The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

Another Portland book. I read this book as a desperate cry for help - okay, maybe it was just withdrawl from college football (and disappointment with the results of the last season). Anyway, it's about college football, its relationship with high school football and the NFL, the evolution of the passing game/west coast offense, the left tackle position, and a kid named Michael Oher. I knew next to nothing about any of these before reading the book. Now I know more - enough to hold a conversation, but I suppose one book doesn't make an expert, even if it's a great book.

It's fun to read, though, since I didn't know much about most of the topics, it's hard to judge it. I'm trying to see what others who know more think about the book, but I think most of the people I know are just shocked that I read it in the first place. But what I liked most about it was the way it managed to tie all the stories and topics together. It's an interesting book, about an interesting kid, and it made me all the more interested in watching this guy, and perhaps maybe even some NFL.

"Inside football, the argument between brains and brawn never has been settled, and probably never will be. The argument less and less found its way into words off the field, but on the field, it reprised itself in action and strategy, over and over again. And on the chilly wet afternoon in Candlestick Park, it was about to play out in an extreme form, with Walsh as the brains and Bill Parcells as the brawn. Parcells was deeply suspicious of the overt use of intellect on a football sideline. He knew that Walsh claimed to script the first 25 plays of every game in advance, but later said 'that scripting was a bunch of bullshit. They never got past number eight.'... (By 2006, two thirds of the teams in the NFL had been run by a coaching descendant of Walsh or Parcells). After Parcells later won his first Super Bowl, in 1986, he said his style of football 'never had anything to prove. It's the fancy-pants stuff that needs to prove itself.' Walsh was the latest embodiment of fancy-pants. In 1981, people were starting to take notice of his new and improved little passing game, but Parcells had something new and improved, too: a passing destructomatic called Lawrence Taylor. Just as Walsh was lowering the risk of throwing the ball, Parcells was raising the risk to the men who threw it."

"The DMV was for some reason miles east, outside the Memphis beltway, on a road lined with anemic maples, porn shops, and churches. They passed a porn shop and then a church and then another porn shop and another church; it was as if the people of Memphis had chosen this place to fight the war between animal nature and the instinct to subdue it."

"The play was called Gap because each lineman was responsible for his own gap, defined as the space between his inside eye and the head of the defender inside of him (the eye and the defender closest to the center). The quarterback handed the ball to the running back. The running back ran at the right butt cheek of the left tackle, Michael's gap, and followed it as far as it would take him. Michael's job was simply to run straight down the field and destroy everything in front of him.

Michael had brought to Briarcrest an argument that ran straight through football on every level - high school, college, the NFL. It was the argument that Bill Walsh met when he first stressed the passing game as it had never before been stressed. It was the argument between the football fundamentalists and the football liberals. The fundamentalists reduce football to a game of brute force - and some of them do it so well that they appear to have found the secret to football success. The liberals minimize the importance of brute force and seek to overcome brute force with guile - and some of them do it so well that they, too, appear to have found the key to football success. That was Hugh: small, blond, looking nothing like a football coach but every once the crafty chess master, or the military strategist. Whatever his politics, Hugh was, by nature, a football liberal.

Sean Tuohy thought there was another reason, apart from his desire to win, why Hugh made everything so complicated: the pleasure of thinking up new things. 'Hugh thinks football is supposed to be fun,' said Sean. 'We've got a quarterback who is average at best. No running back. No speed at receiver. And Hugh wants to run the triple reverse.'

Hugh wanted to run a triple reverse because in his seven years as head coach of the Briarcrest Christian School Hugh had never had a player he could count on to physically overpower the bigger kids from the bigger schools. Now he had one of the most awesome forces ever to walk onto a Tennesseee football field; and he didn't at first grasp the implications of that. He thought he could keep coaching the way he had always coached, and win a state championship."