Five questions for Gregg Easterbrook

The prolific author with eclectic tastes is reviving his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column.

Gregg Easterbrook is the author of 15 books and a new Substack newsletter.

Gregg Easterbrook has published 13 books, with Nos. 14 and 15 on the way. In his words, “My books cross genres – public-policy reporting, literary fiction, sports, humor, theology.”

He’s also the author of a witty column about the NFL, Tuesday Morning Quarterback, which over the years appeared on Slate, ESPN.com, NFL.com, the Weekly Standard and the New York Times.

Gregg this year launched a Substack newsletter, called All Predictions Wrong, which veers across a wide variety of subjects. When the NFL season returns, his TMQ column will return on his Substack.

Easterbrook took part in the Sports Literate five-question Q&A.

You named your Substack “All Predictions Wrong,” yet it turns out that many of the predictions you made in your 2015 book, “The Game’s Not Over,” were correct.

Your central argument was that those who predicted that the link between brain damage and concussions would lead to the sport’s demise were wrong.

Gregg Easterbrook’s 2015 book foreshadowed many developments in today’s NFL landscape.

You also had prescient words about how sports betting would be embraced by the NFL.

Have you thought about updating the book and renaming it “All Predictions Correct”?

I admit to inadvertently making correct predictions. It was an oversight. As Tony Kornheiser says, “I’ll try to do better next time.”

“The Game’s Not Over” also predicts the NFL will dispense with the kickoff, which is proving correct, and that the NFL (and ESPN, NBC, CBS etc.) encouraging gambling will harm people’s lives, which I fear is happening.

Back in the day of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a catchphrase was, All Predictions Wrong or Your Money Back. This catchphrase worked because TMQ was free.

With TMQ about to resurface this fall at my reader-supported Substack, naming the Substack “All Predictions Wrong” broadened the idea while not conflicting with my asking readers to subscribe. At $5 a month, All Predictions Wrong is priced to be affordable. But if I slip up and a prediction is right, subscribers don’t get their money back.

Before the NFL draft, your newsletter revived your Tuesday Morning Quarterback football columnist persona. Will that become a regular newsletter feature during football season?

Yes. When the NFL artificial universe resumes in September, All Predictions Wrong will have a full-on TMQ each Tuesday, plus a newsletter on some other topic later in the week, so that subscribers who are not football fans will have content to look forward to.

You have written 13 books covering a wide variety of substantive topics. Does writing about football let you relax a bit and have more fun than when writing about, say, climate change?

The topics and genres of my books vary widely, which is not the advice that agents give to authors, but it keeps my mind fresh. At least, or so I think.

I enjoyed playing football in high school and college, and enjoy watching the sport – I attend way too many games. Football not only is fascinating, it is everything good and bad about America rolled into a sport. Writing about climate change or theology or environmental regulation is important, but not entertaining like writing about football.

Also, when Tuesday Morning Quarterback ran at ESPN, and there was a lot more money in ESPN’s coffers than today, my deal included tickets and expenses for two to every Super Bowl and Final Four (which is my other favorite sports event). I have three children and two brothers. I took them to Super Bowls and Final Fours at Disney’s expense and we had a blast. (My wife does not like sports so I took her to an ESPYs which she did like.)

On the way out the door of ESPN I gave my last Super Bowl perk to a terrific teacher, and his wife, from the high school my kids attended. No public school teacher can afford to be at the Super Bowl. But teachers are so important! They had a blast too.

I’ll spare you a Mount Rushmore reference, but do you have a small handful of sports books that are your favorites of all time, ones you have most enjoyed or admired?

Considering the centrality of sports to American culture, there are too few really good books about athletics. I blame the New York publishing houses, which push writers to do books praising specific players or coaches, not to analyze sports generally. New York publishing houses think sports fans can’t handle complicated thoughts. This is completely wrong – smart people are just as obsessed with athletics as anyone else! I hope Sports Literate helps show this.

I’d commend the Roy Blount book “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,” about the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 1973 season. Well-reported and well-written and it does not build up to a 90-yard winning touchdown on the final play, it’s about the realism of trying and failing.

I’d commend my own 2013 “The King of Sports.” It’s mostly about the ways in which football should be reformed. For research I hung around and traveled with the 2011 Virginia Tech football team, which made the Sugar Bowl that year. I chose Virginia Tech because I admired the fact that Frank Beamer built a winning program around players going to class and graduating. Beamer was fighting a rear-guard action for those ideals, which mean less to Power Five football every year.

There’s a fairly well-known canon of sports books among interested readers, but is there an obscure or lesser-known book in this category that you would recommend?

“The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football.” Nonfiction, 1994, by Mariah Burton Nelson. The author played NCAA basketball at Stanford, and her theory was that as women move into positions of power in business, government and science, men would retreat to football, the sole place where women just cannot succeed. How right she was! This book is pretty quirky too.