Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football by Nicholas Dawidoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book. I first heard about it on NPR's It's Only A Game, and decided to read it right after the Super Bowl when my withdrawal symptoms from football were at their worst.
In this book, Dawidoff basically embeds with the Jets for the 2011-2012 season, as if he were a journalist embedding with a military unit. He attends practices and team meetings, travels with the team to all their games, and gets to know the coaches, players, and staff.
The 2011 season was a strange one - it was the year after Hard Knocks chronicled the Jets on HBO, the year after Rex Ryan's infamous foot fetish video, and the year of the labor strike that divided players from organizations for much of the off season. Cromartie and Sanchez and Holmes were key players that year.
It was really fun to ride along with Dawidoff. He did a great job characterizing the coaches and players, without idolizing them; Rex Ryan is profiled as a likable person, but not all the other coaches are. It was really interesting to hear how the Draft works from the teams' perspectives, and reading about training camp was fun.
It got even more interesting once the season began. I learned so much about how teams approach each game, what the rhythm of their week is like - how much a Thursday game throws them off, and what they do during the bye week. I learned a lot about football strategy as well - what differentiates one team's approach from another, and how they try to design an appropriate defense each week.
Definitely a must-read for football fans.
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