Books like The Sinful Seven: Sci-fi Western Legends of the NCAA

It was always bound to collapse. A good book about football is almost never about football. This is no exception. What can be read as a network of deep college football lore combined with interesting historical takes is so much more. It's an examination of American mythos and myth-making, a well-synthesized thesis on how money and power works in some of the oldest American institutions, a historical deep-dive that breaks down popular perceptions, and a deeply deeply fun read. I can't go on enough about how brilliantly this book combines fact and fiction. It begins in a way where it appears that the fiction chapters are merely an allegory for the non-fiction's historical argument. Then you hit part 2. I can't say enough about how much I love part 2. It's everything that's compelling, weird, heartbreaking, rage-inducing, sad, and joyful about college football, and America really. It's speaking truth about power, and it's explaining how things work here. History is a valuable tool here, but only because it helps explain the present. Sinful Seven presents itself as a sci-fi western, but it's such a valuable document of now. Very little in this sport has never happened before. It still keeps happening. That should leave you pondering this book's weightier questions long after you put it down. We're about to "begin" a football season that will look like no other. Maybe games will attempt to be played, maybe not. But many of the same questions being raised by the athletes, by fans, by even those a few rungs up the ladder, aren't new questions. Sinful Seven makes you realize how these questions are built into a long history. A history of stories, myths, half-truths, and whole lies. These folks have distilled that unruly thing into a 200ish page book, and what an accomplishment it is.