Looking back on the year in which the Miami Dolphins went 17-0 winning the Super Bowl. the author takes you through not only the players and how they were acquired but also how Shula came to them especially after the Colts lost to the Jets, of course, Rosenbloom was still upset because the Colts lost to the Browns in 64 and felt like Shuls could not win the big game. So from there, you get a look at the players that were acquired through draft and trades and other means. And you get background on each one as well, of course, each player had something to offer to the team especially old man Earl Morral who came in to replace Griese when he got hurt and finished the regular season. This was a good book and brought back a lot of memories for me i remember watching most of these games very much worth the read.

1972 Miami Dolphins. Even many non-football fans know about The Perfect Team. 14 and 0 in the regular season. Two playoff wins putting them back in the Super Bowl. Add in a Super Bowl victory and, voila, The Perfect Team. The first time any pro football team had a perfect season and, in this 50th anniversary year of The Perfect Team, it still hasn't been done again.

This is a fascinating, game by game look at The Perfect Team, the players (especially the players), the coaches, and the times (Nixon, Watergate, the Vietnam War, just to name a few).

Very well written. Very interesting.

Highly recommended!!

Football is the only major American sport where an undefeated season is remotely plausible, and the 1972 Miami Dolphins are the only team to reach that milestone (at least when playoffs are included, thank you Eli Manning). An undefeated NFL season is a big deal now: there is always a flurry of media coverage whenever a team flirts with going unbeaten and then the inevitable “Mercury Morris and his 1972 Dolphins friends are uncapping a bottle of champagne right now…” (which they don’t actually do) comment when that team ultimately succumbs to the vagaries and randomness of a now-18 game regular season and the playoffs. Back in 1972, however, the Dolphins achieved immortality without all that much fanfare beyond southern Florida. They were only one-point favorites coming into Super Bowl VII, with prominent prognosticators such as Jimmy the Greek picking their opponents the Washington Redskins (this was 3 years after the AFL-NFL merger and there was lingering skepticism about the quality of play in the AFC).

But the Dolphins ended up triumphing in the Super Bowl and closed out their 1972 campaign with a sterling 17-0 record. That means that even though they weren’t the best team ever (or even the best all-time Dolphins team, as the 1973 Dolphins are widely regarded as being superior), the 1972 Dolphins are a big deal among history-minded football fans and there already has been one book written about the team (Mark Freeman’s fair Undefeated in 2012).

With the 50th anniversary of the Dolphins’ unbeaten season now upon us, Marshall Jon Fisher has taken another literary stab at chronicling the 1972 Dolphins. Fisher grew up in south Florida in the seventies and his book Seventeen and Oh attempts to be the definitive account of the team. I’d say Fisher largely succeeds in that endeavor, though the book is hurt by the fact that the 1972 Dolphins weren’t terribly interesting besides the fact that they won a lot.

Fisher meticulously reviews every game from the Dolphins’ 1972 campaign, weaving in various player profiles and some of the political and social events going on during the time, especially in the Miami area. The book goes game-by-game with each chapter covering one contest and the aforementioned non-football odds-and-ends. The game descriptions are decent albeit somewhat generic. The Dolphins were involved in some close games and had a few fourth quarter comebacks so there is some excitement in reading the recaps.

I don’t really have any big problems with the book but rather just found it serviceable but nothing fantastic. The bulk of the Dolphins were lunchpail pluggers in the mold of their exacting disciplinarian coach Don Shula. The backfield trio of Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, and Mercury Morris had some flair but they still aren’t that engaging and Undefeated doesn’t yield any new insights about them beyond what you’re probably already familiar with. Mercury Morris wanted more playing time, Earl Morrall was a bit of a square but workmanlike, Bob Greise got injured, Nick Buoniconti was very talented. This is all stuff I knew already. The sections on the history of Miami and its rise during the middle of the 20th century was interesting, while the passages on Richard Nixon (Tricky Dick was a big football fan and would call Shula sporadically) didn’t seem terribly necessary or add much.

The Nixon material illustrates a kind of Catch 22 with Seventeen and Oh: if you’re interested enough to devote 400+ pages of your time to reading a book about the history of the 1972 Dolphins, you probably already know enough about the topic and history of the time so that nothing is going to be all that groundbreaking to you. Seventeen and Oh is overall a good but not great trip down memory lane for Dolphins fans and anyone nostalgic for the NFL of the seventies, and it is the best book (so far) on the team. It’s hard for me to recommend it too strongly to folks outside of that demographic but if you want a general football history read it’s not too bad, just nothing amazing.

6/10

As of the writing of this review, there has been only one perfect season in the NFL during the Super Bowl era. The 1972 Miami Dolphins completed the regular season with a perfect 14-0 record, then defeated the Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers and Washington to complete their perfect year. 50 years later, Marshall Jon Fisher has written a book about that team that is almost as perfect as the 1972 Dolphins. Just about anything you would want to know about the team is in the book.

Fisher grew up in the Miami era and he shares some stories of his fandom as a child that tie in nicely with the particular subject in the chapter where a story would appear. As do many sports books about a bygone era, he also ties in some social and political commentary as he includes updates on the presidential election (especially since both major political parties held their convention in Miami that year), the Vietnam war and the peace talks taking place in 1972 and even some talk about the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. Just like with his personal stories, Fisher does a nice job of weaving these topics into the book without them being a distraction or a lecture.

As good as those stories are, his writing about the team and personnel is even better. While many books on great teams or seasons will focus on a small number of key people, this one has small bios or information on nearly everyone associated with the team. There is plenty of material on the Hall of Fame people on the team – Bob Griese, Nick Buoniconti, Larry Csonka and head coach Don Shula for starters. But just as prominent in the book are others who because of the position or role they played may not be as familiar to casual readers. These include people like Jim Langer, Larry Little, Vern Den Herder and Jake Scott. By including information on so many people, the reader will understand much more about how the Dolphins truly came together as a team that year.

The book’s chapters are divided up by each game played, plus one chapter on the previous off-season in which coach Shula reminded them of their loss in the previous Super Bowl, one chapter for the 1972 pre-season and one for what became of the people after the perfect year. That one does include mentioning the “celebration” that takes place every year after the last undefeated NFL suffers its first loss. The football writing, especially the description of each game and the information on key people involved in that particular win, was excellent. It was detailed enough for hard-core football fans to enjoy, yet easy enough that more casual fans won’t be confused by too much detail. That was what made this book one of the better football books I have read.

Any football fan at any level, whether they were around to see that outstanding Dolphins team, will enjoy reading about the best season any NFL team has ever had. As the 50th anniversary of that season approaches, it is a great way to spend time either reliving or learning about a truly great team.

I wish to thank Abrams Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.