The nice thing about reading Endzone first, i.e. out of order, is that its bird's-eye perspective helps to illuminate many of Three and Out's worm's-eye happenings. Three and Out recounts how the apocalyptic coaching search that ended in the befuddling & ultimately doomed decision to hire Rich Rod happened; Endzone relates why the coaching search turned apocalyptic. The only missing piece of what would be John U. Bacon's stunning "Lost Decade" trilogy is a postmortem of how & why Michigan football was in slow-motion collapse in the waning years of Coach Carr's tenure, a hollowing out that few of us noticed until it was too late (your humble narrator certainly didn't). More on all of this in a post I am aspiring to write, "The Victors: The Lost Decade;" fear not, before that I'll get caught up on the current season.
If I have a complaint about Three and Out it is that Bacon is too sympathetic to his subject. Yes, he often describes Rich Rod's mistakes & is unafraid to call them such, & yes, a certain re-balancing of the scales is necessary given the shameful way in which so many Michigan Men mistreated Rodriguez, never even giving the poor fellow a chance. But in the end, Bacon makes clear that he views as unfair the decision to fire Rodriguez after the 7-6 2010 season, the only winning season of Rich Rod's tenure. This is hard to square with Bacon's otherwise clear-eyed analysis of the valiant Wolverines' many deficiencies in those years. A passage from the October '09 section of the book says it well:
In September, this team was a cat that kept landing on its feet. And now is was a cat that kept landing on its head: Michigan State, Iowa, Illinois, Purdue. In each game, they'd had an excellent chance to win—and each time, they'd found a new and creative way to lose.O.K., there's no "if," that was unmistakably a complaint. I have one more: Neither Bacon nor Rodriguez ever even considered that there might be a qualitative difference 'twixt winning in the Big East (which Rich Rod's West Virginia squads did) & winning in the Big Ten (which Rich Rod's Michigan squads did not). The Big East doesn't even exist anymore as a football conference & it's successor, the American, is not counted as one of the "Power Five" conferences. By way of contrast, in this week's Associated Press poll, three B1G clubs are ranked in the top ten. Rodriguez has subsequently become the head football coach at Arizona in the Pac-12 conference, where no school except for Stanford even pretends to play defense, & yet is a conference in which Rich Rod's Wildcats have only one winning conference record in four complete seasons (4-5, 4-5, 7-2, 3-6, & are off to an 0-1 start in 2016 Pac-12 play). Maybe, guys, just maybe, the Big Ten was too demanding an environment for Rodriguez's spread offense & bizarre 3-3-5 to produce anything other than "new & creative ways to lose." Methinks the quality of the conference a consideration worth at least a paragraph's dismissal, if Bacon disagreed.
Recently
Jon Baird, with Kevin Costner & Stephen Meyer, illustrated by Rick Ross, The Explorers Guild, Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala
John U. Bacon, Endzone: The Rise, Fall, & Return of Michigan Football
John U. Bacon, Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football
Currently
Pope Francis, Amoris Lætitia (The Joy of Love)
Presently
Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations ***paused***
Richard Price, Clockers
Sir Richard Francis Burton, translator, "Sinbad the Sailor" from The Arabian Nights
Sir Ernest Shackleton, South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage
Hilaire Belloc, How the Reformation Happened
William F. Buckley Jr., The Unmaking of a Mayor
Scott & Kimberly Hahn, Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
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