Author Bruce Feldman will be signing copies of “Meat Market” in Manhattan at Borders on 32nd and 2nd on Nov. 6 at 7 p.m.
Any great book transcends its topic. And the biggest mistake anyone could make when glancing at Bruce Feldman’s revealing new book, “Meat Market,” is to think that it’s a book about Ole Miss football recruiting.
Feldman spent last season with unfettered access to the Ole Miss coaching staff to tell the tale of just how a big-time college football program puts together a recruiting class. The result of his dauntingly detailed reporting is one of the most insightful books ever written about college football. (Full disclosure: Bruce is a friend.)
No book has ever painted such a clear, behind-the-scenes portrait of how big-time college football recruiting works. And in turn, it shows how big-time college athletics work.
For all the big-time recruits lured to an SEC school like Ole Miss, there are knockout blonds giving them tours of campus in golf carts, coaches trying to decipher their sketchy academic transcripts and a constant battle against negative recruiting.
The book works so well because its main character, Ole Miss Coach Ed Orgeron, is one of the most unique personalities in college football. The book tells in resplendent detail how Orgeron essentially traded his addiction to alcohol for an addiction to recruiting. He’s in his office well before dawn every day, guzzling black coffee and Red Bull and trying to figure out ways to lure the most talented players in the country to a program whose history, outside when a Manning has been quarterback, is fairly bleak.
Orgeron speaks in a Cajun growl that the book captures delightfully. His recruiting colloquialisms are priceless, like “You can tell a trapper by his furs,” which is a reference to judging assistant coaches by the recruits that they land. There’s also a priceless reference to not wanting a lineman with “pudding in his drawers.”
There’s also no filter on Orgeron, who routinely chews out staff members, like the time the assistant coach Art Kehoe flew to Pittsburgh to try to recruit a tight end there. “Planes don’t fly north,” became Orgeron’s motto after embarrassing Kehoe in front of the staff.
There are fascinating things, like an assistant coach calling a restaurant before Orgeron dines there to be sure that there are no intervals between courses. (Coach O gets angry if he has to wait.) Or there’s the Rebel staff having the reigning “Mississippi Miss Most Beautiful” give quarterback transfer Jevan Snead a campus tour. (And guess where Snead landed? Ole Miss). Or the recruit whose cellphone voicemail said, “If you’re not my mom or a hot girl tryin’ to give me money, don’t even bother leavin’ a message.”
Orgeron spends the book hopped up on Red Bull, offering his assistants cash prizes for races to get recruits on the phone and relishing the uphill challenge that is recruiting at Ole Miss.
The book unfolds with
surreal scene after surreal scene, from watching a cock fight during a home visit to the chase for the country’s top tailback recruit, Joe McKnight.
In the end, the reader ends up surging toward signing day with the Rebel staff, getting to know the names of the kids whose names come purring across the fax machine . And in the process, the mystifying world of college football recruiting, thanks to Feldman, becomes a lot clearer.
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