Next Man Up

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Next Man Up (2006) by John Feinstein

Genre: Sports journalism artifact in which a veteran storyteller embeds with a team for a season and is able to leave with a sense of what the entire league and sport looks like at that moment in time.

Recommended For: Any football fan or someone who gets a thrill out of great sportswriting.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

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I think there are other reasons I wanted to become a writer that predated me ever reading anything by John Feinstein.

Everyone’s always able to reference the person who inspired them to become the thing that they chose to become, but I doubt that it’s usually so simple as to being one person doing one thing so magnificently that their entire world shifts. A number of things begin to awaken something inside you that prime you for that one thing, and those things might actually be just as big, but you don’t quite understand them. You only feel them, so they don’t make you take any particular course of action. They just get those antennas perked up and ready. And then the person who can do that thing in a way you relate to? That person will change everything for you.

It’s obviously much harder to think of those initial sparks. I have some ideas of who they might be for me, not just in terms of my becoming a writer but the person I am and the type of people I like keeping near me, because it’s the type of thing I get a kick out of going back and trying to examine.

Someday, I might write about those inspirations, but that’s not what this space is for. This space is for John Feinstein, who I was most conscious of making me want to become a person who observed things up close and wrote them down to be read and understood by people who were farther away and only really wanted to do their observing if it was neatly packaged in a way that felt like it had a payoff (whether in the way it made them feel inside or the specific information they could take away from it on a practical level).

To be clear, I also wanted to be on the other side of that equation. I also wanted the payoff. Every person does if they let themselves get to the heart of something excellent to read. But Feinstein, man, he made it all feel, so understandable. Just better than a documentary ever could do. And I noticed it was the listening and the writing that was making him so good at it. And I was good at those things, and so his talents looked like they had origins in lesser talents like mine.

Do you ever sit in a stadium or a busy shopping center or a freeway and sort of get overwhelmed by the insignificance of every single person? And then you draw that out more and you can get really overwhelmed thinking about how impossible it is to figure anything out because everyone is just passing each other right by and stuff is happening but it’s all happening so fast and we’re not registering anything. Culture and society and economy and progress are literally developing in those moments, but we all look like molecules bouncing off each other. That is sort of obvious. Any dynamic is the result of many dynamics.

Feinstein’s writing takes things and makes them both less simple than the television tells you they are and less ethereal than the world knows they are. He respected all the characters in his reporting, and he created an ecosystem that you could ground yourself in.

Next Man Up is not my absolute favorite Feinstein book, and I’ll probably write about that one, someday, but it’s an interesting one to think about as NFL content keeps getting churned out. I should stop to say that John Feinstein died in March of 2025. There are many people who would love to replace him. Realistically, none of them are as good as he was, but to be fair, none of them have a chance in the current media landscape. Sportswriting has been gutted at nearly every major publication. Sports Illustrated is a shell of a magazine, churning out AI slop and crashing your computer. The Washington Post recently shuttered its entire sports section, a move that literally wouldn’t have made sense when I was a child, like if you told me that the fire department shuttered their truck funding.*

*Football discussions are probably happening at a much higher level (and in some cases much lower level) than they were in Feinstein’s day. People are able to analyze the game in ways that rely less on lazy narratives, which means less offensive schticks. But what Feinstein did, which takes a very long time with something and then asks readers to take a comparatively much shorter amount of time but still an investment of their available time, to see something from deep within a few perspectives? That is virtually gone with the rarest of exceptions.

In this book, Feinstein embeds with the Baltimore Ravens during a season, and you get an inside look at a 2005 NFL franchise. Looking back now, it’s a time capsule for both the NFL and sports coverage. You’ve got key figures like Jamal Lewis, Brian Billick and Ozzie Newsome (still running the Ravens). It’s not remotely sensational, but it gets at the flaws and the insanity of the NFL. These are all people. But this is a business. Sure. But it’s also just a puzzle that needs to come together. The season happens one way or another and the characters will play some part in sequences that make up that season. Reading about all the in-between, that’s not so much juicy as it is engrossing.

I can’t really think about Next Man Up without untangling (unsuccessfully) nostalgia. There is no part of me that thinks the NFL was better in 2005 than it is now in 2026. I think, probably, the opposite is true, in the sense that the game is more exciting to watch and the technology has made it easier to watch and coaches and players can each come on to the field with wider array of different strengths than they did 20 years ago.

But reading a book like this as a time capsule, as opposed to in the year it came out, is like putting on a little blanket and protecting yourself from nonsense that invades the things you enjoy in 2026. Theoretically, the reason I enjoy watching sports is because teams are trying to win a championship and, on a primary level, I’m rooting for one of those teams to win the championship, and, on a secondary level, I’m appreciating all the other teams’ quest to win that championship. This book does so much heavy lifting for that secondary motivation.

When I watch now, I am inundated with gambling propaganda (something I’ll write about in the coming weeks) and incessive disingenuous social media problem solving (for which I am to blame for subjecting myself to). I feel increasingly removed from the thing. If I search hard enough, I can get context to accompany my experience, but with that or independent of it, I tend to feel lost at sea watching sports.

The way the capitalistic endeavor eventually comes for the consumer experience is indeed real, of course. But I also can’t pretend I’m not just 36. And I was 15 when this book came out, which means it is referencing the knowledge of sports that I had accumulated from ages 8-15, which is a very special knowledge.

And a 36-year-old surely read Next Man Up when it came out. Quite a few, I imagine. And I bet there were plenty of specific 2005-era commercials or some newfangled thing about football that didn’t exist in the late eighties, which made this version of the NFL a bummer to watch to those people. And like I wrote above, if you can lock into a game, it’d be hard to argue games aren’t more fun to watch now.

Maybe I miss being 15. Or maybe I miss journalism being valued. Or maybe I miss John Feinstein. But fortunately, as things get ruined or change in a completely neutral way - however you want to look at it - people wrote books did something to help you wrestle with the questions of nostalgia. You can always go read that book and live there. That’s why it was written.

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