The Hot Seat cover art

The Hot Seat

A Year of Outrage, Pride, and Occasional Games of College Football

Preview
Try Premium Plus free
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Hot Seat

By: Ben Mathis-Lilley
Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
Try Premium Plus free

Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $21.99

Buy Now for $21.99

About this listen

A fan spends the Michigan football team’s 2021 season searching for answers about human nature, American history, and the related subject of whether Jim Harbaugh will keep his job.

Being a University of Michigan football fan should be joyful. Michigan is an elite academic institution whose football team boasts 43 Big Ten championships.

But these days, college football is complicated. The NCAA is corrupt and exploitative, and Michigan keeps losing to Ohio State. It’s hard not to wonder, as Slate writer and superfan Ben Mathis-Lilley does in this book: why are we doing this?

The Hot Seat is a chronicle of one of the wildest years in Michigan football history, but also a search for the truth about fandom, from the pages of history books to the wilderness of online forums. Is it embarrassing to care about what happens in a game? Why is Jim Harbaugh like that? Is this somehow Thomas Jefferson’s fault? This book explores all these questions, and many more.

Against the backdrop of a quickly changing sport and country, The Hot Seat is an exploration of the all-consuming culture of fandom, and why it matters.

©2022 Ben Mathis-Lilley (P)2022 PublicAffairs
Coaching Football (American) Sports Michigan
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.