcs through the 2006 season, up to their late-November showdown in the L.A. Coliseum. He puts you in the field, in the meeting room, and in the huddle as both teams fight to keep alive their national title ambitions.

Between trips to South Bend and Los Angeles, Murphy ranges repeatedly into Big Ten country, hooking up with Michigan and Ohio State, whose November 17 collision in Columbus constitutes one of the book's most memorable chapters. He ventures into the proud SEC, bearing witness to Florida's single loss of the season (and the ensuing "rolling" of Toomer's Corner). He is in the Rose Bowl for the season's most stunning upset (UCLA 13, USC, 9), and is in that grand old bowl a month later, as the Trojans are born anew. Murphy is on the field after the national title game, asking the Gators how they pulled off the upset. ("This is a fast . . . ass . . . team!" replies linebacker Brian Crum.) And he makes it his business to drop in on the Boise State Broncos after their miraculous, trick-play-intensive upset of Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.

Whether hanging out with members of the Ohio State marching band (including the senior sousaphonist, who will "dot the i" in the Buckeyes' famed cursive Ohio), or sampling the frighteningly potent "Gator-Killer punch" at TGFKATWLOCP (The Game Formerly Known as the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party), or staying up past his bedtime to witness Notre Dame's midnight drum circle, Murphy is the perfect guide for this rich and raucous celebration of the pageantry and tradition, the talismans and rituals, that prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that when it comes to football, Saturday rules.

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Kirkus Reviews

Attention college-football fanatics: If you couldn't find your way to either the Golden Dome in South Bend or the Swamp in Gainesville last season, never fear, Austin Murphy (How Tough Could It Be?: The Trials and Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-at-Home Dad, 2004, etc.) is here. College football always has its share of soap-operatic story lines, but the 2006-07 season was about as gripping as it gets. It had enigmatic Coach Urban Meyer overseeing the University of Florida juggernaut, Notre Dame quarterback/golden boy Brady Quinn going through a roller-coaster senior year and the University of Southern California Trojans trying to pick up the pieces in their first post-Reggie Bush/Matt Leinart season. For these college football powers, the year had a compelling natural arc, making their parallel journeys a natural subject for a book-length memoir from an intrepid, fly-on-the-wall reporter. Enter Murphy. Once referred to by Dallas Cowboys behemoth Nate Newton as "that preppy motherf***** from Sports Illustrated," Murphy wears his love for the sport on his sleeve (or, in this case, on the page). Rather than merely cover the season, he takes a put-the-author-into-the-story tack, a tricky approach that succeeds thanks primarily to his unabashed enthusiasm, unpretentiousness and insider access. Nothing is taken too seriously, which is exactly the way it should be; after all, it's just a bunch of kids playing ball. The prose is loose, the reportage at times flat-out comedic-think Frank Deford meets Nick Bakay. Murphy also makes the wise choice to periodically step away from college football, reporting on Terrell Owens's suicide attempt, professional golfers and his fellow journalists. Allof which is why you don't have to be a Trojan, or a Gator, or a Buckeye or even a college football aficionado to appreciate this book-you just have to be a sports fan. A fun, frenetic memoir of one of the more volatile college gridiron campaigns in recent memory.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061375774
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 9/4/2007
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.09 (d)

Meet the Author

Austin Murphy is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He lives in northern California with his wife and their two children.

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Saturday Rules
A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines)

Chapter One

Irish Eyes

August 11, South Bend, Ind. —I feel His gaze. I feel those granite eyes on me before I turn to meet them. Making my unhurried way across the Notre Dame campus on a still August evening, heading east on a thoroughfare named for one Moose Krauss, I am captivated, as usual, by the monument to my right, the tan-bricked colossus that is Notre Dame Stadium. I've covered huge games in this old bowl: Notre Dame's upset of top-ranked, Charlie Ward—led Florida State in 1992; its near misses against Nebraska in 2000 and 'SC last season—the Bush Push game. But my most vivid memories tend to be small-bore and personal. Playing catch with Raghib Ismail during a 1990 photo shoot. Chatting on the grass with Bobby Bowden on the eve of that upset in 1992. Seeing the Trojans react to the savannah-length grass the groundskeeper prepared for the visitors in 2005. ("Do you think they might be trying to slow us down?" inquired Frostee Rucker, feigning shock.)

And I remember Notre Dame's comeback win over Boston College 20 years ago. Fueled by flanker Tim Brown's 294 all-purpose yards, the Irish rallied from a 25-12 second-half deficit. What success Notre Dame had running the ball that day, according to the lore of my family, it earned by attacking the left side of the Eagles' line, away from starting defensive tackle Mark Murphy. (I have since told Brown, who won the 1987 Heisman Trophy, that he owes my brother at least a thank-you note.)

Less than a year after that 32-25 Irish victory, I was back on campus,reporting a preseason cover story on the resurgent Fighting Irish, when my mother phoned with news that Mark had been cut by the Detroit Lions.

"That's a shame," sympathized Lou Holtz, with whom I shared the news, and who graciously feigned a recollection of No. 67 of the BC Eagles. "Your brother's a fine football player."

This being Holtz, the word "brother's" came out "brutherth." As well documented as the coach's lisp is the fact that he could be a son-of-a-bitch on the practice field, a saliva-spritzing martinet whose players referred to him as "Lou-cifer." His sideline histrionics used to get on my nerves, as did his compulsion to inflate the upcoming opponent into the second coming of the 1985 Chicago Bears—-"They've got a lot of great athletes at Navy; they do some things very well"—while reflexively poor-mouthing his own more talented outfit.

These quibbles amount to a modest pile beside the mountain of reasons to admire and respect the man who may have been the most charisimatic coach of his generation. Certainly none of his peers was handier with the one-liner. (When an apoplectic Woody Hayes shouted at the 1969 Rose Bowl, Why did O.J. go 80 yards?

it was his young assistant Holtz who replied, "Coach, that's all he needed.") And he was a hell of a game coach.

Maybe I am thinking about Holtz when I come upon a familiar commons. Despite having been to this campus a dozen times, I have yet to gain such a firm handle on it that I am not taken by surprise, just a bit, each time I come upon this green rectangle, which pulls the eye to the north. There above the reflecting pool is a massive, vibrantly colored mural called The Word of Life, a 163-foot rendering of the resurrected Christ better known by its more populist handle, "Touchdown Jesus."

In no particular hurry, I walk toward the pool and the Theodore Hesburgh Library, whose south-facing façade is brought to life by the most famous mosaic in sports. What's the deal with this haloed, Fu Manchu—ed, vaguely cubist Christ? Who are these smaller figures milling about beneath him? A plaque by the reflecting pool identifies apostles, just beneath "Christians of the early church," who reside on the mural above the guys representing for the "age of Science," whose bookishness is thrown into sharper relief by their proximity to the manly "explorers," whom the artist has blessed with better muscle tone and whose loins are girded with armor. Below them stand envoys from the "medieval era" and "ancient classic cultures." The scene is not static. Some heads are turned toward the Wonder Counselor, others are talking, gesticulating, arguing their positions, possibly discussing grant applications. Diagonal shafts of light further animate the tableau.

Later, I will learn that the mural has been rendered in granite to better withstand the Michiana elements. The artist, Millard Sheets, used 140 different colors. In a terrific little video clip on the university's Web site, Notre Dame architecture professor John W. Stamper explains that Sheets "visited 16 foreign countries and 11 different states" to find the granites he needed. Says Stamper, "The theme of the mural, Christ the Teacher, was based upon a biblical passage" from the first chapter of John. After sketching out the figure of Christ, Sheets drew in a cross (one of the last things you notice about the mural), then sketched in a kind of who's-who of Christianity. After the classical scholars and Old Testament prophets, he "moved upward on the mural, to the Byzantine, the medieval, the Renaissance."

"It's like a kaleidoscope of personalities making up the history of Christianity, and pre-Christianity as well," adds Father Hesburgh, who gets in the best line of the clip. "We knew that if we didn't do something with this building," he explains, when asked why the library needed a mural in the first place, "it could be mistaken for a grain elevator."

Walking back to the car I smile at a guy roughly my age—a dad playing Wiffle ball with his three sun-kissed daughters. They look to be around 14, 12, and 10. The youngest is at bat, rifling her old man's underhanded pitches past his head, despite the fact that she is confined to a wheelchair.

Saturday Rules
A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines). Copyright © by Austin Murphy. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Kyle09

Posted May 21, 2009

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Murphy must continue writing books

Austin Murphy does a tremendous job in delivering college football into a grand old game for America.He presents plenty of evidence to convince the common reader that college football is a much better sport that than the NFL.Mr.Murphy was also hilarious in this book as he takes you on a college football road trip of a life time.
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Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines)

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Editorial Reviews

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Read an Excerpt

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Murphy must continue writing books