The Blind Side Movie Review

I dropped in to see The Blind Side last night, and was very pleasantly surprised. I was a big fan of Michael Lewis's book but had been skeptical of its adaptability and the way the movie had been marketed. The book spent more time exploring the history of football over the last twenty years, and the movie (perhaps wisely) cut most of that.

The Blind Side is a genuine tearjerker. Usually, that term is thrown around pejoratively, insinuating that a movie has left the audience with an exploited, used feeling. But some movies come by their sentiment honestly, and The Blind Side is just such a movie. It is not simply a sad story because Michael Oher is abandoned or because he comes from a bad neighborhood. It's an emotionally complicated story, ruminating on guilt, violence, resentment, race, and gender. Like the book, it falls apart about three-quarters of the way through: it doesn't have the neat symmetry of fiction, after all.

The casting is good, though I only dimly understand why Quinton Aaron was chosen for the role of Michael Oher. Oher himself does not have the doughy innocent features of Aaron, and I can only guess that he was chosen because he doesn't convey a smidgin of violence at all. (At Ole Miss, Oher did get into some trouble off the field.)

John Lee Hancock, the film's screenwriter and director, deserves the credit though. Oddly enough, I watched A Perfect World (a movie he wrote and Clint Eastwood directed) the night before. I was struck by its genuine emotional weight, too, and it's clearly the better movie. With both screenplays, Hancock explores the relationship between adults and children and the violence meted out by both. I think he deserves a lot more attention than he's gotten so far.

2009 Egg Bowl: Ole Miss at Mississippi State

Mississippi State exploited the edge against Ole Miss's ends as I suggested they would here: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/jfp.php/comments/an_appetizing_egg_bowl_112509.

Even though Ole Miss was able to allow their defensive ends to get upfield and cause havoc the week before (against LSU), the Rebels front was not able to slow down the option game. When State went to the air, they used "flood" concepts to beat the Rebel's aggressive defensive backfield.

Defensively, the Bulldogs also came up with three interceptions against Jevan Snead. Ole Miss will return next year with a bare cupboard, and State returns a lot of young talent. A swing in power within Mississippi?

Book Review: Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting by Bruce Feldman

Meat Market focuses on one recruiting season for the University of Mississippi’s football program. Under the guidance of head coach (and former recruiting guru) Ed Orgeron, the Ole Miss program is expected to land top ten classes, then eventually top ten regular-season rankings. In the recruiting world, that year (2007) seemed like something imagined by Ionesco, fore-grounded by Jimmy Clausen’s stretch Hummer limousine and four national titles in South Bend.

A regular ESPN contributor, Bruce Feldman writes in the style of the fifteen-minute Sportscenter segment: clearly composed, well-researched, superficial. There are no shocking revelations, even if the exact methods of circumventing NCAA rules make some fans uncomfortable. More disappointingly, Feldman does not analyze (question?) some of the presumptions in recruiting circles, as Michael Lewis (and Billy Beane) did in Moneyball.

Most fans will find the process of evaluating high school prospects informative. How does one 320-lb. defensive tackle grade out as five-star, while this one grades out as two-star? The frequent accuracy of professional scouting is undeniable, but greater insight into the trade might have been given by a different author. As I suggested earlier, at USC, Orgeron gained a reputation for finding “creative” ways to enroll players with questionable GPAs. Frankly, I don’t have a problem with it; once a player enrolls however, they should pursue a credible course of study.

The most interesting passages of the book, aside from the outrageous second-hand accounts of Orgeron’s locker-room antics, are the exchanges between the head coach and his recruiting/coaching staff. One recruiter brags that he will be able to land the most coveted running back in the country (He doesn’t). A different recruiter slowly finds himself on thin ice after failing to land one targeted player, after another. Between reviewing their targeted prospects, Orgeron and his staff will watch in a tape of the very best 18-year-old prospects (which are beyond his reach), which leaves the room of adult men salivating.

The 2007 recruiting cycle was the last Orgeron engineered as head coach. (He is now recruiting coordinator and defensive line coach at Tennessee.) What Feldman suggests in the last chapter of his book (that Orgeron would need to win in 2007 to see the real fruition of his recruiting successes in 2008 and 2009) has been realized: Houston Nutt led Ole Miss to a preseason top five ranking. In an upset loss to Steve Spurrier’s South Carolina squad, I watched a defense stocked by Orgeron and his staff keep the Rebels in a close game by harassing Stephen Garcia for most of the game.