American Odyssey

"American Odyssey is a fascinating road trip through the nation of college football, past and present, with an expert guide in the driver's seat. Mark Schipper supplies a powerful reminder-and a much-needed reminder-of why college football matters."

-Jonathan Eig

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life

Join college football aficionado Mark Schipper on a journey across the United States by plane, train, and automobile in search of the sport's soul during a revolutionary period. Over the course of two seasons and four months on the road Schipper set out to explore ways in which college football and American culture are inextricably intertwined, and how the upheavals rocking the sport -conference realignment, rising costs, and roster instability-could irreparably alter that special connection.

Drawing on the rivalries that turn autumn Saturdays into unforgettable dramas-including Ohio State/Michigan, USC/Notre Dame, Alabama/Tennessee and many more-Schipper pilgrimages to the sport's biggest weekends, meeting legendary figures like Oklahoma's Barry Switzer prior to a Red River Shootout in Dallas, and former Florida coach Steve Spurrier, with whom he spent a morning talking football at his restaurant-museum in Gainesville.

Readers will be fascinated by an extended West Coast swing spent examining programs at UCLA, USC, Oregon, and Washington following their shocking relocation to the Midwestern-based Big Ten Conference, and the cataclysmic demise of the formerly platinum-tier Pac-12. On the opposite coast, basking in the heritage of the Army-Navy game, a preposterous spying scare at Annapolis leads to pathos at West Point, where veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan give Schipper a personal tour of Army's campus.

Schipper's Odyssey skillfully weaves together history, expert insight, and first-person experience in a celebration of the American imagination, the wonderfully diverse American landscape, and the folk sport that has bound together a country in passionate competition since 1869, when a group of hard-nosed collegians brought it to life on a fenced-off cow pasture in New Brunswick, New Jersey.