William Meiners attempted to complete a very noble task: Capture an oral history of the tenure of one of Notre Dame's often-overlooked coaches.

What to do, then, when Brennan sadly proved that time had robbed him of most memories and that his unwillingness -- or inability -- to tout his own accomplishments would make for a thin read? Meiners could have scrapped the project, but he decided to pad it instead with a lot of asides and stories that have nothing to do with Brennan or even the era in which he coached.

There are plenty of tomes detailing the ascent of Notre Dame football from a small midwestern footprint to a blue-blood of the Football Bowl Subdivision. (I'd recommend Murray Sperber's "Shake Down The Thunder," with the caveat that it only covers the program up to 2002.) It appears Meiners did his research, and he'd like to demonstrate that to us -- even at the cost of the flow of his book.

I'm not sure if Brennan was approached about a book of his career before this time, and only picked the year before his death to make it a reality. I really wish Meniers or another talented writer had captured this story in the 1970s or 1980s, when time would have healed most wounds but memories would have remained intact.

I’ve been following Notre Dame football for years…ever since watching the movie Rudy as a matter of fact. There have been good years and bad years, but I’m a student of the game and understand that there will be ups and downs as players graduate and coaches change. So, when I saw a book that was about one of their comeback seasons, I decided to check it out.

Though the Odds Be Great or Small is said to have been written by Terry Brennan and William Meiners, but when you actually get into it, its more a book written by Meiners with some insight from Terry Brennan. The book starts off with Terry’s prowess on the field as a player while a college student attending Notre Dame. Then it goes on to discuss Terry’s tenure as the youngest Notre Dame coach. It gets a little confusing from there.

The book is supposed to be about Notre Dame’s 1957 comeback year, but it doesn’t really concentrate on that. The book does show how Brennan took a team that was destined to fail thanks to Notre Dame’s football recruiting or lack thereof. It does show how they came back to get a bowl game in 1957. It also shows how Brennan was fired the following year in hopes that the man to replace him, an NFL coach, could raise the team to greatness. But in between is a muddle of comparisons between older teams and newer teams, coaches from before Brennan and after compared to his style of coaching and more.

Terry Brennan was a Notre Dame Football Letterman under coach Frank Leahy during their post World War II run of dominance. After coaching at Mount Carmel high school in Chicago and passing the bar, he was hired by legendary Notre Dame President Father Ted Hesburgh at the age of twenty five to take over the storied program as head coach. Terry Brennan led the Irish over four up and down years including “The Upset of the Century” over an Oklahoma team that had won forty seven games in a row until Note Dame pulled out a 7-0 win. The book is written by William Meiners and Terry Brennan himself, although Mr. Meiners seems to do most of the heavy lifting with occasional insight from Coach Brennan. Of course that is to be expected as Coach Brennan was in his early nineties when the book was written.

The book was very well researched with direct insight from Coach Brennan himself. I enjoyed this book as it shed light on a period of Notre Dame Football that is not well known outside of “The Upset of the Century,”. It was a time of change as a new young President, Father Ted Hesburgh, was molding Notre Dame into a prestigious university. Father Hesburgh did not make it easy on Coach Brennan as he limited scholarships and did not allow Notre Dame to sign recruits until April, well after other schools were able to sign these same recruits.

The one downfall of this book is that Mr. Meiners tended to get off topic and run down the whole history of Notre Dame football. I found these tangents we researched and interesting, but they tended to take away from the flow of the book and many times was not needed to further the story.

Overall I really enjoyed this look at Coach Brennan and the Norte Dame Football program in the 1950s. If you are a fan of Notre Dame Football or even just a fan of college football history I think you will enjoy this book. It is detailed and well researched. The insights Coach Brennan offered in the book gave it a unique view that you don’t often get so long after the events took place. I’m glad this book was written when it was as Coach Brennan passed shortly after it’s publication. I would recommend checking out this book. Thank you to NetGalley, Mr. Meiners, Coach Brennan, and Loyola Press for an advance copy of this book for an honest review.

I received an advance copy of, Though the Odds be great or Small, by Terry Brennan, and William Meiners. I am a big fan of Notre Dame, and I really enjoyed this book. The only off putting was the word Manuscript on every page, that made it hard to read the book.