Greetings, Subway Domer literati. Steve in Iowa is back after an extended sabbatical to fill your long and dreary off-season with football knowledge. Yes I am finally coming out of my post-January depression, thanks for asking. To get back into the swing of things, I fired up the Kindle and cranked out the syllabus below. Every other Thursday this summer, I’ll post a book review at SubwayDomer.com. (C’mon, people, SubwayDomer is not all Wu-Tang Clan all the time.) That evening I’ll also hang around with Blog Davie on the comments page for discussion and chat. Steve in Iowa’s Summer Book Club should offer something that appeals to any Notre Dame football fan: biographies of colorful Notre Dame personalities, analysis of X’s and O’s, social commentary, and some Michigan schadenfreude. Most titles are available for download. So check out these great books and "I'll see you next time."
June 6: The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Maubboussin. Maubboussin explores that perennial question what part of success is luck and what part is skill? As humans we are hard-wired to look for simple, comforting narratives to explain events, and almost nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of sports. Since most of us don’t naturally think in terms of say, Bayesian statistics, Mauboussin offers a helpful primer.
June 20: Resurrection: The Miracle Season that Saved Notre Dame by Jim Dent. Great, compelling record of how Ara Parseghian turned around the fortunes of the Notre Dame football program.
July 4: Blood, Sweat, and Chalk: How the Great Coaches Built Today’s Game by Tom Layden. A great source for looking at the history and cyclical nature of football concepts. Enjoy Independence Day with a PBR and join us for chat that evening during fireworks.
July 18: Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890 by Charles Martin (No, not that Chuck Martin). I almost blogged about this before the championship tilt with Alabama, but Bama fans owe a debt of gratitude for their football success to ND because of Fr. Hesburgh’s leadership on civil rights and desegregation. This is a great American story. Sobering and chilling, yet also hopeful and uplifting.
August 1: Football Physics: The Science of the Game by Timothy Gay, forward by Bill Belicheck. Gay is a physicist who breaks down the game to it’s most elementary level. Gay considers what does physics say about the best tackling angle? How does a football behave in flight? What are the ways the stadium, playing surface, weather, and equipment game? Promises to be fascinating.
August 15: Perfect Rivals: Notre Dame, Miami, and the Battle for the Soul of College Football, by Jeff Carroll. If you’re as old a Notre Dame fan as me, you cut your teeth on the Miami-ND rivalry of the 1980s. I thought that I knew everything there was to know about those teams until I read this book.
August 29: Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football by John Bacon. Because Michigan hate will always be a way of life around here.
