Lords of Smashmouth: The Unlikely Rise of an American Phenomenon

It all began in the spring of 1890 when a ragtag group of lads got off a Columbus train in the sodden midlands of Ohio and walked themselves into gridiron immortality. More than a hundred and thirty years later, their athletic descendants at Ohio State are part of an institution with nearly nine hundred wins and has become, said the Wall Street Journal, college football’s most valuable franchise, worth in excess of a billion and a half dollars. That journey across time is one of America’s great sports stories, told imaginatively in Lords of Smashmouth: The Unlikely Rise of an American Phenomenon. Revealing the subterranean alignment of forces that built one of America’s most spectacular athletic institutions, Lords contends the modern era of Ohio State football began with the appearance of a bowtie-wearing Southwesterner who appeared in downtown Columbus and outlined―with a handful of pocket change on the hotel carpet―game strategies no one had ever seen before. There was the near-miss of Ohio State’s likely first dynasty, then the real thing: the tumultuous near-quarter of a century in which Ohio State football―and its irascible coach Woody Hayes―became a national icon for both excellence and excess.