Friday Night Lights: A Review

I can't think of a better book to recommend to my loyal readers than Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights.  Not only is Bissinger's work an excellent piece of journalism - part research paper, part interview, part cultural commentary piece - but it's a perfect book for those interested in learning more about the varying experiences of sports fans across the globe (I presume that's why you're here, unless you're a relative of mine.  If that's the case: Hi Mom!).  Though Friday Night Lights isn't mentioned alongside other excellent works of sports journalism (such as The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, for example)- likely because it's been a bit over-exposed by the presence of the film based on the book, and in turn the TV series based on the film based on the book - it's truly worth the read.

Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is the best sports book I've read in some time.

As I've discussed before, I grew up without much of a non-professional sports influence.  There's only one thing Long Island lacks more than decent college football, and that's decent high school football; I graduated from a school whose football team, while I was there, went an entire season without scoring a point.  I know nothing about the Friday Night Lights culture that dominates Texas and other parts of the south and midwest, and before reading this book completely lacked the ability to fathom a town or community completely consumed by a high school football program.  Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is the closest I'll ever get to experiencing a football season in a place like Odessa, Texas.  Not only does the book do an excellent job of documenting the pandemonium that is Permian High School football from the perspective of an outsider, but it also allows the reader to empathize with the characters on a personal level.

This book is not really about football; it's about what football can do to a community.  Sure, the chapters that talk about the results of particular games are interesting, but when you get down to it these games happened over 20 years ago (the work follows Permian High's 1988 campaign) and have long since been deemed as historically irrelevant.  What's far more compelling, and far more timeless, is Bissinger's ability to describe in detail the ways Permiam football changes - and dictates - the everyday lives of virtually every resident of Odessa.  From the Uncle who agrees to adopt his broken-home-fleeing nephew because he sees the opporunity to mold him into a Permian star, to the boosters who support the program even though their children and grandchildren have long since graduated high school, to the coach who comes home to "For Sale" signs stuck in his front lawn following every loss, almost every member of the town is engulfed by high school football.  Bissinger mixes in a bit of history here and there, too, helping the reader understand the origins of Permiam's on-field dominance and off-the-field obsessiveness.  The school district's committment to preserving the strength of the football program - often at the expense of academics, demographic heterogeneity, and safety of the players - is simultaneously terrifying and riveting.

If you like sports, read Friday Night Lights.  Even if you don't, though, anyone who has interest in the social sciences and leaning more about how communities of people interract will get a lot out of this book.  Bissinger's work is far more than the traditional non-fiction sports work.  Often that can be a recipe for disaster (read my review of Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves), but Friday Night Lights is the near-perfect mixture of sports, history and psychology.

Good Morning, NFL

Though tomorrow is my first day of graduate school classes and I've been assigned more work than I anticipated (assigned reading and homework before the first classes of the program?), I'm going to do my best to try and update Caught Looking at least once or twice a week while in school.  Living in the Bay Area should give me tons of new and (somewhat) interesting sports-related topics to write about.  With today being the first real day of the NFL season (the Thursday night season opening game doesn't really count, after all . . .), there's no better time to write about my return to morning NFL football.

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2005, I quickly discovered the beauty of the Pacific time zone when it comes to following the NFL, and following East Coast teams (like my New York Giants) in particular.  At first pass, most East Coast sports fans are against the idea of watching the early games starting at 10 AM local time; they complain that that's too early to watch games, that it's awkward to go to a sports bar that early in the morning, and that the Sunday night game is actually more of a Sunday "late afternoon" game, since it starts at 5 PM here on the West Coast.

Trust me on this: following football is better when you're three hours behind.  The key considerations:

• 10 AM is a great start time for games.  It gives you the ability to go out on a Saturday night, sleep to a respectable (but not too early or too late) time - let's say 9:30 AM - on Sunday morning, roll out of bed and immediately start watching NFL games.  What better way to start a Sunday?
• I've never been a big fan of football at sports bars - too noisy, too many distractions, too much emphasis on beer and food and not enough on football.  I especially dislike going to the bars when the Giants are playing - all I want to do is focus on Big Blue, and can do without hearing what the fat guy behind me (wearing the Jake Delhomme jersey, most likely) thinks about the Browns chances this year.  Having the East Coast games start at 10 AM makes it a bit less likely that people will want to mobilize to a bar for the early games, and lets you focus on the action with your fellow true fans at home.
• The late games end at 4 PM here, so the NFL doesn't kill your entire day.  Even if you watch through the Sunday night game, you're done by 9 PM and still have a few quality hours left in your Sunday night to do work, laundry (which I'm doing as I type), or whatever.  Anyone who responds to this with a "Yeah, but on the East Coast you can get stuff done before the start of the early games" is delusional; no one I know is even mildly productive before noon on a Sunday.

I almost forgot how great Pacific Standard Time football was until this weekend, when I took advantage of it for both NCAA (some games start at 9 AM!) and NFL games.  Throughout this season and next, I'll continue to embrace all of the 10 AM Giants games.  I encourage you all to come out to the Bay Area for a weekend during the NFL season; I'll be sure to show you how much fun being a West Coast football fan can be.

Dear Nike: Enough is Enough

Tonight I write to you from outside Park City, Utah, a town filled with BYU football fans.  Everywhere I look I've seen BYU shirts, car flags and license plate frames, with a few Utah Utes items sprinkled in.  Motivated by the college football spirit, I made sure to tune into ESPN tonight to check out the Labor Day battle between Boise State and Virginia Tech.  While I was hoping for some good football and an exciting, close game (the teams delivered on both), all I could focus on were how awful the uniforms were.

With the new Boise State uniforms, Nike definitely crossed the line.

Earlier this week, a loyal Caught Looking reader pointed me to this article about Nike's new Combat football line and uniforms, being worn this season by a number of schools including the Broncos and the Hokies.  As usual, Nike used a New York City-based fashion show to launch it's new duds and, also as usual, they're extremely ugly.  For a while, Nike only conducted their hideous experiments on the Phil Knight-dominated University of Oregon Ducks, but recently the Nike laboratory's reach has expanded across college football (and basketball, for that matter). 

The Boise State vs. Virginia Tech game displayed just how much damage Nike can inflict on college football uniforms.  The Rivals.com article does a good job of pointing out some of the true lowlights: namely the "ludicrously oversized Bronco logo on Boise State's alternative helmet and pants and the Tron-inspired design on Virginia Tech's numbers."  The one blue sleeve on the Broncos jerseys was also absurd, and I really disliked how Nike took the Hokies' classic maroon jerseys and turned them black.

I'm usually a big Nike fan; I often find myself buying their products, and think they've done a lot of good work in college sports.  But when Nike starts using college teams as vehicles to promote their new, "alternative" products, I say enough is enough.  Why can't we have more jerseys that look like those of the Oakland Raiders or New York Giants, and not something inspired by the inner components of a computer?

Notes from the Road

Greetings from Kearney, Nebraska, the third-night stopover on my five-day drive across the country.  The trip is going well so far, and I'm hoping to be approaching the Wyoming / Utah border by tomorrow night.  While this hasn't been a very sports-intensive weekend for me so far, I did have a few relevant notes I wanted to pass along.

• I recently got a new HTC Incredible for school and, while I primarily intend to use it to access email and make phone calls, it makes following sports incredibly convenient, too.  Getting up to speed on MLB and college football scores this weekend was super easy.  This likely warrants a post of its own sometime in the near future, but I have a feeling that the Incredible may have a profound impact on my ability to follow my favorite teams.
• The first half of this trip has been filled with college gridiron landmarks.  We had to pay a higher-than-expected nightly rate at a Holiday Inn Express in Howe, Indiana after our first day because we were within a short drive of South Bend on the Friday night before Notre Dame's opening contest against Purdue.  I also drove through or passed some other excellent college football towns that I might never visit again, including Iowa City (University of Iowa), Lincoln (University of Nebraska), State College (Penn State) and others. 
• I was especially excited to pass by Grinnell, Iowa and see signs for Grinnell College.  For those of you that don't know, Grinnell is somewhat famous in the college basketball world, mainly for their run-and-gun, high-scoring style.  Sometimes called the "Anti-Princeton Offense," the scheme known in Grinnell as "The System" has produced a number of highly competitive teams at the D-III level.  As a big Princeton hoops fan, it was interesting to pass by the school that's basically bizarro-Princeton from a basketball standpoint.
• Lots of NASCAR gear out here.  At a gas station near the Iowa / Nebraska border, there was a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Dale Earnhart, Jr. just outside the entrance to the restroom.  Probably not something you'd see at a Mobil station on Long Island.

Tomorrow's it's on through the rest of Nebraska (yes, it's as flat as they say) and on into Wyoming.  I'm targeting a Tuesday evening arrival into California, and I'll try to post this week either from the road again or from my new digs in Palo Alto.  Until then, there'll be plenty of scores to check on the HTC Incredible.

Be True To Your School

It's T-minus five days until I begin my road trip from New York to the Bay Area, where I'll be starting graduate school this fall.  One of the most common questions I get asked is "Are you going to become a Stanford sports fan, or keep Princeton as your college team?"  It's come up so often that I figured I'd address it here on Caught Looking.

I've been waiting for a major college sports program to root for my entire life.  I grew up on Long Island, an area devoid of big time college football (although Hofstra did have former New York Jet Wayne Chrebet and current New Orleans Saint Marques Colston at one point) or basketball (rooting for St. John's hoops is more painful than rooting for the New York Knicks, if you can believe it).  In college I became a big I-AA (or FCS, as it's now known) football fan and an even bigger Ivy League basketball fan, but I've always admitted that Princeton athletics lack the atmosphere and passion that BCS conference schools possess.  Now, by chance, I'm headed to Stanford, a school full of sports tradition and right in the middle of a wide open Pac-10 football and basketball race.

The perfect opportunity to convert from small time Ivy League sports to big time Pac-10 athletics, right?  Well, not exactly.  While I'm definitely going to become a fan of the Stanford Cardinal and plan on attending some football and basketball games this fall, I'll never care about Stanford the way I'll always root for Princeton.  I think it's definitely okay to adopt your grad school as your secondary team, but you always have to stand by your undergrad squads.  While it might be tempting to abandon the Tigers for the bright lights of the Pac-10, I would never consider doing it.     

While I'm excited to be a part of Pac-10 sports, the Tigers will always be my first love.

Within the Pac-10 (and all of FBS football, for that matter), I'll be happy to don the cardinal red and cheer for Stanford.  But in basketball, where the Tigers and Cardinal could conceivably compete, I'll never give up on my alma mater.  When Princeton (a 13-seed) and Stanford (a surprise 4-seed as Pac-10 champions) meet in the first round of the 2011 NCAA Tournament, I'll be in the stands decked out in the orange and black.