Spirit-deflating but eye-opening reading for hardcore students of The Game.
A revealing look inside the NFL’s front office, heaven for number-crunchers.
Wall Street Journal sports editor Robinson and executive news editor Clegg open with a football fanatic named Howie Roseman, who had pursued a position with a NFL team since high school. Finally hired to formulate salary-cap strategy, he became the league’s youngest ever general manager. For all his analytical savvy, Roseman was edged out of management by an old-school jock; Roseman gets some sweet revenge, but it takes a while to get there. Meanwhile, Robinson and Clegg have the hard job of explaining just how that salary cap works, for which it helps to have a math degree. Its intent, along with the structure of the annual draft, was to level the playing field, so to speak, so that dynasties could not form. The draft, for instance, gives preference to the teams with the lowest record of wins in the previous season. In theory, this makes it hard to guess who’ll end up at the Super Bowl. Sometimes it works that way, as with the Seattle Seahawks in their time of glory, with little money but plenty of psychotic on-field rampages. Sometimes it doesn’t. Teams soon figured out how to game the game, though, some by playing the equivalent of penny stocks, picking dozens of low-value rookies in the hope that some work out, others by putting all their money on blue chips. In the end, the authors note, it was all about math: “You could no longer win on the force of talent or grit or Xs and Os alone,” not when suiting up now means Armani and not shoulder pads. Of course, the money side has worked out just fine for the owners, given that viewership of Game 7 of the 2025 World Series “was outdrawn by thirteen NFL matchups from the regular season alone.”
Spirit-deflating but eye-opening reading for hardcore students of The Game.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9780063442641
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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