Listen up, football widows

Posted February 1st, 2007 at 12:33 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 5 Comments / Filed in: Those Crazy Yahoos

I know better than to call my mom on Sundays during football season. This is a woman who spends her time organizing chamber music festivals, laboring over intricate French sauce recipes, raising honeybees, reading Marcel Proust aloud on long car trips and weeding between her delphinium and dianthus. But give her a good NFL match-up and a cold one and even a transcontinental call from her grandchild won’t break her loose from her television.

That’s because my mom learned that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. As Paul Reiser said in “Diner,” “We all know most marriages depend on a firm grasp of football trivia.” That’s exactly what Yahoo! Mobile Business Operations Manager Susan Gagnier was after when she decided to write “Putting on the Blitz: The Football Book for Women” (Action Press, $39.95).

Football widows everywhere — sneer from the kitchen no more. With this coffee-table book, you’ll not only know your “button-hooks” from your “crackbacks,” you’ll discover that “eligible receivers” are quite different from “hot men” (defined in the glossary as the only two men allowed to immediately leave the punt formation when the ball is snapped). The book covers the gamut from understanding the psychology of men and sports to basic game strategy (making sense of those Xs and Os) to football history. Susan explains the roles of the seven referees (complete with handy drawings of their signals), provides an overview of each NFL team (covering names, logos and uniforms) and gets into football fashion, dissecting the more than a dozen pieces of gear designed to fortify against collisions of 66,000 pounds. Susan even ultimately added a section on cheerleaders, described as unsung athletes (did you know they earn just 50 bucks a game?).

And what football book is complete without a chapter on “Entertaining with Football Flair?” Susan provides recipes and menu suggestions for each team’s region. Fortunately for you, the Bears and the Colts both hail from the Midwest, so you can confidently serve anything from veal scaloppini to whitefish baked with mashed potatoes to pork roast with prunes.

Susan, who writes under the pen name Suzanna Gagnier, learned football the hard way: running up and down a football field as a high school varsity statistician, which she learned wouldn’t get her much attention from cute guys. She quickly knew as much as the next guy about sweeps, pitch-outs, clipping and shooting the gap. In fact, her inspiration for the book came when she was arguing with a guy about which team had the best Super Bowl chances and he responded, “I wish my girlfriend knew as much about football as you do.”

A die-hard Seahawks fan (mainly because she loves to hate the Raiders), Susan joined Yahoo! in 2005. A single mom working full-time, she spent about two-and-a-half years writing the book. She wears lots of hats in our mobile division, yet has found great support for the 3 television and 10 radio interviews she’s done across the country since word got out about the book (even the Today Show and Ellen DeGeneres’ staff called for a copy).

We’re t-minus three days to the Super Bowl. Thanks to Susan, now that I know my coffin corner from my deep zone, I’ll be too busy to call my mom.

Get your copy here.

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5 Comments Add your own

Scott | February 1st, 2007 at 8:23 pm

Nice work Nicki.

Sadly, no one watches TV anymore since the Yahoo! TV beta came out. Please post the score after the game.

GO Oilers.

Mus | February 4th, 2007 at 8:14 am

From Nicki’s Mom:

Just have Max call me today – I might even push the mute button…..after all, the Patriots will only be watching with me.
Go, uh….Colts!

Ray | October 1st, 2007 at 4:02 pm

Why would anyone need a whole book to learn the rules of this simple game? All the rules could be amply explained, with illustrations, in a six page pamphlet.

Nicki Dugan | October 1st, 2007 at 4:42 pm

@Ray — Oh, ho! But it’s more than just about rules. Re-read that third paragraph. This tome is chalk full of interesting background.

Ellen | December 3rd, 2007 at 2:50 pm

This was the worst load of tripe ever, full of inconsistencies – give it a wide berth