Season of Saturdays

September 1, 2014
Veteran college football writer Weinreb (Bigger than the Game) grew up in State College, Pa., adoring Joe Paterno and the Nittany Lions. The elegance and dexterity with which he explains his emotional attachment since childhood â even after Penn State's football program was rocked by a damning sexual child abuse scandal in 2011 â is only one reason why this cultural history of the game belongs on the shelf of every hardcore college football fan. His candor and passion are displayed on every page as he traces the sport's official beginning to Nov. 6, 1869, when Rutgers defeated Princeton by the baseball-like score of 6-4, and concludes with the 2013 Iron Bowl, when Auburn's Chris Davis caught Alabama's missed field goal attempt and ran the ball back 109 yards for a most unlikely touchdown and a berth in the SEC Championship Game. Weinreb assigns each chapter a so-called "game of the century" title and allows himself plenty of latitude to explain why "college football is fundamentally different than any other sport." By evoking sympathy for larger-than-life coaches Woody Hayes and Nick Saban, poking fun at Notre Dame and Michigan, and tackling "the incongruous notion of marrying amateurism with big business," Weinreb convinces readers he's right.

August 1, 2014

Weinreb, a Pennsylvania State alumnus and passionate fan, was driven to write this idiosyncratic history of college football when he confronted his athletic loyalties in light of the Pennsylvania State child-sex-abuse scandal and other prominent examples of corruption in the sport. The 14 games of the title jump from 1869 to 1913 and then to 1962 on; the gaps reveal that the book is not about these particular matches or a rigidly chronological rendering of the past. Instead, the author uses the selected games as symbols and discussion points of key elements of the sport. In addition to covering essential topics such as the origins of the college game and the adoption of the forward pass, Weinreb also addresses other items including overly passionate coaches, Southern football as religion, tie games, and improbable upsets. Despite the frequent conflict between money-making football and academic mission, Weinreb defends college football's existence for its spontaneity, tameless nature, and ability to bond an academic community across generations. VERDICT Entertainingly written for the college football fan.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2014
Journalist Weinreb was brought up in State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State, and shares a fascinationokay, an obsessionwith fans similarly raised in university towns or educated at the big football schools (he is disdainful of eastern liberal-arts colleges), or just compelled by the phenomenon that has dominated Saturday afternoons for more than 100 years. He cleverly (this is a very well put-together book) recapitulates this history hung on the stories of 14 college football gamesbowls and regular-season contestsdating back to the Rutgers-Princeton game of 1869. This device provides the armature, gratefully, not for dull play-by-play descriptions but rather for a discursive (he prefers footnotes to parentheses), informative, sardonic, and often hilarious (especially regarding Notre Dame) account of a sport attended (never mind seen on television) by 50 million colorfully dressed fans every year. The book is being published at a time when the game is, as it often has been, in transition and under considerable scrutiny, not least of all in Weinreb's hometown, and questions of race, corruption, amateurism, trickery, hypocrisy, and hyper-aggressiveness are integral components of this absorbing book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)