Product Description
In college football circles, the first Wednesday in February is New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, and Christmas all rolled into one. It’s payoff time for a year spent screening miles of videotape and probing mountains of data, balancing the promise of a dazzling 40-yard-dash time against the perils of a putrid GPA, and text-messaging high schoolers 50 times a day. It’s the day when coaches across the country camp out in front of their fax machines waiting for their football futures to be decided by a bunch of 18-year-olds. It’s National Signing Day. In this surprising and unprecedented dissection of college football’s secret season, author Bruce Feldman takes you deep inside the war room of Ole Miss head coach Ed Orgeron, the combustible Cajun who built national championship teams at the University of Miami and USC before setting up shop in the Deep South. In a blow-by-blow account of the year leading up to National Signing Day 2007, Feldman reveals the inner secrets of Orgeron’s success, recounting every step along the way as Orgeron and his Ole Miss staff pick 25 winners from a list of 1,000 names. Meat Market makes the actual football season—the one that runs from September through January—read like a postscript.
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 Turnover on Downs
I have always been intrigued by Mississippi football and the whole Rebel mystique. That might sound strange coming from a Midwest kid, but growing up watching Archie Manning was special indeed. However, much like those Mississippi teams from the 70's this book didn't win the big one.
Meat Market caught my eye while browsing for a weekend read and though it was interesting, truth be told it wasn't all that earth shattering.The story line had a great deal of potential and you couldn't ask for a more colorful character than Coach O. Yet despite these seemingly great beginnings the book fell short in so many areas. Perhaps my disappointment was the author never quite developed a relationship between the characters and me, the reader. I wanted to like them and I wanted then to succeed but in the end It really did not matter one way or the other. Like many of the other reviewers I question how some people can call Meat Market a classic.
I was also somewhat surprised that Feldman omitted or barely scratched the surface on a topic like racism. Here was a wonderful opportunity to explain and educate his audience on the University Gray and people like Chuckie Mullins. So in my humble opinion he missed out.
On the plus side, and yes there are positives, the book was informative about the life and times of college recruiting. Feldman was successful in pointing out the mindset of high school superstars and the games people play to secure their services. A coach or recruiter of any type can find value in the material presented and the casual fan can get a glimpse of the inside of a "War Room".
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Concept is excellent, but focus is too narrow. ( brian911743 )
The book focuses mainly on the Ole Miss Rebels during the tenure of Coach Ed Orgeron, who coached Ole Miss from 2005-2007. Coach Ed Orgeron was particularly keen on the recruiting aspect of the college game, and the book talks about all the various shenanigans, difficulties, unforseen obstacles and such that go into the whole recruiting process. Since success in recruiting is probably a good 60-65% of a college team's overall success, I found the book very interesting. The only complaint I would have about it, I guess, is that it mostly focused on things from the perspective of the coaches in the program trying to recruit high school kids. It also only took the perspective of the Ole Miss coaches, without trying to get a bead or reading on coaches from other schools also on the recruiting trail.
I thought that this book, as a concept, could have been a masterpiece if Feldman followed say - three or four programs and their various appraoches and the kind of energies and different kinds of strategies they put into recruiting. Make those three or four programs vary from a national powerhouse that basically recruits itself (like a USC, LSU, Florida, or Ohio State) down through struggling programs trying to get over the hump (like Ole Miss), and also a school or two that has never been big-time and is just trying to fill its roster with players who have any kind of talent.
On the other side of the recruiting trail, get some stories from the kids themselves who are being recruited, and just like the programs, profile the recruiting sagas of kids who are 5-star blue chippers who have been on the watch lists since their sophomore years, down through players who might be gems in the rough but happen to play for small, unsuccessful HS programs, down all the way to desperate hopefuls who have marginal talent but attend every camp they can get invited to in order to hopefully show a coach or two that the too-small, too-slow, too-short kid from the winless high school program might actually have what it takes to play CFB.
Now that would be an awesome book. This one just felt too short and too narrow a focus.
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 Interesting Book, Even If It Is Dated
I graduated from the University of Arkansas. Reading this book and knowing that Houston Nutt replaced Ed Orgeron gave me a different perspective.
I liked how the book had Orgeron's life history, which influenced how he and Ole Miss recruited. The anecdotes about the evaluation and discussion of recruits was as if I were listening to Orgeron. Having heard Orgeron speak at press conferences and at halftime interviews, I could hear his voice as I read his quotes. The anecdote about his relationship with Matt Lubick was interesting because it showed a human side of a coach who sees an assistant coach who feels uncomfortable living in an area different than anywhere he has ever resided.
It is good book to see the inside of college football recruiting.
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Watch the wheels coming off the wagon ( glynnj10 )
I picked this up at the library for a short read, I have no great knowledge or interest in recruiting per se or SEC football, so my question is how typical of coaching or college football life this is. Because, especially for assistant coaches, it could be set in hell. The recruiting part of the book is a repetitive story of the interactions of Ole Miss and bunch of recruits, parents, etc.
The interesting part to me is watching a head coach, Orgeron, who seems utterly unprepared for the management aspects of his job and wondering if he is typical of the coaching fraternity or just a fish out of water. In fairness to Orgeron it is not clear how much real access to planning or thinking or how much understanding the author has. It may simply be that we are seeing the small corner of the picture that the author sees.
Orgerun, as presented, seems to think that overdosing on caffeine, yelling, and working from 5AM to 11PM is his job definition. It seems that there is no long term integrated recruiting plan but rather sessions where names are demoted and new names are sought out, even toward the end of the recruiting season. Coaches are required to join Orgerun in watching (the same?) recruit tapes over and over again when they might be sleeping, seeing their families, thinking about their jobs, or even, getting drunk. Maybe these are the only sessions the author gets in on so they are overemphasized but, among grown men they are truly weird.
The life of an assistant coach under Orgerun seems to have been sheer hell, no apparant direction except frequent change in direction, yelling, teasing, etc.
The book ends late in 2006 with some hopefulness for 2007. I looked up Orgerun in Wickepedia and 2007 was a catastrophe of major proportions. Orgerun got fired when he should have been shot. My sympathy is with the assistants and to a lesser degree, the players he recruited.
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Amazing look into the forgotten part of College Football
Recruiting is where a team is made. You can only take a team so far if you don't have top flight athletes, especially in the SEC. Meat Market is a great look into the recruiting process, and how far teams have to go in order to get the top tier players. Coach O is an amazing character, and fits perfectly into this story.
Also, this books works because it shows a team that is trying to get back to the top. If it would have been about USC or Florida, it wouldn't have gotten the point across, as they get some recruits on name alone. This book does a great job of show the ins and outs of recruiting, and how much work actually goes into it, even during the season.
A great ready for anyone who is a college football fan, fan of the SEC, or wants to know more about the game.
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