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Book Reviews Career in Crisis: Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant and the 1971 Season of Change. By John David Briley. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2006. xv, 322 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-88146-025-4. John David Briley’s Career in Crisis is the latest entry in a growing list of books about legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant. Although it is neither as comprehensive as a recent work by Allen Barra (The Last Coach, New York, 2005), nor as insightful as Andrew Doyle’s cultural study (in Patrick Bryant Miller’s The Sporting World of the South, Urbana, Ill., 2002), nor as dramatic as Jim Dent’s account of Bryant’s first season at Texas A&M (The Junction Boys, New York, 1999), it is likely to be enjoyed by general sports readers, especially if they are Crimson Tide fans. Like Dent and author Keith Dunnavant (The Missing Ring, New York, 2007), Briley’s focus is not just on Bryant, but on a single season of one of the Bear’s teams. Briley argues that the 1971 squad was the “most important team during [Bryant’s] twenty-five year career at the Capstone” (p. 275). Situated against the context of the Tide’s first year with African-American players and on the heels of two mediocre campaigns, the 1971 team went undefeated in the regular season to win its first of eight Southeastern Conference (SEC) championships in the decade. Only a 38-6 Orange Bowl drubbing at the hands of the Nebraska Cornhuskers on January 1, 1972, prevented Bryant from garnering yet another national championship . Bryant, who pondered forays into politics and the possibility of coaching the Miami Dolphins after the disappointing seasons of the late 1960s, successfully retooled the Alabama offense to include the wishbone formation, a rushing style patterned largely after the University of Texas. The new attack was based on discipline, precision, and above all toughness. “I am through tip-toeing around and I’m through pussyfooting ,” Bryant announced to a reporter as he planned changes for his under-achieving team. “I’m going back to being Paul Bryant; if anybody does not like the way that Paul Bryant does things, you can get the hell out of here” (p. 46). The changes in recruiting and tactics eventually resulted in three more national championships in 1973, 1978, and 1979. Scholars will learn little new from Briley’s book, though the second chapter, “A Second Reconstruction,” details the 1969 lawsuit filed by the university’s Afro-American Student Association. The student group, T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 62 mindful of the cultural importance of college football at the state’s flagship university, asked the federal court to compel Bryant to actively recruit and sign black players. Bryant had been reluctant to integrate his team, although a few black players had previously participated in spring drills. The suit was eventually dismissed after Wilbur Jackson and John Mitchell joined the team and other black prospects were aggressively recruited. As many others have concluded, Briley identifies Bryant as a coach, not an activist or a pioneer; “Bryant was the one coach in the South who could have bucked the system and integrated in the mid-sixties . He saw himself as a football coach, not an agent for social change” (p. 35). Most of the rest of the book—constructed primarily through oral histories with former players and coaches—details the weekly practices and games of the season, often painstakingly. Briley provides reams of statistics in his text: numbers of tackles, sacks, carries, pass completions, heights, weights, poll rankings, and even yardage totals from the A-Day game, the annual spring football game which caps off-season practices. Die-hard Alabama football fans will find these metrics interesting; others will find them tedious. At times, the prose lapses into melodrama—“Terry Davis did a masterful job” (p. 138) and “Parkhouse had the heart of a lion and showed it throughout the game” (p. 134)—or oversimplification —“Bryant was going to make every effort for this one” (p. 225). Even so, the book is generally readable and the appendix useful. A...

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