Since Brian is in the story, it (again) fell to me to write this site's official review of John U. Bacon's latest book, Endzone: The Rise, Fall and Return of Michigan Football.

We'll get the Amazonian recommendation bit out of the way first: You should read it. If you are a Michigan fan, you should read it. If you are a rival fan, you should read it. If you are part of any organization that has customers and/or employees, you should read it. If you are a fan of a college football team you should read it, then try to get your athletic director to read it. If you're a fan of Texas you should just throw copies of it at Steve Patterson. Except this hardcover is over 450 pages, so that might hurt him. Do not throw copies of this book at Steve Patterson. Read it.

Since you are reading MGoBlog right this minute, either you already own the book, are going to follow this link to buy the book (hardcover/kindle) right this second, or else you're just here because you heard we are a purveyor of Blake O'Neill photographs (here you go). If you're not done with the book yet, you are invited to leave this tab open and come back when you are, since this review is going to spoiler the hell out of it. I will give you the same bit of advice that Brian did when he handed it to me:

"This book is going to blow your mind."

[After the jump: We with the broken bits of brain matter and skull on the floor try to piece that back together long enough to find a theme. (Spoiler alert) Michigan contracts a disease, but its immune system wins]

Why Not Brandon's Lasting Lessons?

John U. Bacon's unamused face [Eric Upchurch]

At the Literati release event at Rackham Auditorium last week somebody made a comment to me that Bacon doesn't really like it when we call the book "Brandon's Lasting Lessons." For the (probably) none of you who missed the reference, it's a play on Bacon's first hugely successful book, Bo's Lasting Lessons. The reason given for Bacon's attitude toward "BLL" was that this book isn't just about Dave Brandon.

That is true; David Brandon's administration at Michigan is only a part of a story that's really about the organism of Michigan. It is kind of a large part, though. Many tales of it are included. Like:

• "Firing Fridays"
• how we lost Notre Dame and how that led to the worst schedule ever
• what he did to the tennis coach for seemingly no reason
• what he did to the past lettermen and their traditions
• the sharp contrast between how he treated student athlete Will Hagerup like a son, while treating the students' elected representatives like pariahs.

Had Brandon been the only real agent in this story, Bacon's book would be one more cautionary tale about empty suits. He's not, and it's not.*

This is Michigan's story, not Dave's. Bacon got some extraordinary people to go on the record about what the hell was going on in there. But the book also carefully autopsies every safeguard torn down that could have prevented one bad scion from setting the estate on fire. More importantly, it details the actions and motivations of student leaders, university leaders, thought leaders, and football captains in rescuing the enterprise from the flames.

Why Brandon's Lasting Lessons?

You remember November 2013, after the Iowa sludgefart, when the nature of Brandon was established, the trajectory of Hoke was manifest, and Brian said we are The Dude. Michigan was crumbling before our eyes. What could we do but yell "What the fuck, Walter?!" and metaphorically go bowling? The following week Devin Gardner tried, throwing the broken bits of his body against Ohio State in the single greatest performance by a Michigan athlete in history that no one will remember in ten years. He still lost, because one man is not enough. We literally went bowling.

The lasting lesson of Endzone is that one man can't do anything, but many can. There's student co-presidents Bobby Dishell and Michael Proppe, dismantling Hunter Lochmann's rationale for foisting general admission on the students. There's the professor who oversees M-Hacks, and multiple regents. There's Daily writer Alejandro Zuniga, who checked out the two Cokes deal, and Brian and Ace who checked out the emails, and all the readers who sent those in. There's the people who organized the Fire Brandon rally, and the alumni from various eras who pressured the school for change. There's new president Mark Schlissel, who walked into a crisis and did right, and Jim Hackett who stepped out of retirement "for God and Country." And of course there are the lettermen who organized and participated in a massive, coordinated grass roots effort to bring back Jim Harbaugh, for love. For MICHIGAN!

THIS is Michigan, fergdosakes

It is that ineffable thing that stars. Dave Brandon could not understand that what made Michigan "MICHIGAN" for over a century was far more than the world on the right side of his golden rope.

There's a contrast Bacon makes between Bo's Michigan and Brandon's. Brandon was "kicked off the team" by Bo. It happened to a lot of guys—Harbaugh twice—because this was one of Bo's Jedi mind tricks. The lesson was about love: you don't know how much Michigan means to you until it's suddenly taken away. The lesson Brandon took from it was "don't screw up even once, or you'll be on the other side of the rope."

In the courting of Harbaugh you start to get an appreciation for how far from the rope line the program truly extends, from a dishwasher at Pizza House to a renowned statistics professor, the state capitol, and several million alumni and fans who did something to right this ship.

So all jokes aside, Endzone really is Brandon's Lasting Lessons. Among the core Bacon books, Bo's Lasting Lessons is the heart, Three & Out is a spin-off, Fourth & Long a companion piece, and Endzone is the sequel. It shows the difference between trying to stage Bo's lasting lessons (e.g. getting a commitment from Hoke before talking money) and embodying them (e.g. Hackett's handshake agreement and its 8-hour ordeal).

It teaches that loyalty out of love is greater than loyalty out of fear and that either is a weak substitute for morality. It teaches that candor is virtue, that authenticity is recognizable, and that a person or a program's aspirations are every bit as important as their accomplishments.

It shows what Brandon did wrong, but also, to paraphrase Bacon's favorite Yost quote, how the "enthusiasm that makes it second nature for Michigan Men to spread the gospel of their university to the world's distant outposts" can also come back.

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*[If it was, the publisher would have had  time to fix the unfortunately common copy errors that were the tradeoff for having this in our hands before kickoff. Focusing on them does a disservice to the enormous amount of fact-checking and research and doubling back and "are you SURE you can share this?"-ing put into it.

As long as we're in the critic brackets I'll note that Bacon forgot Fred Jackson survived all the coaching changes, and I think almost all of the relevant decisions in Domino's "we acknowledge our pizza sucks and we're changing it" about-face occurred in the last half-year of Brandon's stewardship. That it had gotten so bad before an attempted about-face rings familiar anyway.]

[Update: So I learned today that "novel" means fiction.]