Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers

by Austin Murphy

Austin Murphy knows a thing or two about football. His twenty-three years at Sports Illustrated include six covering the NFL and a decade chronicling the college game. In Saturday Rules , Murphy leaves no doubt as to which beat he preferred. Does the NFL have better athletes? Yes. Does it entail more direct flights? Undoubtedly. Which game is better, more entertaining, less predictable? It's not even close—college football wins by two touchdowns. With rich traditions and deep passions—marching bands and menageries of living, breathing animal mascots; arm-long lists of ancient blood grudges—college football is far more captivating, fan-friendly, and, frankly, more fun than the corporate, clinical, risk-averse, imitation-intensive, hermetically sealed game they play on Sunday. No two programs are more storied than Notre Dame and USC, headed by those ex-NFL rivals and philosophical (and physiological) opposites Charlie Weis and Pete Carroll, perhaps the biggest names in the college game. With the inside scoop on these top-ranked teams, Murphy closely follows their arcs through the 2006 season, up to their late-November showdown in the L.A. Coliseum. He puts you in the field, in the meeting room, and in the huddle as both teams fight to keep alive their national title ambitions. Between trips to South Bend and Los Angeles, Murphy ranges repeatedly into Big Ten country, hooking up with Michigan and Ohio State, whose November 17 collision in Columbus constitutes one of the book's most memorable chapters. He ventures into the proud SEC, bearing witness to Florida's single loss of the season (and the ensuing "rolling" of Toomer's Corner). He is in the Rose Bowl for the season's most stunning upset (UCLA 13, USC, 9), and is in that grand old bowl a month later, as the Trojans are born anew. Murphy is on the field after the national title game, asking the Gators how they pulled off the upset. ("This is a fast . . . ass . . . team!" replies linebacker Brian Crum.) And he makes it his business to drop in on the Boise State Broncos after their miraculous, trick-play-intensive upset of Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl. Whether hanging out with members of the Ohio State marching band (including the senior sousaphonist, who will "dot the i " in the Buckeyes' famed cursive Ohio ), or sampling the frighteningly potent "Gator-Killer punch" at TGFKATWLOCP (The Game Formerly Known as the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party), or staying up past his bedtime to witness Notre Dame's midnight drum circle, Murphy is the perfect guide for this rich and raucous celebration of the pageantry and tradition, the talismans and rituals, that prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that when it comes to football, Saturday rules.

Genres: Sports, Football, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published September 4, 2007

About the author

Austin Murphy is an American author and journalist who wrote for Sports Illustrated for 33 years before corporate downsizing made him an Amazon.com delivery truck driver. After working for Amazon, Murphy was recently hired as a writer for the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat.

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

augh! the most hackneyed writing i've been exposed to in quite some time! i put it down on page 5, and retain it only as a decoy. i've realized that both my waiting for godot and my treasured hardback The Annotated Wasteland (the latter of which made it through 26 brain-aching weeks of anger management class but apparently couldn't make it through the old apartment) are missing. i don't know whether they were stolen or lost or drunkenly pressed upon people as gifts or forced into the hands of people who were like, "ummmmm, but nick, i can't read" and i said "ahhhh, read Eliot and you'll change your mind" and they were like, "ummmm....." and promptly threw the book into the bushes as they left argh thieving motherfuckers i hate them so much!!! so the hope is they'll steal/lose/be forced to take this one, instead. it works for uniform probability distributions and indeed any distribution where P(Shitty Saturday Rules) > 0.

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Amazon, third party, 2009-08-13. Getting ready for football season, w00t!!!!

[Tom Gase · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this book, although the author seems full of himself at times. But a very well reported, pretty well-written book on the 2006 college football season and a nice trip down memory lane. God I forgot just how good USC used to be. The Book focuses mostly on U.S.C. and Notre Dame, but there are other good sections on Ohio State, Florida, Michigan and a few other schools. There is just about a chapter for each week in that season, but a few weeks are skipped ahead. You get some good stories in this book on Troy Smith, Ted Ginn Jr. Michael Jarrett, Pete Carroll, Lamar Woodley, Brady Quinn, Charlie Weiss (especially Weiss and Quinn) and a few others. Not too game detailed, but not rushed either. Good stuff overall.

[Rob Vitagliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a fan of college football. I honestly couldn't care less about a sport that most football fans enjoy more than the professional level. That being said, I enjoyed this book so thoroughly, I had to start paying more attention to the sport afterwards. Learning just enough history of the teams involved to get invested, I remember being utterly surprised at how much I enjoyed a book about something I cared so little about. It was a given to me as a gift originally and I figured it was at least worth checking out, and I don't regret it for a second.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Austin Murphy, a long-time writer for Sports Illustrated, loves college football. He loves its traditions, wackiness, and big upsets. He loves its fun.

It is, in all its variegated splendor, the antidote to the corporate, clinical NFL, where the grail is parity, and a head coach needs a special waiver from the league to wear a suit on the sideline. Indeed, college football is the opposite of the pinched, unsmiling bureaucratic No Fun League, which last January put the kobosh on a church’s plan to use a wall projector to show the Colts-Bears Super Bowl game, tut-tutting that it would violate copyright laws.

Saturday Rules is his evidence: a chronicle of the 2006 Division I football season. He travels the country and takes part in a wide range of rituals: the Salute to Troy, the rolling of Toomer’s corner, a drum line in South Bend. He recounts the stunts of the ever-creative (if sometimes too creative) Stanford marching band. The crown of the season, of course, is Boise State’s victory over Oklahoma—an upset the likes of which the NFL hasn’t seen since the AFC-NFC merger and will likely not see again.

So there’s lots of fun here. Murphy is less than forthcoming about exposing the NCAA underbelly. He makes no mention of academic cheating. (He’d probably call it a “scandal” with an attempt to glamorize it.) Boosters who essentially bribe athletic departments to land a recruit or fire a coach are nowhere to be found here. Hard-core recruiting violations—all of which involve grown men and 17- and 18-year-old students—aren’t here to crash the party.

That’s not to say that Murphy isn’t right on the essential point: college football is more dramatic and more fun than its professional older brother. The traditions surrounding the college game are often a much-needed antithesis to lifeless commercial-driven events. Murphy would do far more justice to a very interesting game by pointing out that the drive to win is a two-edged sword. It can result in great efforts (see Boise State) and great shame. Making that point doesn’t rob the game of its high points, but it could make it clear that football, like all pursuits of excellence, needs to be vigilant about itself.

[Mark C. Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love college football, this book is worth your time. It's a look at the 2006 season, which seems LONG ago when you consider it was the first year of the SEC's current BCS championship streak.

The storytelling is great, and takes inside the personalities that make watching college football so entertaining. Urban Meyer's coaching approach is eye-opening, and learning about the background of some of the players is also enlightening. The close look into how major programs function shows what week-to-week grind that a football season can become.

but there were some editing mistakes that took away from my enjoyment. Sometimes Murphy's desire to demonstrate great writing covers up the basics of a game story, like getting the score wrong. I know it's tough to get everything right, but that's why you have editors. I thought the book was way too heavy on Southern Cal and Notre Dame, as those two schools only finished in the top 10 and were not playing for the BCS title.

It's an enjoyable read if you're anxiously awaiting football season all year, like many of us in the Southeast. It could have been great, but settling for "very good" isn't the worst place to be in your life.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book's an interesting narrative/first person account looking back on the 06' college football season. There are PROS and CONS. The PROS are that the book goes into great detail about the teams, players, and important big games of the year. It's also fascinating to read in 2010 with many of the players/coaches either having successful careers or flaming out badly. Which leads to the CONS; the book is like a verbal BJ for Charlie Weis and Notre Dame. It almost got me sick. It's hilarious to read these accounts of Weis, Llyod Carr, and Brady Quinn looking like gods, now knowing what happened to both today. When's your book coming out which looks at the last 3 years of ND football, Murphy? That pretty much lowered the book to 2 stars to me. Murphy also goes into great depth with USC + Ohio State as well. It's a decent read that goes by fast but you might want to put the book down from time to time because some of the stuff in their is ridiculous in retrospective.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the start of college football season, I thought it would be a good time to check this out. Austin Murphy takes readers through the 2006 season in a fun and amusing way. His premise is that college football is kore fun than the pros and reading this and the interviews with the college coaches and players, it seems that the personalities come out a lot more than the watered down personas that the NFL seems to out out there. My only complaint was very little PSU.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I thought this was a fun little book, with some interesting stories and anecdotes. There were lots of typos in the book, which caught me by surprise. But, if you are looking for a pretty quick, mindless read about the 2006 college football season, this fits the bill perfectly.

[Craig Brantley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good book to read over new year’s. I liked the insight at SC and ND. Murphy could have laid off a few of the big words. It’s just football dude!

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pleasant recap of the 2005 (?) college football season.

[Chandler]

Great analysis of the 2006 season through the lens of Notre Dame, Southern Cal, Michigan, Ohio St, and Florida. Even has a nice postscript on the Boise St Fiesta Bowl shocker from that season.

[Darryl Stangry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent read for college football maniacs like myself. Had hoped there would be more about FL given they won the National Title this year, but I was ok with the book overall.