An enjoyable read, though not quite what I hoped it would be or what it purports to be.

What this book claimed to do and what I hoped it would do was to celebrate the tradition of the scholar athlete in Ivy League athletics, and to highlight how this conference has held out from the corrupting influences that have badly damaged college sports in order to preserve the original and far more nobles goals of college athletics.

Feinstein touches on this, but the book is more important of a state of the union-style report on what’s what in Ivy League football today. This was fun to read and Feinstein is always reliably entertaining as a storyteller, but there was a far better message that the book hinted at and then kind of swept under the rug. It’s worth a read, but a bit of a letdown if your expectations were taken from the publishers summary of what the book was intended to be.

I read my first John Feinstein book in middle school, 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘛𝘦𝘢𝘮, about the rise of Duke basketball in the 1970s. I’ve been a fan of his ever since, from 𝘈 𝘎𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘞𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘥 (about the PGA Tour) to 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘕𝘰𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘴 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘕𝘢𝘮𝘦 (about minor league baseball). Therefore, I was excited to be given the opportunity to read an advance copy of his book about Ivy League football, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘌𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵.

Last year I read his book on the Army-Navy rivalry (𝘈 𝘊𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘭 𝘞𝘢𝘳), so I was also excited to read another football book of his. If you haven’t read Feinstein, generally he embeds himself with a few key players and follows them around for a certain period of time.

Unfortunately, this book was a rare miss for a myriad of reasons.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗱:
- Subject matter. I like college football, I liked the other college football book Feinstein wrote. This book follows Ivy League football, which is an intriguing topic I know little about.
- Cinderella. Since this book is about real life, there’s not really a spoiler here. Feinstein writes about the 2023 Ivy League season. In September 2023, Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens died from injuries he sustained in a bicycle accident earlier in the year. Dartmouth went on to win the conference after he died. It’s a little Disney, but a feel good real life story. Of course I wanted to read that.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻’𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲:
- Too much. Feinstein tries to tell the whole story of the season and it’s too much. There are too many characters, too many minute details of various games told in chronological order. It becomes a bog after a while.
- Repetitive. For some reason, Feinstein repeats quotes and anecdotes throughout the book. And I don’t mean once or twice - it happens dozens of times. I think “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” is explained on four different occasions. Jack Ford’s entire biography is given in two separate, non-adjacent chapters. I feel like he wrote each chapter each week of the season and never went back to make them cohesive.
- There is no focus on Dartmouth winning. The final “action” chapter is Harvard-Yale. That’s fine and understandable, because it’s The Game and the book is about the Ivy League. But the most compelling story - Dartmouth tying for the conference title - is told as an afterthought. This should have been the underlying thread of the book.
- Structure. The book is basically just written in chronological order, game to game, with reports of what happened in each game. Yeah, we get a little bit of background, but there’s nowhere near the kind of depth he gives in his other books.

𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁:
John Feinstein has written a lot of great, fascinating and memorable books about a variety of sports subjects. He’s one of the best sportswriters out there, but I can’t recommend this book.

John Feinstein has long been one of my favorite sports authors – whenever I saw a book that he wrote, it immediately gets put on my “need to read” shelf. So, when I saw this one about Ivy League football, I immediately requested an advance copy and started reading. I also saw a couple reviews of the book – one glowing, one not so much. I felt that this was in-between and while an okay book, I don’t believe it was one of his better works.

I’ll start with the disappointing aspects. The first is that one of Feinstein’s great strengths is his ability to tell stories about his subjects, primarily coaches and athletes, with a great human touch and makes the reader that these are people with real issues, not just glamorous celebrities. While he does this at the beginning with coaches from all eight Ivy League schools, the items about the players are not as interesting and instead read more like clippings from press conferences.

Which leads to the second part that disappointed me – most of the book is a rehashing of the 2023 Ivy League football season complete with game descriptions, quotes and updated standings each week. While many times that is fine for a book of this nature, it isn’t the usual Feinstein style and for that, my satisfaction came up a little short.

But this doesn’t mean everything about the book was disappointing. The stories about the coaches mentioned earlier were great. Especially with the passing of Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens and the outpouring of support that came from all the Ivies. The dialogue about how many coaches in the league stay in their positions for long periods of time, no matter their records, was also good reading. Same goes for other passages that talked about the history of the league – some of which were interspersed with the 2023 game notes. Also, of course, no book on the Ivy League would be complete without mentioning the Harvard-Yale match called simple “The Game.” Although…here there are four references to the famous headline “Harvard beats Yale 29-29” but at least they make sense in their use and not just added to make the story juicier.

Overall, it was an okay read, but I would not recommend it to hardcore Feinstein fans like me. There just wasn’t enough of the material that makes him a great writer and instead it felt more like a product to just get out there and sell.

I wish to thank Hachette Books for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley. The opinions expressed in this review are strictly my own.

Book #50 was not nifty for John Feinstein.

John Feinstein, who has written some of my favorite sports books over the last 30 years, chronicled the 2023 Ivy League football season. In the era of D1 realignment, NIL, mass transfers, all for maximum profit - the Ivy League still has the same eight teams and focuses on the student-athlete. Other than the service academies - few, if any, schools can make that claim with a straight face.

So why the poor review?

Feinstein's gift is telling the backstories of players and coaches which always has led me to an emotional investment in them. Other than several Ivy League coaches, this was not the case here. Despite interviewing 82 student-athletes, this book was just primarily a regurgitation of the 2023 season's games. If I wanted that, I could just go to the school's websites and read the postgame press releases.

Also, was this book even edited? I counted five different occasions where quotes were repeated - and in one case the same story told verbatim in two chapters. Also Brown, on numerous occasions, were referred to as the "Bruins." John, they are the Bears. How on earth did you miss that?

This book also really failed to capture the zeitgeist of Ivy League athletics. In Feinstein's book about the Army-Navy football rivalry, a year in the Patriot League, and a year of low-majors trying to compete for NCAA bids, he showed the feeling of all those milieus. Not here.

I would hope that this book gets edited on a couple more occasions.

I want to thank NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Hopefully, Feinstein can redeem himself with his next book, because he's a fantastic writer. However, I would not even recommend this one to Ivy League graduates.

For anyone interested, I could recommend 5 phenomenal Feinstein books off the top of my head. This was a disappointment to say the least.

I have read all of the sports books written by John Feinstein. Feinstein's books are well written tomes that typically cover a specific time period with a college or professional sports team. The astounding amount of detail in his books and Feinstein's uncanny knack of getting his subjects to tell him their stories is one of many reasons to read his work. There is a balance to Feinstein's writing, he covers both sides of a controversial or historic series of events or a rabid sport rivalry without bias.

The Ancient Eight fits the pattern of the other Feinstein books it provides that background and results of an Ivy League Football season.
When you read the words "Ivy League," you expect the subject to be academic excellence, or history, not football prowess.
Nevertheless, the Ivy's play division one football and the rivalries like Harvard v. Yale are no less interesting or competitive than Ohio State v. Michigan.

The Ancient Eight will prompt the reader to reflect on the quaint notion that college football players are student athletes; in the Ivy League they are! Despite the lack of national exposure or interest the young men playing football are facing the many of the same challenges that anyone who plays the sport encounter.

If you have not read any of John Feinstein's books you should immediately hit the local library or a book store. You can be a casual sports fan and still really enjoy this mans work. The Ancient Eight is a good book, however, if you are just beginning to read his books I suggest you begin with "A Civil War,' Army v. Navy. I have read this book two times and I am tempted to read it again!