Customer Reviews

Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today's NFL

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I was anxiously looking forward to this book as I have always been curious about what goes on with an NFL team away from the cameras. Unfortunately, this book came up way short of my expectations. I learned a lot about the Baltimore Ravens, but not much about the NFL. Any fan of the Ravens should steer clear because there is little in this book that they won't already know if they follow the team. There were a few exceptions, but for the most part this book gives no more detail than you would find if you followed the team through the local papers throughout the year.

A true look "behind the lines" would go into far greater depth about what life is like during the week. We often hear about players who come in early and stay late, but what does that mean? What happens during the film sessions? How do the coaches formulate a game plan? How is the game plan presented to the players? If players are at the complex all day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, what is happening? Surely they aren't on the practice field that whole time. Are they in meetings? In the weight room? Working on individual techniques with position coaches? Studying film?

A classic example of a missed opportunity was Feinstein's discussion (p. 182) of the injury to starting center Mike Flynn and how the loss would affect the offensive line because, among other things, "it is the center who makes all the calls for the linemen, which makes him the quarterback of the group". Well, we often hear announcers talk about centers making calls on blocking assignments but none ever explains what that means. Here was a perfect opportunity to take a few sentences to clarify this concept. What are the calls? What do they mean? How do the other linemen hear them in the midst of the quarterback's signals? What happens with the line calls if the QB calls an audible? Feinstein offers nothing.

On the positive side, the description of the so-called "clothes Nazis" employed by the league was humorous but informative. The closest thing we got to a real inside look at things was the discussions among the coaches, staff and front office surrounding the decisions being made on the final cuts before the start of the season. The conflict between the coordinators and the special teams coaches over keeping players who are strictly special teamers versus those who can also play a position on offense or defense was especially interesting.

On the whole, I'd look elsewhere if you really want to know what goes on behind the scenes in the NFL

The author spent a year with the Baltimore Ravens and the result is this book that describes in-depths the 2004 season with the NFL team. It's curious to note there is no mention of the Ravens visible on the front cover, the back cover or the inside flaps of the dust cover. Maybe this marketing ploy is to entice all readers interested in the NFL and not just Raven fans. In any case, this is a fantastic look inside a year of a NFL team, as well as a look at how NFL players go through the emotions of being cut, getting injured, going through real-life trials, relationships with coaches and owners, and the ups and downs of winning and losing on a weekly basis. Peppered throughout the book are mini-bios of several players and coaches, including the stars of the team as well as some players who were cut in training camp or who barely made the 53-man squad. These sections are most worthwhile to Ravens fans.

The devoted NFL fan will not find any startling newsflashes or issues regarding the game, but there are certainly several interesting tidbits and stories throughout the book, such as: the difference between the Raven's owner (Steve Bisciotti) and the Redskin's owner (Daniel Snyder); the Terrell Owens debacle - before the season and the game against the Eagles; the discussions that take place in the draft war room, specifically the GM Ozzie Newsome; the role of religion in the NFL; and many other issues. So this book may be more appealing to the casual fan than the fanatic.

To top it off, Feinstein's writing style is so smooth and so readable, it makes this book worthwhile and I recommend it to any sports fan - even those fans of the Steelers, the Bengals and the Browns!

This is the first Feinstein book I've read, although I have heard a lot about his past books. I am also a fairly knowledgeable football fan (not particularly a Raven fan, though), and in a large part because of that, I found this book to be shallow, superficial and trivial. For someone that is not a fan of the most heavily covered sport in the world Feinstein's tedious tome may be readable and illuminating. But I found this book to contain very little that a knowledgeable fan wouldn't know about, or couldn't find from other sources.

In any sucessful work of non-fiction, the author needs to distill the essence of real life people into the pages of a book. Feinstein does this by providing endless and monotonous, thumbnail biographies of all the characters that he runs into in his year with the Ravens. "So and so grew up in the Deep South/Inner City/Midwest/So-Cali, his father was a firefighter/Coast Guardsmen/Test Pilot, and from the time he could tie his shoes he wanted to play football." There are literaly endless pages of this drivel. A football team consists of 53 players on the active roster, which is down from 85 or so in pre-season training camps, the coaching, scouting and training staffs combined are 30 to 40 people and it seems like Feinstein has a 2 page mini-biography on each and every one of these people. After awhile you cringe when Feinstein's monlogue shifts to a player he hasn't said much about previously, because you just know he's going to roll into another little biography filled with trivial details about what the player's parents did, how many siblings he had, when he started playing football, what his SAT scores were, what he did in high school, where he went to college, how he got into the NFL, and on and on and on.

There is very little in this book in the way of technical details. Things like how game plans are developed, how adjustments are made during the game, how practices are structured, and the intense preparation during the week for upcoming games. Feinstein, to his credit did focus a fair amount of effort, on how personnel decisions are made. But this is one of the most compelling issues on any football team, and Feinstein's coverage of it just left me wanting more, it just wasn't detailed enough. For example, the Ravens lose their punter for three games in the middle of the season, they bring in 10 players for a mid-season tryout. Feinstein launches into a 2 page biography of the guy that wins the tryout, but doesn't talk about any of the others, what the tryout was like, how the decision was made to pick the one guy, what the details of his contract were, what issues he had trying to fit in with the rest of the team. But thanks to Feinstein, I now know what the guy's parents did, where he went to college and which NFL team first signed him and how many teams he's been cut from. Also at the end of the season no effort is made by the Ravens to re-sign some of their best defensive players, notably Ed Hartwell and Gary Baxter, yet they re-negotiated Chris McAllister's contract during the season, why? We don't know, I get the impression Feinstein probably doesn't either.

The title of the book, Next Man Up, refers to the injury rate in the NFL which is extreme, virtually everyone gets hurt. But Feinstein goes in to very little detail about how teams and the players deal with it. The Ravens Pro-Bowl Left Offensive Tackle, Jonathon Ogden, gets hurt and has to be replaced for several games. Feinstein mentions this, but there was so much more he could have done. How did Ogden get hurt? What did he have to do to heal? How did the other members of the offensive line deal with his absence in practice? In games? How did the Ravens game plan change? How sucessful, ultimately, were the Ravens in replacing the cornerstone of their line over those games?

There is so much more that Feinstein could have covered in this book. He had virtually nothing about the player/agent/team triangle and how contracts werer negotiated. Nothing on the logistics of an NFL team traveling to play a road game. He mentioned that the Ravens chartered a train to go to Philly and New York. Really? What was that like? I don't know, Feinstein just mentioned it. What was the air travel like? What kind of hotels did the team stay in? What was it like? How did the players/coaches/staff deal with the travel? What do players do on the road? He talked a little about the pre-game meeting with the networks and the weekly media conference calls with the opponent's media, but other than that had very little to say about the relationship between the players, media and team. NFL teams also put tremendous pressure on their players to do charitable work in the community, no discussion of that at all. Brian Billick, the head coach of the Ravens, has a reputation as an innovator, especially with the use of computers. How does he use them? Are playbooks now all oncomputers? Do players carry around laptops rather than binders? If you are interested in stuff like that, you will still be clueless after reading Feinstein's book.

Rather than an true inside look at a football team, Feinstein's book reads more like the team's yearly media guide, notable more for it's endless biographies of the players and staff than any illuminating details of the team. Sadly a disappointing book.

I've been disappointed by John Feinstein's writing before - I thought his season with Bob Knight failed to produce a high quality book. I'm disappointed again with this book. What should have been a great opportunity for an author to take a reader behind the scenes with a pro football team was squandered by this mediocre writing effort. I hear Feinstein on sports radio regularly and find him engaging and sharp, so I expect his writing to be good. But, it's not that great. I don't know whether he lacks the writing talent or fails to invest the effort required to do outstanding work. Regardless, he doesn't really deliver the goods in this book. It's long and tiresome in spite of the fact that the material seems to be interesting.

I hope that future writing opportunities like this one are directed to better or more motivated writers. Unless you're a diehard Ravens fan, you can skip this one.

This is a good book if you are interested in how the Ravens transformed themselves from one of the most feared team's in the NFL to a laughingstock in two short seasons.

As stated by other reviewers, the author made many mistakes. (My favorite was refering to the current Maryland Speaker of the House Michael Busch as residing in Western Maryland -- the home of former Speaker of the House Cas Taylor.)

The mistake underscores the author's constant misapplication of political subthemes to a book that was supposedly written about football. On a related matter, the author's cheap shots at people like Michael Powell were just plain petty and showed that he was more interested in criticizing individuals who had nothing to do with the management of the football team than he was in criticizing the people who were the subject of the book.

On the football front, the author reveals his own unfortunate bias to the team's head coach -- clearly showing that the author felt an allegiance to the coach for the unprecendented access he provided to him. However, as the 2004 and 2005 seasons have played themselves out, the inherent incompetence of the coach has come to the forefront for even casual observers of the game.

The good news is that Mr. Feinstein's "Walter Duranty" style of journalism -- trading access for objectivity -- is as transparent as can be, and a knowledgeable football fan can read this book to learn the root causes of the team's ongoing woes.

The book lays bare the undisciplined nature of Coach Billick's coaching style, along with the lack of coherence between the team's offensive unit and defensive unit. And it also quotes an actual conversation that Billick had with an offensive coach advocating against any competition at the QB position because he was worried about the fragile psyche of the supposed "tough kid" he had anointed as the team's starting QB fresh out of college.

A good book, but not for the reasons the author and the man who granted him access intended.

In contrast to much of Feinstein's earlier work, this book does not give the feel of truly being behind the scenes with a team. Instead it reads as a series of personal profiles interspersed with bland descriptions of games that really add very little that couldn't be found in a wire service recap. Feinstein touches on the issues facing the team, but doesn't delve into them at all. He spends much of the book talking about Kyle Boller, but he never analyzes why Boller struggles; indeed from reading the bulk of the book one might think that Boller is playing well. It isn't until the last few pages of the book acknowledges that Boller was, in fact, the lowest-rated quarterback in the league. He mentions in passing that Ray Lewis's play is slipping (actually he notes that John Madden mentions the slippage on Monday Night Football), but he never talks further about the issue. Actually that is probably the best description of the weaknesses of this book: John Madden made more insightful comments about a player in one sentence on TV than Feinstein makes in the entire book. All in all, while it was an easy read and has some interesting sections, the book as a whole was very disappointing.

Sadly, John Feinstein swapped his integrity for access to an NFL team to write this book. Feinstein has written far better books on other topics than this. Other authors have written far better books on this topic than Feinstein did here. His failure to research the players and the team owners deeply results in simplistic, misleading and often false explanations of the very events that people read an insider book to get. The problem is consist throughout the work. I suggest The Education of a Coach by Halberstam instead.

The NFL is easily the most image-conscious professional sports league. While the NBA may have instituted a new dress code, the NFL has long had one. Players and coaches on the sidelines must wear licensed NFL apparel. And the NFL was quick to shut down "Playmakers" on ESPN by threatening to revoke the network's contract.

Feinstein does a good job of penetrating the veil in his one-season journal with the Baltimore Ravens. The team gave him access to everything, and the real strength of this book is the chronicles of the interplay between players, that between coaches, and that between player and coach. You learn how player cuts and acquisitions come about, how coaches go about motivating their teams, and the rituals of game preparation.

Also interesting are the league's policing of injury reports (all practices are taped so the league can validate the seriousness of a player's injury) and uniforms (former players are charged with gathering pregame uniform code violations and reporting them to a designated coach for correction). Feinstein also dives into the role of religion in the game, as many of the Ravens star players are among their most overt Christians.

The commonality with Feinstein's other books are his excellent mini-biographies of players, so the football fan can see the human side of those who are masked behind helmets, faceguards and pads each week. This is one of the author's better "season in the life" chronicles.

DJ

I have now read 5 Feinstein books (Civil War, A March to Madness, A Good Walk Spoiled, The Open and this one)and they are all essentially in the same style. There is no technical discussion of the sports involved, Feinstein is more interested in the characters who play and coach the games and the environments they work in rather than how the games are played. This worked brilliantly in Civil War where the young men with no prospect of a professional career played for the honour of their service academies and the respect of their peers and losing with dignity was as important as winning. 'Character' was of vital importance.

In all of the other books this way of writing doesn't have the same impact because sports fans could care less about the early lives of proffesional golfers,football players and basketball coaches. They care even less about how Golfers or Sports coaches met their wives, which Feinstein seems to find endlessly fascinating. What they want to know about is playing and coaching philosophies, why teams play a certain way and how important in-game decisions are made. What Feinstein CAN do is take you into a losing locker room and give you some idea of the tensions and emotions that exist there, and these are some of the best moments in the book. With his insider access he could have been stronger on certain things like the Draft (although admittedly the Ravens had to settle for less than stellar options in every round). Compare his chapter on the NFL draft with Michael Lewis' chapter on the Moneyball draft and you can see that something is missing.

Overall though there are enough little snippets of information in here that you can't get just by reading your local beat writer's column every day that save it from being a total dud. Like Kyle Boller being considered just a tad below Carson Palmer and Ben Roethlisberger in ability by the Raven's scouts and the teams bafflement that that ability has never manifested itself on the field. Brian Billcks ritual walk to the stadium from the hotel for home games accompanied by only one security guy, mingling with Ravens fans along the way was an eye-opener. Even the petty fact that ESPN's Len Pasquarelli will not do a training camp preview on the Ravens because of Billick's comments before the Superbowl in 2001 came as something of a shock.

Read it if you want some background filler on a supposedly typical NFL team, but not for any great insights into how Professional Football is played.

Had this book been just a chronologically ordered account of an NFL season with enough additional detail to fill in the blank spots - which it is -- I would have called it very good. But unfortunately, it is rife with pettiness and minor factual and grammatical mistakes, enough so that, just when you're really starting to enjoy the read, it all comes crashing down.

For example, take these offenses, from Chapter 16 alone:

-- Feinstein first says "The arrival of the Monday Night football crew in town was greeted with slightly less enthusiasm than the Beatles' arrival in New York in 1964," which clearly implies a significant reception. A few sentences later, he states, "the arrival of the MNF crew in town is greeted with more of a whimper than a bang." Pick one, please.

-- Feinstein credits announcer Al Michaels with "massive ego" and says Michaels "didn't even show up for ABC's pregame [stet] production meeting." We learn, a few sentences later, that Michaels wasn't physically there; he was participating by phone.

"Didn't even show up" implies Michaels had no involvement in the meeting, which clearly he did; Feinstein doesn't explain further, so for all we know, Michaels was sitting by someone's death bed, or may simply have had an important family engagement to attend. Again, this may seem like picking nits, but the point is, the accusations he levels on Michaels are petty (especially since Michaels doesn't get a chance to defend himself), and Feinstein himself admits his statements about Michaels aren't true.

-- Feinstein takes some cracks at then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell, "a job he clearly had been given on pure merit, having nothing to do with the fact that his father was secretary of state." Later in the book, Feistein has no problem with nepotism when new offensive coordinator Jim Fassel's son is hired as a defensive coaching assistant by the Ravens.

-- Feinstein complains about ABC's requests to find Powell a luxury box. He states that Powell refused in-stadium tickets as "Powell did not want to sit among the great unwashed in the stands." A couple sentences later, he notes that press box tickets were turned down, as well, because "Powell had Secret Service protection and at least one agent had to be with him."

If the press box couldn't be made secure to the Secret Service's liking, how likely is it the stands could be made so? And how is that Powell's fault? Additionally, it's not unlikely that politicians and VIPs have visited a Ravens home game before, what with Washington, D.C. less than an hour away. Why doesn't Feinstein question how the Ravens could be so disorganized as to have no leeway to entertain dignitaries, especially when they are hosting Monday Night Football?

-- Even after badmouthing Powell because of his actions following the "wardrobe malfunction" of Super Bowl XXXVIII, which hardly rises to the level of criminality, Feinstein has no problem noting, without comment, that Jamal Lewis, who was guilty of intentionally facilitating a cocaine deal between an undercover agent and some of his friends, was going to plea bargain that matter. He also notes that plea bargain would happen only after the team and the NFL brokered a two-game suspension following a clandestine, "we-never-met" meeting -- which Feinstein describes without passing judgment.

There are other examples I could point to -- elsewhere, Feinstein says Ravens quarterback Kyle Boller was named NFC player of the week, but the Ravens are in the AFC (actually, given the way Boller played in his 2004 stint [70.9 QB rating], maybe the NFC thought he played for them, or maybe they were just thanking him for being the worst quarterback in the rival conference); Feinstein repeats often the fantasy that Ray Lewis did not plea bargain his obstruction of justice charge (Lewis just suddenly decided to cooperate fully with police, after initially lying to them, Feinstein would have us believe), and so forth.

Which is symptomatic of the entire book: It takes a decidedly pro-Ravens stand. No one -- coaches, players, office or support people -- is criticized in any manner. Any statement or action that might be considered in any negative light is immediately conditioned or explained.

Considering the venom Feistein has for everyone else, it's surprising (or is it?) that he does not make judgments of any sort about the Ravens' personnel or actions.