Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: Ole Miss, Ole Hiss, Ili Ili (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A jaw-dropping book. Bruce Feldman is the John Feinstein of his generation. He has gotten inside and gained access to this complex subject better than any sportswriter in memory. Meat Market is easily among the best sports books of the new millennium. Not only was it engaging, it was at times hilarious and frightening, seeing what really happens in the bowels of recruiting. This is must-reading for any college football fan. I don't know when I have enjoyed a book more or been unable to put one down. This book absolutely blew me away." --Paul Finebaum, Mobile Register columnist and talk show host -- Paul Finebaum

"Bruce Feldman has recorded the most detailed account of a recruiting season I've read. You are taken behind the curtain of a program hungry to reach the elite and provided a revealing, fascinating look at one of college football's unique characters, Coach ÔOÕ." --Chris Fowler, ESPN College GameDay host -- Chris Fowler

"Coach Orgeron transfers his ferocious competitive spirit into all phases of his coaching, particularly as a recruiter. He's relentless in his effort and comprehensive approach to the whole recruiting process." --Pete Carroll, head coach, USC -- Pete Carroll

"Recruiting is the lifeblood of college football yet is the most mysterious, misunderstood aspect of the sport. Feldman opens doors and opens eyes in a revealing look at how the machine that drives college football really works. Playing the big boys on the field is one thing. For those outside the "traditional power" fraternity, Meat Market shows that recruiting against them is even tougher . . . even for a Red Bull powered recruiting maniac like Ed Orgeron." --Rece Davis, ESPN College Football studio host -- Rece Davis

"Tremendous behind-the-scenes look at the highs and lows of recruiting with extremely accurate portrayal of the day-to-day operation. This book captures what goes into the evaluation, scouting, tape study and on and off campus recruitment of some of the best players in the country. An unprecedented chance to get the true skinny on how high school and juco athletes end up on a college campus." --Jim Donnan, ESPN college football analyst and former Georgia head coach -- Jim Donnan

"We all knew Bruce Feldman could write. We all knew him to be a meticulous researcher. What we did not know until now is that he has the guts of an S.E.C. middle linebacker. On his next trip to Oxford he may take an Ed Orgeron headbutt for this canny and thorough page turner. This is the best I have seen on the real story of bigtime college recruiting. I loved reading this book!" --Bill Curry, former coach at Alabama, Georgia Tech and Kentucky -- Bill Curry

"What serious football fan wouldn't love to be a fly on the wall in the recruiting war room of a major college program? Feldman got to do just that, delivering a fascinating first-hand account of all the dizzying phone calls, late-night film sessions, frantic road trips, and paranoid parents that went into the Ole Miss coaching staff's pursuit of a recruiting class." --Stewart Mandel, Sports Illustrated -- Stewart Mandel

Product Description

In college football circles, the first Wednesday in February is New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, and Christmas all rolled into one. It’s payoff time for a year spent screening miles of videotape and probing mountains of data, balancing the promise of a dazzling 40-yard-dash time against the perils of a putrid GPA, and text-messaging high schoolers 50 times a day. It’s the day when coaches across the country camp out in front of their fax machines waiting for their football futures to be decided by a bunch of 18-year-olds.

It’s National Signing Day.

In this surprising and unprecedented dissection of college football’s secret season, author Bruce Feldman takes you deep inside the war room of Ole Miss head coach Ed Orgeron, the combustible Cajun who built national championship teams at the University of Miami and USC before setting up shop in the Deep South. In a blow-by-blow account of the year leading up to National Signing Day 2007, Feldman reveals the inner secrets of Orgeron’s success, recounting every step along the way as Orgeron and his Ole Miss staff pick 25 winners from a list of 1,000 names.

Meat Market makes the actual football season—the one that runs from September through January—read like a postscript.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: ESPN (September 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933060395
• ISBN-13: 978-1933060392
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #17,927 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the better sports books I've ever read., October 1, 2007

By	Kyle Minor "reader" (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews

Bruce Feldman, in his study of big-time college recruiting, could have chosen to follow the coaching staffs at, say, USC, or the University of Florida, or Notre Dame -- one of those programs whose name alone sways your average high school recruit. In choosing, instead, to follow the staff at Ole Miss, Feldman locates the reader where the real struggle is: at the bottom rung of a big-time conference, in the shadow of traditional SEC powers LSU and Alabama, in the hands of an energetic and unorthodox coach who, quite frankly, wouldn't have this job at any other SEC school.

The frank and evenhanded account that follows is worthy of the best sports books I've ever read, among them John McPhee's Levels of the Game, Kevin Kerrane's Dollar Sign on the Muscle, and Ron Luciano's The Umpire Strikes Back. It's entertaining as hell, and informative to boot. If you want to know what it's like to sit in the war room alongside the hungriest recruiting staff in America, this is the book for you. Feldman delivers and delivers.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Have the other reviewers actually read this book?, December 28, 2007

By	Dr. Teeth (Florida) - See all my reviews

I question whether any of the other reviewers have actually read this book. It is as though Feldman took his notes from trailing Orgeron and his staff and had them transcribed into book form them without adding any real insight or conclusions.

I went to school at Ole Miss and am a fan of Ole Miss football, as well as SEC football in general. While this book enumerates the minutiae of Ole Miss recruiting in excruciating detail (wanna know how many Red Bulls Coach Orgeron drinks per day?), it offers no real insight into SEC recruiting, or college football on a larger scale. In one funny anecdote that does stand out, University of Florida Coach Urban Meyer tells a top QB recruit that Tim Tebow (this year's Heisman Trophy winner) is coming to Florida to "be a linebacker", but that is one of the few memorable passages.

The sad truth is, this book appears to be nothing more than a shameless attempt to ride the coattails of Michael Lewis excellent book, "The Blind Side." Lewis followed the progress of left tackle Michael Oher from inner-city Memphis to his eventual enrollment at Ole Miss, offering illuminating and hysterical profiles of Orgeron, Nick Saban, Philip Fullmer, and others in the process. I learned far more from "The Blind Side" than "Meat Market", and if you are looking to learn about recruiting in college football, it would be a better place to start.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So Long Coach O, December 4, 2007

By	A Southern Reader (New Orleans, LA United States) - See all my reviews

Ironically, I picked up this book from the library the day Ole Miss announced that Ogeron had been fired. So, you can ignore the part of the book where he talks about 2007 being the year they would get a bowl bid.
In fact, Coach O's brilliance instead of getting Ole Miss a bowl bid got them 0-8 in SEC conference play, but I digress.

Since the author had unlimited access to the recruiting process, the book is nothing if not interesting and revealing about the real world of college football recruiting, and I think it will be a good read for a college football fan ( though probably not an Ole Miss fan since it is a reminder of their dismal situation caused by Ogeron ). The downside of the book for me was the constant repeating of the same story, ie the lenghts they were going to to recruit some player. The book could have used a lot more substance.