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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22699 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-18
• Released on: 2007-09-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
"A jaw-dropping book. Bruce Feldman is the John Feinstein of his generation. He has gotten inside and gained access to this complex subject better than any sportswriter in memory. Meat Market is easily among the best sports books of the new millennium. Not only was it engaging, it was at times hilarious and frightening, seeing what really happens in the bowels of recruiting. This is must-reading for any college football fan. I don't know when I have enjoyed a book more or been unable to put one down. This book absolutely blew me away." --Paul Finebaum, Mobile Register columnist and talk show host -- Paul Finebaum

"Bruce Feldman has recorded the most detailed account of a recruiting season I've read. You are taken behind the curtain of a program hungry to reach the elite and provided a revealing, fascinating look at one of college football's unique characters, Coach ÔOÕ." --Chris Fowler, ESPN College GameDay host -- Chris Fowler

"Coach Orgeron transfers his ferocious competitive spirit into all phases of his coaching, particularly as a recruiter. He's relentless in his effort and comprehensive approach to the whole recruiting process." --Pete Carroll, head coach, USC -- Pete Carroll

"Recruiting is the lifeblood of college football yet is the most mysterious, misunderstood aspect of the sport. Feldman opens doors and opens eyes in a revealing look at how the machine that drives college football really works. Playing the big boys on the field is one thing. For those outside the "traditional power" fraternity, Meat Market shows that recruiting against them is even tougher . . . even for a Red Bull powered recruiting maniac like Ed Orgeron." --Rece Davis, ESPN College Football studio host -- Rece Davis

"Tremendous behind-the-scenes look at the highs and lows of recruiting with extremely accurate portrayal of the day-to-day operation. This book captures what goes into the evaluation, scouting, tape study and on and off campus recruitment of some of the best players in the country. An unprecedented chance to get the true skinny on how high school and juco athletes end up on a college campus." --Jim Donnan, ESPN college football analyst and former Georgia head coach -- Jim Donnan

"We all knew Bruce Feldman could write. We all knew him to be a meticulous researcher. What we did not know until now is that he has the guts of an S.E.C. middle linebacker. On his next trip to Oxford he may take an Ed Orgeron headbutt for this canny and thorough page turner. This is the best I have seen on the real story of bigtime college recruiting. I loved reading this book!" --Bill Curry, former coach at Alabama, Georgia Tech and Kentucky -- Bill Curry

"What serious football fan wouldn't love to be a fly on the wall in the recruiting war room of a major college program? Feldman got to do just that, delivering a fascinating first-hand account of all the dizzying phone calls, late-night film sessions, frantic road trips, and paranoid parents that went into the Ole Miss coaching staff's pursuit of a recruiting class." --Stewart Mandel, Sports Illustrated -- Stewart Mandel

About the Author
Bruce Feldman is the author of Cane Mutiny: How the Miami Hurricanes Overturned the Football Establishment, which was ranked No. 1 among sports titles in the fall of 2004. A senior writer at ESPN The Magazine since its launch in 1998, Feldman writes a popular college football blog for ESPN.com. His articles on college football have appeared in several editions of The Best American Sports Writing, and he has won first-place awards in contests sponsored by the Football Writers Association. Feldman lives in California but on any given autumn Saturday can be found at one of the top college football games in the country.

Customer Reviews

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.

Watch the wheels coming off the wagon
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.

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.