Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

By spending a year with the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff entered a mysterious and private world with its own rituals and language. Equal parts Paper Lion, Moneyball, Friday Night Lights, and The Office, this absorbing, funny, and vivid narrative gets to the heart of a massive and stressful collective endeavor.

Here is football in many faces: the polarizing, brilliant, and hilarious head coach; the general manager, whose job is to support (and suppress) the irrepressible coach; the defensive coaches and their in-house rivals, the offensive coaches; and of course the players. Wise safeties, brooding linebackers, high-strung cornerbacks, enthusiastic rookies, and a well-read nose tackle-they make up a strange and complex family. Dawidoff makes an emblematic NFL season come alive for fans and nonfans alike in a book about football that will forever change the way people watch and think about the sport.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Football, Audiobook, History, New York

486 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Nicholas Dawidoff is the best-selling author of five books, including The Catcher Was a Spy and In the Country of Country. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has been a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, and Art for Justice Fellow. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews

[victor harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent in depth look at the behind-the-scenes operations of the New York Jets during the 2011 season, with a concluding section that takes readers through the Tebow fiasco in the subsequent season. This was a little heavy on the Rex Ryan worship but seems balanced in the rest of its coverage.
What I found striking is how Ryan as head coach had so little to do with the actual game preparations and game management. He serves as more carnival barker than hands-on director. The commentary and excerpts give an unflattering view of the juvenile Mark Sanchez and thin-skinned Antonio Cromartie; neither of whom are with the team now.
It confirms other negative portraits of players such as Santonio Holmes, who is part of the "me first" self-absorbed diva trend among NFL wide receivers. He and others made for a very dysfunctional Jets organization where players pretty much march to their own beat and management and coaches are at their mercy. Ryan plays the sympathetic father figure who tolerated it because of the " boys will be boys" attitude.
One of the major defects of this otherwise impressive account is the annoying habitual use of initials for people rather than using their real names. Nevertheless, it is a very good detailed narrative of the intricacies of the preparation for the NFL draft and week-to-week game planning.

[Jennifer-Eve Workman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway! I was very excited to share it with my Hunky Hubby! We actually read the book together and we both really enjoyed it. Although my hubby is the NFL guru in our household, I thought it would be fun to read together... and I was right (as always)!

The author Nicholas Dawidoff had a very unique idea when coming up with this book. Spending an entire year with the New York Jets and writing about it from the inside out was truly brilliant. Even my husband learned a lot about how the wheels spun from an inside look.

I would recommend this book to the hardcore fans more than the casual observer. (Even though I am stereotypical casual football fan, I really enjoyed reading this.)

Side note: Tony Dungy has always been my favorite NFL coach, but after this book Rex Ryan has skidded into that spot... sorry Tony!

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book fun to listen to as it reminded me of my days playing football. There were some things I could relate with.

I think the biographical info at the beginning was way too long, and incredibly boring. Similarly the end notes about where everyone ended up.

I found the general vibe of the book to be a bit grotesque. It seems to glorify a kind of egotism and delusion that eventually leaves men completely separated from what has been made their entire world, and often resulting in destroyed lives and relationships. At least the players make a lot of money (which many blow immediately by the sounds of it), but the lives of the coaches and their relationships with their families are certainly hell for basically free.

One of the themes that Dawidoff begins and ends with is that anything can happen in football. I think that may be true because these people are told that football is all that matters in their lives, and they are set up with absolutely no order to their lives without it. Of course anything could happen. It's insanity.

One coach went home to his wife at the end of the season and laid down next to her, and his 3 year old son told him that the father was taking his place. His response was that he would be home now because of the offseason. I found that heartbreaking. Players consistently ignore injury and sedate themselves against pain, causing incredible damage to their bodies in the long term. The average NFL career is 3.3 years. So many will cripple their bodies for a small chance at "greatness" for 3 years. I used to wonder why NFL players got in so much legal trouble. I don't anymore. It makes perfect sense. They are told over and over again they are invincible, and to have short memories. Why wouldn't you do whatever you wanted.

I by no means think it is impossible to have character, success, or simply a good life playing the sport of football, but you certainly are not set up to leave the career with any of it - regardless of what players an coaches say about how it benefits their lives. I simply don't see football glamorously depicted or as an enviable existence from the book.

[Scott Sykes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly engrossing portrait of what life in the NFL is like. When first picking this book up, I thought it would be more from the players standpoint versus the coaches, but it truly was based from the coaches point of view. Seeing all the behind the scenes work that goes into an NFL team before the players hit the field truly is amazing. The amount of work these coaches do is equally inspiring and terrifying. 18 hour days. Nights spent at offices. Barely any days off. Missed family obligations. You truly have to be of a different ilk to be in the NFL in any capacity. Dawidoff writes not just as a fly on the wall but as someone who has been taken in as a family member of the Jets, getting both coaches and players to open up to him, truly humanizing the sport, and it's not always pretty. When the book ends, you feel as if you too have spent a year with the Jets, feeling the ups and downs they've been through, saying goodbye to friends as they move on to different teams. It's as if you don't want the book to end, because you don't want to lose or miss that camaraderie, like the end of high school or university. This book really proves that football is a sport like any other and can equally bring out the best and worst in people, both providing better lives to some and destroying others. But those involved in the building of a team to those who play it, and even to those who watch, wouldn't have it any other way.

[Miguel Gonzalez-Feliciano · Rating 1 out of 5]

I rarely give books one star, or at least I think I rarely do it, but this book just earned it. Normally, I enjoy sports, and I even had a deep love for the New Orleans Saints in both middle and high school (mostly Drew Brees).

But this book just ruined any love I might have, or could have had for football. Because it seems to do the opposite of what it intends, I'm giving it one star.

Of course, I'm sure many people who enjoy football will find reasons to enjoy this book. It does a good deep dive into the world of professional football by following the coaches closely as they prepare for the season, execute the gameplays, and follows them well as they close out the season. It isn't bad for that reason.

What I had such a hard time with was the amount of lives that are seemingly ruined by a game. Littered throughout the book are examples after examples of players being used and discarded ending up homeless, brutalized by injury, suffering from all sorts of brain injury and trauma, marriages ruined and stories of childhood where fathers neglected children "for the sake of the game". In the book, someone is quoted as saying, "With how little you see your kids, you have to win or it isn't worth it" and Dawidoff constantly references the strings of broken marriages for coaches and players as if some game is actually worth it. While I can understand there being a high price for success, this book just shows the lack of any true worth to this sort of glory. Of all teams to follow, Dawidoff follows the Jets when they went 8-8. For every mention of horrific injury, time away from family, and the essentially fatherless homes for the families of coaches, a season goes by with nothing to show for it except to keep the circus going of abandoning family and bringing in young men to be brutalized by a sport and cast aside.

It was just sickening how casually this was all mentioned as "part of the game". Towards the end, a player got hit so hard he was blind in one eye and he stayed in the game because "too many linebackers were injured and Coach needs me," while Dawidoff seems to praise this as proof of how great a leader Rex Ryan was and oh boy, the Rex Ryan worship was real in this book. Tragic in the backstory of Ryan is in his upbringing when his father said something to the effect of "only meeting his sons for the first time," when he was in a hotel room talking about football plays before they would make their foray into coaching. Maybe that was meant to be endearing, but it just felt pitiful.

Undoubtedly, many people who love football will skim over the injuries, the poverty or players, the casual casting aside of marriages and kids as "just the way it is", but I don't think that's right, nor should it be so readily accepted. I normally wouldn't read a book like this because my enjoyment of football isn't that high and I only read it for book club. But I'm glad I read this book because I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy a football game again, and that's a good thing.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let me first say, any small amount of appreciation or entertainment I found in football is totally gone after reading this book. What an awfully disgusting, fool-hearted "game." It destroys marriages, families, and lives, not to mention the absolute destruction of bodies all for the sake of a nauseating amount of money... Really?

Okay. Moving on from the absurdity of football, the book itself was just bad. It was so hard to force myself to finish it.

The first 50% of the book is just random biographical information about people who maybe had something to do with football at one point in time. After detailing the childhood of one guy, Dawidoff would say something like, "And oh, he was this really miniscule position on the Jets for year or two." And that was all. It was difficult to follow who he was talking about and why he was talking about them.

Finally, after half of the book has gone by, we get to the actual football part. Maybe it's entertaining if you like football. If you don't or if you stopped liking football due to everything in the first half, the second half just gets worse. Let's dive even deeper into exactly how football ruins lives.

From "I have to keep playing on this broken x, y, or z because I can't let coach down!" to "I get to go home but can't have a conversation with my wife for four straight days because I have to focus on the game that's coming up." This, folks, is our Great American Game.

In conclusion, they lose their girlfriends. They lose their wives. They lose their children's childhoods. They lose their bodies. Eventually they lose their jobs. But at least they know how to lose. isn't that what everyone wants? Real nice, Dawidoff.

[Lexi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, let’s get this out of the way, I’m a pick me for this one. But in my defense what am I to do I’m just a girl who is trying to have a positive relationship with my dad and a love for the Steelers is basically the *only* thing we have in common!! (That’s not true he also has fire music recs when they’re not Christian rock). Quick fun thing is that my dad played football with Mike Pettine at UVA which I actually didn’t realize.
Now that I’ve filled this with narcissism, I enjoyed this book, but it was severely dense (hello took me over 2 months to read) and to be honest what I like most about sports is the camaraderie and the players and their stories and honestly having the game act as a microcosm of the human experience. And so because of that I struggled as we talked about “watching film” and various plays the jets were trying. So… all this to say, I learned some things, I enjoyed seeing this team grow, but def not a fav for me.

[David Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to write a thorough review of a book on here for several reasons. Most pressing currently is I'm on my phone and I would rather move on to my next book anyway. I thought this book deserved a few words though- both good and bad. On the plus side, I have watched hundreds of nfl football games in my life and yet found myself on the Sunday just before finishing the book watching them somehow 'differently'. It's hard to finger what had changed exactly but I was paying more attention to the personnel groupings and the setups than before. More appreciative of the diligent preparation required for this ballet consistent of hyper athletic , hyper aggressive , very large ballerinas. So this book definitely gave me more of an appreciation about the coaching and preparation.
Unfortunately it's 460 pages long. If I could summarize the main insight of the book in one sentence it would be 'coaching nfl football takes long long hours and endless meetings and is incredibly tedious most of the time'. As you can imagine, 460 pages to convince me of the tedium of nfl coaching can get .. Tedious. If you want a sense of the NFL from the inside , better off reading Nate Jackson autobiography. At least it's a much quicker read. And funnier.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The big story about the NFL these days is how brutal playing the game can be on the players. The story told in this book is how brutal life off the field can be not only for the players (who endure what they do on the field in return for close to zero job security and long-term prospects) but also for the coaches. The latter are the main characters in Dawidoff's book, which usefully reminds us that the 16 sixty-minute games per season (20, if you're really lucky) represent only the tiniest part of a coach's life and that even the season itself is just a subset of a year in the NFL. I've certainly heard about coaches working around the clock and sleeping in their offices while perfecting game plans and making decisions about personnel; Dawidoff's accounts of how they put together these plans and make these decisions are fascinating. The early sections about the combine, the draft, and training camp are more interesting than the coverage of the season itself, which seems like something of a slog--a narrative echo of reality, I suspect, at least for a team whose year ends in disappointment.

[Carmen Petaccio · Rating 3 out of 5]

needed min 1 whole chapter about the 'butt fumble'

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the result of a Harvard grad journalist’s year spent with a pro football team: a compelling, intensively informative, funny but melancholy 485 page book. There is so much I did not know about how a football team runs: the number of coaching staff employed (7 dedicated to the defensive players alone, for example), the fact that a new game plan is crafted for each season matchup, the number of classroom meetings players have to go to, the fact that every player is evaluated with a + or – by their coaches for each play they’re involved in, how damaged and drained everyone is at the end of the regular season, and so on and so on.

I must confess that I’m not finished with this book even now—I finished the audio version, which is what I started out with, but which I had to supplement with the hard copy book because of the density of names, positions, and events. I’m a little over halfway through the print edition, and continue to grasp new things in the re-reading. (The audiobook is great, though—the narrator has an excellent delivery and reads quotes by both black and white players believably without it being insulting.) And Dawidoff is so reliably thorough, that at a certain point you *know* the Jets aren’t making it to the playoffs, because that would have required another 100 pages of book.

It’s very interesting to read about the players and coaches as people with distinct personalities—something you never get if you just watch games on TV, or even probably from reading stuff like Sports Illustrated. Though I cared nothing about the New York Jets before reading this, I found myself looking up some of the 2011 team members to see what they are up to now and if by some miracle any of them are still playing. (I happened to watch a college bowl game last month, and one of the half-time ESPN commentators was “Mark,” who "used to be a pro quarterback." Wait, could this be *my* Mark Sanchez? It was! I kept waiting for him to say something slyly funny, based on his portrait in the book, but he did not.)

There are fun tidbits here and there about other football notables, like what makes Tom Brady such a good quarterback, and good in a different way than Peyton Manning was really good. I learned of other great players who are not household names. For instance, I had never heard of Darrelle Revis before—one of the stars of the 2011 Jets team, and a star cornerback in his own right. Dawidoff does these guys a great service by immortalizing them through narrative instead of just leaving their achievements for the football wonks to know. Maybe some readers will even go ahead and watch some of the 2011 game tape so pored over by these poor obsessed coaches! I almost wish that books like this would come out about *all* the teams—shorter, referencing this as the ur-text to which the tempo, style, and personality of other teams are compared. They would all be outdated almost immediately, though, given the rate of personnel turnover in the NFL.

Although long, Collision Low Crossers is a fun read, and not just for diehard football fans. Dawidoff’s writing style is engaging, and the members of the New York Jets say a lot of punchy things. It will give you fodder for sounding both cryptically knowledgeable during games (i.e., “What this team lacks is a real bitch kitty pass rusher,”) and motivational at the office (i.e., “Don’t you go bringing your soft into this meeting room!”). Highly recommend; I can see myself seeking out other books by Nicholas Dawidoff over time.

[Matt Fleetwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book premise is that a writer followed the New York Jets for the 2011 NFL season, from the combine and draft until after the season concluded, and then shared his experience.

My biggest issue was that the book tried to balance analytics and schematics with the emotional and personal turmoil of the season. Both are valid angles, but by splitting its focus, neither felt explored in real depth.

[Kelsey Dallas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! I learned a lot about football without being overwhelmed by technical jargon. Dawidoff must have sifted through an astounding amount of information to create this beautiful tribute to his year with the Jets.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a lifelong fan of NFL football, I've long suspected that the league is selling not sport, but an ideal conception of manhood. Look at the way the NFL markets its greatest stars--retired Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis is a good, if problematic, example--and you will see what I mean. Lewis, complicit in a double murder, spent the rest of his career after he beat the rap cultivating an image of Christian piety, devoted fatherhood, and ferocious onfield leadership, and the NFL was happy to help him sell it. "Now THIS is a man," the league seemed to say.

But as Nicholas Dawidoff makes clear in Collision Low Crossers, this cult of manhood, as problematic as it may be, is much more than a marketing ploy. Dawidoff follows the struggles of the 2011 New York Jets, a team with great expectations that implode in the course of the season. The Jets coach is Rex Ryan, a big-hearted, larger than life devotee of the game who is often mistaken for a buffoon. But Ryan is as devout a follower of the NFL cult of manhood as you will find, a coach who speaks of his players as "Mighty Men," and whose greatest compliment is "That's a MAN!" For Ryan, football offers his players the opportunity to claim their manhood, through hard work, through suffering and injury, through victory and defeat.

For many of these players, who all too often come from impoverished neighborhoods plagued by violence and, more significantly, fatherless homes, the need to define and claim their manhood is a very real lifelong problem. That football provides the structure and the arena they need in order to achieve this is touching, but once again, problematic. In the end, Ryan's love for his players notwithstanding, an NFL team is a truly heartless enterprise which will cast its beloved talent aside the moment it's no longer of any use--like a child who does not mourn a broken toy but simply tosses it aside and forgets about it.

There's a scene in the book when Ryan asks Dawidoff about his father. Dawidoff recalls that his own father "had suffered from such severe mental illness that he'd wander the streets before another stay in the wards...I said to Ryan that conceiving children had made me nervous both because I didn't know what I might pass on and because I had no firsthand knowledge about what a good father did day after day." Dawidoff concludes by considering "how fine a thing...it would have been to be a part of a football team when I was young." At another point, a player tells Dawidoff that football "has been my father in life."

This is the aspect of Collision Low Crossers that I found most interesting, but there's plenty of football, too. You realize in reading this book just how much preparation goes into each game, and how minute a portion of a player's time is spent facing that week's opponent. It's meetings, meetings, practice and meetings. For the coaches, a football season is essentially a sixteen-week exercise in sleep deprivation, as they obsess over opponents' tendencies, choose plays from the playbook, and install game plans. It is complete and utter commitment--perhaps another aspect of the manhood ideal. What's on the other side of this commitment? "The coaches were left with the losing...All they kept was the satisfaction that, while everyone out there in America was headed for defeat, they knew defeat and could stand it. In America, land of happy endings to feel-good films, this was the truer entertainment; to fail is human."

Ryan is the great protagonist of this book, and I finished it with newfound respect and empathy for both the man and his players. As a 49er fan, I have very little use for any team on the east coast, yet Dawidoff's ruminations on defeat were universal, and, I must admit, comforting in the face of the last three season-ending gut-wrenchers for my team. In that sense, Dawidoff's written something very special here--perhaps definitive. I'd recommend it to any football fan, or to anyone who wants to understand its attraction to the men who coach it, those who play it, and the fans who are enthralled by it.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dawidoff does a fine job of combining journalistic and literary writing as he relates his time spent with the New York Jets during the 2011 season. There were times it seemed as if the paragraphs did not connect in a cohesive manner, but that is to be a bit expected because of the expansive "cast of characters," many with different tasks and agendas.

Dawidoff admits to having "no special knowledge of football," which actually makes the book very accessible to even the most casual football fan, or even a reader that is not a fan of football, for that matter. It really is incredibly intense to read how much preparation goes into each game. Combine that with all the various personalities involved with the decision making and game planning - it is somewhat like reading a novel about a large dysfunctional family.

I especially loved the quotes that followed every chapter title, quotes that seemingly have little to do with the game of football, but then everything to do with it: Chapter Two: "Brothers"
"What strange creatures brothers are!
- Jane Austen, MANSFIELD PARK
Perfect summation of that chapter. What other book can connect Jane Austen and football?

[Ted Lehmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collision Low Crossers – Nicholas Dawidoff

Collision Low Crossers: Inside the Turbulent World of the NFL by Nicholas Dawidoff (Little Brown & Co, 2013, 475 pages, $13.63/11.99) belongs to a sub-genre of sports books, “A Year with the Team”, including books from John Feinstein's Next Man Up, and Season on the Brink, and Michael Gaffney's The Champ: My Year with Muhammad Ali. In these books, the authors spend a year, or a season, as a fly on the wall, watching the action, assessing the personalities, and providing readers with an “inside” view of the sport. In Collision Low Crossers (the title is a reference found in the Jets playbook to linebackers hitting potential pass receivers within five yards of the line of scrimmage) Nicholas Dawidoff spent the 2011 season with the NY Jets. He was given “a security code, a desk in the scouting department, and freedom to roam.” He does not posit himself as an expert, but was given unusual access to complement his keen eye for detail, ear for nuance, and sensitivity to individuals. These qualities come together in Collision Low Crossers to provide a real understanding of the violence, intimacy, and job insecurity each person associated with an NFL football team experiences. As Dawidoff's year with the Jets develops, so does the reader's empathy with the team, and, for me at least, a much greater appreciation of the athletic skills and human vulnerability of these uniquely gifted men.

Dawidoff came to the Jets two years after Rex Ryan had come from the Baltimore Ravens, where he had been Defensive Coordinator, to the New York Jets as head coach. Ryan, a larger than life personality who tried to stay above the fray, preferred to run the team from a distance, although his reputation for stout defensive football clearly influenced the way the team drafted and how they trained. Early in the book, Dawidoff points out that football is the most watched and least understood sport of all. Even the coaches don't fully understand what's happened in the game until after they've viewed the films.

Dawidoff was given unparallelled access and soon was viewed by the coaches and players as a member of the team. He was often the butt of jokes and pranks, responded appropriately, thus earning the trust and affection of players and coaches alike. He apparently came to “the facility,” the Jets offices and practice fields in New Jersey, each day, going to meetings, watching practices, and interviewing all parties on the team. Because he took the time and did his research, the reader comes to see the players as real people. He doesn't duck the prior life experiences various parties bring to the team: poverty, absent parents, violence, or the communities from which they come. With two thirds of the players coming being African-American, race is often an underlieing issue. On the Jets, such possibilities are minimized because they're talked and joked about. Furthermore, there's a solid mix of races in the coaching staff, perhaps easing some of the issues.

For coaches work at the facility is a full time business. Numberless hours looking at college films and assessing possible free agents leads up to the draft, seeking to bring together the team within a salary cap negotiated between the league, the players, and the teams' managments. With the average professional career lasting less than three years, turnover is always a problem, while maintaining a balanced squad is essential. The amounts of money are large and the pressure is constant. Tempers among and between levels within the organization can erupt easily and need to be dealt with. The athletes, despite their size, strength, and agility are often emotionally fragile. Managing all this stands on a pyramid with the head coach at the top. Dawidoff, with literary skill and psychological insight brings this all together in rich detail. The stories are funny, touching, horrifying, revelatory and useful in understanding both individuals and groups. If there's a major problem in the book it lies in the number of people and the difficulties growing out of trying to keep over 100 characters straight. The provision of a complete appendix listing all the personnel and roles helps with this issue.

I was first introduced to Nicholas Dawidoff through his book In the Country of Country, a trip through the world of mid-twentieth century country musicians, written with rare insight into the music and the people who made it. I liked the book enough to order several more of his books with Colission Low Crossers being the first I read. This volume is as good about the world of professional football as the previous one was about country music. Dawidoff graduated from Harvard College and won several fellowships for advanced study. He wrote for Sports Illustrated, resigning to freelance. Since then, he's written five books covering a variety of topics from his own life story through music and more sports. His range is wide, his viewpoint broad and comprehensive, his mastery of descriptive language and dialogue superb.
Collision Low Crossers: Inside the Turbulent World of the NFL by Nicholas Dawidoff (Little Brown & Co, 2013,475 pages, $13.63/11.99) sets a standard for sports books that won't be easily surpassed. Dawidoff's facility with description and dialogue makes his books believable and readable. He humanizes people whose careers have often given them iconic qualities setting them apart from ordinary people. Dawidoff finds ways to make the people he writes about approachable and distinctive at once, a rare skill. Most important, I have been watching football with new eyes since reading the book. I find that I both enjoyed the book and learned how to appreciate its vast complexity better through reading it. I bought the book from Thriftbooks.com, my go to online used book dealer of choice. My experience with them is that they provide lots of choices and their descriptions are always accurate. Their delivery costs are reasonable (free with multiple orders, even from different vendors), accurate, and timely. I highly recommend the book and the vendor.

[Nette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've watched a total of about 19 minutes of football in my entire life and know very little about it, but this book held me enthralled for days. More proof that excellent writing can make any topic fascinating. I'm just sorry I read it after the end of the season, because now I want to watch some Jets games and see if poor Sanchez can finally become a great quarterback and if Rex Ryan can keep the weight off.

[Lenny D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Far from just a literary Hard Knocks, this book provides a look behind the curtain of an NFL team far more memorably and incisively than any other documentary or article I’ve encountered. While Dawidoff’s writing style grated on me — often cloying and willing to sacrifice clarity for attempted wit (rarely successfully) — the author vividly portrays what a pro football life is like: constantly stressful, unceasingly competitive, and paranoid for good reason.

I would experience all of [the season] not as individual days but as a long car trip in which days were absorbed by days and everything happened at an accelerated clip. There were a series of destinations along the way (the games), and getting to each one involved the punctuated routines of the journey: buying gas, stopping for coffee, seeing an interesting billboard, hearing something good on the radio, encountering heavy traffic or heavy weather or a speed trap or a good road turned to swale, all the days blending because they never stopped, went constantly forward—every day many dozens of small occurrences and interactions whose cumulative import I would be able to discover only at the end, looking back. In the moment, to those immersed in the work, every last thing seemed urgent. (270)

The star of the book is New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, who comes across as a titanic, charismatic leader of men. His supporting cast of coaches and players are hyperfixated strivers bound by a warrior ethos. But more than Ryan or the Jets, the true subject illustrated by this study is the culture of NFL football. It is a world of unrelenting commitment defined by a preoccupation with toughness. Weakness and doubt are poison to these people. I used to wonder why coaches kept handing the ball to starting running backs in games that were not essential to win. Not anymore. To let in the smallest sliver of moderation, in this maximalist world, is tantamount to admitting defeat. Being on an NFL team requires buying into a carefully ordered delusion. It is a shared, often miserable grind.

By the middle of August, David Harris, the linebacker, could no longer keep track of what day of the week it was. Much as they liked to play football, the players thought of training camp the same way coaches did—something to endure. “It’s a blue-collar sport,” the guard Brandon Moore said while walking off the field one day. “Got to bring the lunch pail. You do a lot of things you don’t like to do. Uncomfortable things… It’s repetition—over and over. Besides Sundays, the fun is the one-on-one battle, doing your job and winning more than you lost.” (218)

One of the most interesting revelations was learning what exactly the head coach’s job is. Contrary to what I thought, it’s not really to be a technical director. Even in a regime headed by a tactical genius like Ryan, that job belongs to the coordinators and assistants. Really, an NFL head coach is a CEO. A manager of managers; a motivator of motivators. Head coaches hire the technicians who devise and install the strategy — and thus the head coaches have ultimate say over that strategy — but they’re not moment-to-moment operational executives. The skill of a head coach, in other words, seems to have little to do with being a great tactical guru. It’s more about being able to install a culture of high performance. A vision of success. Ryan was great at it, but in this book, starts to become a little drunk on power and authors his own undoing.

I appreciated the contrast Dawidoff draws between the cultures of offense and defense. The offense, run on this team by Brian Schottenheimer, is a world of precision and skill, built around intricate plans designed to outwit and out-execute the opponent. Defense is a wrecking ball; an angry bringer of chaos built on intuition and willpower. “I don’t want gourmet, I want ghetto!” shouts one defensive coach at a too-nice spread of food. The offense strives for gleaming jewels of perfection; the defense strives to fuck things up.

Aside from the profiles of individual players — the up-close looks at Sanchez and Cromartie are fun, as is everyone’s astonishment at the otherworldly brilliance of Darrell Revis — the most vivid and enduring dispatch in Collision Low Crossers is about the monastic sacrifices required of everyone on and around a football team. The coaches and the players give far more than we see; in every moment and every day of their career, they give everything they have. It is unglamorous, but for a lot of these guys, it is the only way they can imagine living.

[Bob O'G · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the book I always wished existed, and then I found out that it did 5 years after it was published. My fault. Collision Low Crossers is an in depth account of the 2011 NFL season with the New York Jets, experienced first hand by the author. It follows the team from before the draft to the cleaning of lockers at the disappointing season's end. The author, Nick Dawidoff, does a fantastic job of treating the book like a piece of journalism as opposed to a fan. In fact, it in unclear if Dawidoff was even a football viewer, though it is obvious he understands the game. Since the bulk of his time was spent with members of the coaching staff, the reader gets the deepest view of those men. On a 53 man roster though, a large number of players are spoken about including back stories, personalities, abilities, etc. No player is too big or small to be written about. He creates a feel for the most part on who these players are without glorifying them or leaving out their short comings.
I'm not entirely sure who would want to read this book outside of hardcore football fans, or even more specifically, New York Jets fans. However, I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in the behind the scenes of an NFL team: countless hours of preparation, inside jokes, ridiculous fines, superstitions, fading hope, doubt management, eye bleeding film study, cafeteria food choice, and much more. Most importantly, as an avid New York Jets fan, I must say it was a happy accident that I stumbled onto this book a half a decade late since the team now is experiencing some of the same positive whispers that happened 10 years ago, the last time the team was successful. It was interesting reading about 2011 knowing the failures that were to come. Collision Low Crossers first shows the team splinters, and then the splinters becoming cracks, the cracks becoming breaks, and the breaks leading to a decade worth of painful misery for the rabid fan base and even the casual local viewer.

[Marc Gerstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have any idea, from the title of this work, what the heck this book is about, then you’re far wiser than I. But being a long-time long-suffering NY jets fan (from 1963, pre Joe Namath), I noticed the uniforms on the cover and took a glance. Although I was almost hallway through before I could actually remember the title, I have to say the book, an incredibly detailed inside chronicle of the 2011 NY Jets, captivated me, and not just because I’m a super-fan (oh God help me!!!). It’s a bit over-written at times (more detail on individuals than anyone should ever need) but it was significant regardless of which team or even sport you’re into (if any, if you aren’t a sports fan, skip it). It’s many things but what sticks most for me is the way the assistant coaches, the many whose names and faces we barely know, live and work. If we tried to do that to prison inmates, I suspect the U.S. Supreme Court would put a stop to it based on the 8th amendment ban against cruel and inhuman punishment. Recently, Brandon Marshall (a current – so far but maybe not for long – NY Jets receiver) advocated on TV recently for a union to represent coaches. After reading this book, I think he’s spot on.

[Ben Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collision Low Crossers is an extensive, in-depth look at the New York Jets imperfect 2011 season. Boy was this a journey inside football! Dawidoff completely immersed himself journalistically (semi-spoiler but this includes living with defensive coordinator Mike Pettine) with this team. I couldn’t read this without thinking of the similar style as David Halberstam’s classic Breaks of the Game, which to me is still the quintessential American sports book. Football is not always pretty. The sheer amount of man hours folks in the NFL (especially coaches) spend crafting personnel and playbooks was fascinating. All the media semantics aside, Rex Ryan seems oft misunderstood and a great player’s coach. The overall takeaway for me was how razor thin the NFL truly is. It felt like the Jets were in the same boat as the other 31 teams out there. One of the great lines of the book (paraphrased) – “NFL is really just operating 32 branches in different cities”. The story is quite dense and not for the faint of heart, but with as many hours I’ve spent watching football it was worth gaining a deeper understanding of what goes on besides what comes across the television on Sunday.

[Scott Cumming · Rating 4 out of 5]

We're eight years removed from the events of this book, but I'm going to say the process of coaching and playing in the NFL hasn't changed all that much from when this was written. Dawidoff acts as a fly on the wall within the New York Jets during the 2011 season chronicling them through the draft, player lockout and regular season. This book is a precursor to the Amazon show, "All or Nothing", but within the 460 pages you get much more information on the process of coaching and playing.

The first third of the book was perhaps the most interesting with a look into the draft process of interviewing prospects and seeing how they cope with the range of questions and scenarios thrown at them and how this comes together to with the game film to inform decisions. There was a real sense of honesty about the Jets here as they knew that with their draft pick they wouldn't get the perfect blend of talent and character. The undrafted free agent scrum scene was revealing too of this process, which I'd barely given thought to in the past.

When the season rolls around, the book hits a repetitive stride with coaches and players building and working on game plans throughout the week and watching film of the upcoming opponent. The books shows how the individuals deal with adversity and display a team that is fractured.

This is a good, layer-peeling read that will certainly give you a new found appreciation for NFL coaches and co-ordinators and the schedule they live during the season.

[Ian Allan · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Insider”. It’s a word that gets thrown around too much. These guys are NFL insiders, these guys have the inside story, this is the inside information – obtained from inside sources.

But rarely is there anything inside about it.

But here’s a true inside work. Dawidoff was given the opportunity to sit in with the Jets for a full year. He was in their war room at the draft, he was in the film rooms all year with the coaches, and he was at all of their team meetings. We’re left with a gem – probably the best football book of this type ever written.

It’s rare for a team to open itself up in this way. Most teams are notoriously secret about this kind of stuff. But the Jets, for some reason, decided to give Dawidoff pretty much full access for a full season, even though there’s a lot of stuff in there that will piss off management, players and coaches.

Dawidoff sits in at film sessions, where coaches talk shit about Antonio Cromartie’s unwillingness to get in on tackles. And he’s in the discussion when they’re talking about how to hide Bart Scott’s declining speed.

Published two months ago, this book is built around the 2011 season, but most of the guys here are still in the league in different capacities. Ryan is still the coach of the Jets, and much of his staff is still in place. Mike Pettine, their defensive coordinator, is now the head coach in Cleveland. You learn a lot about Pettine’s background, and how he works with Ryan – how those guys are similar, and what their differences are. They had worked together in Baltimore. You’re there with Pettine when he’s calling the late-game blitz that allows Tim Tebow to run for the winning touchdown in that Thursday night game at Mile High. Pettine seems to be a more techie and Xs-and-Os guy, while Ryan has some leadership skills and ability to work with people. And we get to see Brian Schottenheimer struggle as their offensive coordinator; they let him go, and he’s running the Rams offense now.

Dawidoff is in the team’s war room during the draft, and those few pages are worth reading slowly. Picking 30th, the Jets had their eye on Muhammad Wilkerson all along. They were hoping to pick him, with cornerback Jimmy Smith their No. 1 backup option. The coaches trade high fives when Tennessee selects Jake Locker early – picks like that are just making it more likely they’ll get Wilkerson. The Jets rejoice when Houston takes J.J. Watt (they feared New England might trade up and get him). John Schneider in Seattle has gotten a lot of credit recently for his ability to pick up gems late (Richard Sherman, Kam Chancelor, etc.) but he makes a mess out of the first round. Sitting at 25th, Schneider tries to trade down to 30th and pick up a third-round pick. The Jets offer a fifth, but Scheider passes. Schneider calls back later looking for a fourth, but the Jets continue to hold tight for a fifth, which is what the value chart says is fair. Then, head-scratcher, Seattle selects James Carpenter, whom everyone thought was a second-rounder anyway – Seahawks could have and should have picked up a fifth-round pick in that draft.

Dawidoff is at all the practices, and he’s working without a filter. He’s allowed to outline how the team’s defense is frustrated and angry all year with the offense – not only the players, but the coaches too. He’s able to illustrate how a lot of the coaches don’t like linebackers coach Jeff Weeks – a friend of Ryan’s, but a coach who isn’t bringing much to the table. Assistants and scouts are pissed when Ryan selects wide receiver Scotty McKnight – a friend of Mark Sanchez, but a player who never should have been drafted. He paints Sanchez as an over-eager youngster who’s simply not ready to be a big-time quarterback. He shows how Cromartie is immensely talented but too sensitive, moody and inconsistent. He’s there when the Jets make the decision to sign Plaxico Burress, and how that causes them to lose Jerricho Cotchery (which some coaches don’t like). Ryan’s biggest flaw, it seems, is an unwillingness to take on some problem players, like Santonio Holmes. Other coaches are livid when Ryan declines to take on Cromartie for shying away from even attempting to tackle Tim Tebow in that loss in Denver.

Mostly the book shows that if you’re going to be an NFL coach, you pretty much have to ignore your family for half the year – with the hours these guys are working, they’re often sleeping at the facility.

Dawidoff is a quality writer; he’s written three other books, including one that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as for the The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and New York Times Magazine. Everything’s very professional and put together nicely. He has a much larger vocabulary than I do, to the point where I needed to have a dictionary nearby for help. About every other page, I’d see a word that I either never use or have never even heard. I started jotting them down at one point. Riposted, redounded, vortical, beatific, sui generis, Rashomon, lagniappe, presentiment, ephemeral, ligature, scatological – stuff like that.

Only one error that I saw. There was a “Blitzberg” reference; that’s Blitzburgh (the team is based in Pittsburgh, not Pittsberg). And I thought it was odd that there was very little mention of LaDainian Tomlinson. He was a declining player in 2011, but he’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer. I would have thought he could have tapped into that a little – how Tomlinson feels about getting demoted behind Shonn Greene. And I thought there should have been more written about the Week 17 incident, where Santonio Holmes gets thrown out of the huddle in the game at Miami.

But this is an outstanding book. Definitely a must-read for any fan of the New York Jets, and a good one for anybody who really wants to get an inside look behind the curtain of the NFL.

[Steven Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

COLLISION LOW CROSSERS by Nicholas Dawidoff is not your typical football expose. It does not purport to provide deep insight into the strategy of the game and if it has any particular angle it tries to bring a sense of humanity to the sport. Dawidoff was embedded for a year observing the 2011 New York Jets, a team at that time that was coming off losing two American Conference Championship finals that would have taken them to the Super Bowl had they been victorious. Bill Parcell’s, a former coach and general manager has noted in describing football that “this sport is not for the well adjusted.” (11) Having played and watched football for more than a half century myself I firmly agree. I remember driving for an hour and a half with my family to watch the 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants; attending the Giants-Cardinals game at Yankee Stadium two days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy; watching the Giants defeat the Broncos in the 1987 Super Bowl on a high school trip at NATO Support Headquarters in Brussels, and living each moment of each Giants game, as my wife complains as if “you owned the team.” It is obvious I am as a fan not very well adjusted which is why Dawidoff’s book was so intriguing.

The author takes the reader through the season focusing his lens on the coaches, players, front office personnel, and the player’s families. The personal stories are at times uplifting and at times very sad. Many players view the sport as a means of escaping poverty and dysfunctional families. Their stories bring out the best in human nature, and at times the worst. We meet a number of interesting characters such as Jets coach, Rex Ryan, a bombastic individual who has a very sensitive and soft side. We follow Ryan through his childhood and relationship with his twin brother Rob, also an NFL coach. We see Ryan live and die with each game, but more importantly we learn what kind of person he is as he relates in an emotional manner with everyone he interacts with on a daily basis, be it a player, coach, or fan. Football can be a nasty enterprise, after all it is a multi-billion dollar business, but Dawidoff is able to bring the reader into the locker room and we witness the character flaws, the uplifting moments of victory and as John McKay said years ago, “the agony of defeat” on a daily basis.

The structure of an NFL season through the creation and preparation of the roster is reviewed in detail. Player combines, draft preparation, signing of free agents and player competition are dissected and during the 2011 season it is made more difficult by a “lockout” perpetrated by the owners. The reader is exposed to the emotion of being “cut,” and making the final roster. However, just because a player makes the roster it is no guarantee he will be employed for the entire season. Injuries dominate game preparation, and it is rare that a player can get through an entire season without playing hurt or playing up to their potential through an entire sixteen game schedule.
Locker room relationships are paramount on any team. Some call it team chemistry and argue that you cannot win without it. In the case of the 2011 New York Jets “chemistry” slowly declined as the offense was challenged by the defense because of a weak quarterback, Mark Sanchez, and a number of selfish personalities embodied in wide receiver, Santonio Holmes. These issues could have been glossed over except for the poor decision making of Sanchez and the overall inability of the offense to score. The defense which was one of the most dominant in the National Football league grew to resent the offense and this bled over into the locker room and at times the playing field. Ryan and his coaches did their best to mitigate this problem but when fifty-three plus men spend what seems to be their entire waking hours together over a six month period the negativity of human nature usually holds forth.

As Dawidoff explores these human relationships there is one overriding theme for all involved, pain; physical and emotional discomfort that dominates the game. There have been a number of exposes that have been written delineating the “pain” issue and how medical personnel deal with it in getting football players ready to take the field. The author does not mince words and explores how players deal with their pain and how it is treated so they can play on a regular basis. Constant pain and injury also has a psychological cost and Dawidoff devotes significant coverage to this problem as one player describes “it could all go to shit so fast.” (284)

For those individuals who follow the game there is a great deal of meat in this book. We see how a professional coaching staff comes together in trying to meld fifty three men into a cohesive unit that strives to be the best it can be. We see the Darelle Revis story told in detail as is the failure of Mark Sanchez to grow as a player from the perspective of 2011 and how his situation remains somewhat the same today. But more importantly the book is not designed for the football fan but it provides a window for the general reader to engage with a sport that has become a national religion in our society. Football is a sport that in the end is very violent, hence the obsession finally with concussions, and is a sport where the average playing career lasts between four and six years, and results in financial and medical issues once a player’s career ends that are difficult to cope with. Football is a microcosm of our society and COLLISION LOW CROSSERS is an effort to humanize the sport and place it in the larger context of our culture. In the end this is a good read.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sports lend themselves well to narrative. And that's especially true with football. Even without the battle-type imagery, the ebb and flow of games, unexpected defeats and reasonable pacing is all well-suited to the printed page.

Because of this, it's not surprising that every few years a reporter puts out a narrative from a season spent embedded in one form or another with a team. By my count, I've read at least six of these works prior to this one, from other ones about football (Next Man Up), high school basketball (The Last Shot and Fall River Dreams), college basketball (A March to Madness), high school football (Friday Night Lights), and professional basketball (The Breaks of the Game). This makes number seven.

The idea of embedding is clearly an attractive one--a chance to tell the general public about all the goings on behind the scenes that make up the games we love to watch and play (this is more true for those books that follow professional sports rather than high school teams). But almost always, these books end up feeling flat. The author is clearly closer with the coach, whose job is what you'd expect it to be, and more distant from the players, the people you really want to hear more about.

"Collision Low Crossers" suffers from this problem. It sounds impressive that Dawidoff got to spend a season with the New York Jets, a team at the time that looked like it very well might make a Super Bowl run. But for all that access, the general sense we got was that coaches work long hours and spend lots of time in meetings. Game action is kept to a minimum (not a bad thing for reasons I'll explain in a minute) but players appear as little more than caricatures. Mark Sanchez is goofy; Darrelle Revis studies film a lot and is really good; Antonio Rodgers-Cromartie is inconsistent. They are 2-D portraits that lend little to the narrative.

For what it's worth, that's not an uncommon flaw in these books. John Feinstein's Next Man Up, which profiled an utterly forgettable Ravens team from the mid-aughts also clearly had too much coach/general manager and very little from the player angle.

But there's a deeper flaw about why many of these books aren't actually that good--they are overly focused on a literal retelling of a team. And when you do that, you are taking a huge risk--if that team has a boring or uneventful season, you've spent a year covering something that's destined for the dustbin of history in a matter of weeks if not days. One way to get around this is to pick high school teams, which are more consistent in terms of athletic dynasties, especially in football.

Or you can do it the right way and realize that the embedded season is less about the team and the games and more about what it can say about the state of sports and society in that time period (yes I know that's cliche, but let me explain). Friday Night Lights is a phenomenal book not because it tells great stories about high school football games. Rather, it uses high school football as a device to discuss the plight of small town rural America, the places where people do "cling to their guns and religion." That's why one of the most fascinating pieces of the book is a chapter in which George H.W. Bush comes to visit and it prompts a whole discussion from the author about why folks whose livelihood was effectively ruined by his economic policies ended up still voting for him. Fall River Dreams does this pretty well too, by depicting the story of a basketball team in a rundown mill town in Massachusetts.

But of course, the story of a random town through its sports teams works less well with professional teams playing in major metropolitan cities. There's a model for how to do that well too--David Halberstram's The Breaks of the Game. Frankly, that book is just so much better at every professional entry into this genre, that it almost seems like no one should be allowed to do this anymore. What sets Halberstram's book apart is he uses a year spent with the Portland Trailblazers to talk about the massive upheavals going on in the NBA at that time--how rookies would come in and make more in a year than their veteran teammates did in a career. An increase in televised games and pitted all against the turmoil in the 1970s when economic inequality started to increase again. On it's face, it's a book about professional basketball, but it's so much deeper than that.

"Collision Low Crossers" is none of those books. Head injuries are referred to in maybe a few paragraphs at most. You can almost see the NFL Films voiceover of past gridiron glory when talk of injections and messed up fingers comes up. It's a thorough play-by-play that's gone as soon as it happens.

And that's too bad because I could see an argument for a Breaks of the Game type treatment for the NFL. It would probably need to be set sometime in the 1990s (maybe the year of the baseball strike?) and it would talk about when football really became America's actual sport. What the huge revenue increase for the league meant in terms of operations and approaches. How fantasy football, NFL Sunday Ticket, and a host of other things changed the viewing experience, while concerns about health and lasting injuries changed the player calculus. Set against a backdrop of heady 90s, irresponsible aughts, and chaste whatever decade we are in now, that could make for a fascinating and deep study. Sure you might not get specific names of team plays, but you'd have something much more meaningful to walk away with.

[M. Crabtree · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book because it was such a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see behind the scenes of an NFL team from draft to post-season. there are
Ups and downs and sometimes you wonder if the author is really unbiased about what he experiences. I think he becomes quite attached to the coaches and GM and some of the players. But I appreciated his admiration because I actually think it made the book better. I am also not a NYJets fan, but I found it easy to be pulled into the personalities and tensions of their 2012 season, fan or not.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Dawidoff uses his extraordinary access to zero in on the coaches - particularly the defensive coaches - and comes back with a fascinating story of office politics, hard work/drudgery, and pathos. There's no sex and drugs, but there's an awful lot of near-tragic rivalries, loyalties, dysfunction, and testosterone. It's a little long and repetitive, and what passes for wit in NFL facilities is as juvenile as you feared, but you'll definitely be charmed by Rex Ryan and might even gain some respect for him. But Brian Schottenheimer? fuggedaboutit...

[Michael Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, among the best sports books I’ve ever read. Starts slow as the author gets familiar with the sport and the coaches and players on the team. But as you keep reading he gets totally immersed in the team and the anecdotes and stories are terrific.

Small quibble, he spent almost all his time shadowing the defensive coaches and didn’t catch all the drama coming from the offensive side, which ultimately sank the team, but there’s enough there that you can get the picture.

But apart from that; a tremendous read.

[Gareth Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many books that follow a sports team for a season can, for whatever insight they have, become repetitive and dull. Dawidoff manages to keep this account of the Jets 2011 season fresh and interesting. There is much for a relative football novice to learn. The most staggering thing is the amazingly long hours that the coaches work.

It took me a long while to read. It is a long book, but I did get distracted looking at the Internet to explore the later careers of the players and coaches.

[Avi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best sports books you’ll ever read. Dawidoff provides a deeply reported, insightful look into the 2011 New York Jets and the culture of professional football more generally. In particular, the portrait he paints of the Jets’ defensive coaches room is full of depth and insight into this particularly notable team that was on the precipice of eternal glory in 2010 only to fall so far down in 2011. There is no other book that will teach you as much about the NFL as much as this one.