Autumn Thunder Book Club: Meat Market

Definitely a must-buy you're a recruiting junkie. If you're not, it's a loaner.

The latest installment of the Autumn Thunder Book Club is "Meat Market" by Bruce Feldman. This book chronicals the 2006 recruiting season of Ed Orgeron and the Ole Miss coaching staff. If you are a hardcore recruiting junkie, you'll get a real kick out of this book. It provides in-depth details of how Orgeron, a master recruiter, evaluates players, picks his prospects, and goes after the prize. "Meat Market" also gives great insight into Jerrell Powe's unfortunate troubles with the NCAA clearinghouse, and provides tasty tidbits about some of 2006's hottest recruits (one emu-lookin' quarterback in particular!).

To be quite honest, I was hoping for some more anectodes about Ed Orgeron's cajun caveman personality in this book. I wanted some ridiculously hillarious shirt-ripping yaw-yawing tales that would make me laugh out loud. While I did get a few chuckles while reading this, I thought Feldman could have capitalized on this aspect of Orgeron to make the book much more entertaining.

It you really love recruiting, are a member of either Rivals or Scout (like me!) and want to get a closer look at how all this madness truly works, "Meat Market" is a must-read. For the average recruiting fan, this book might be a little disappointing - a lot of time is spend describing the high-school recruits, which takes away from the plot and development of the book's major characters.

I'd say give this book a whirl. If nothing else, the story about how Orgeron wrestled a recruit and how the wrestling became a major factor in his commitment makes this book entertaining enough to read.

Nice work, Mr. Feldman.