Sanctioned Savagery by Michael Oriard, review

Sanctioned Savagery takes its title from a 1959 Esquire article that captured the central paradox of American football: a game in which violence is not just expected but required, so long as it stays within the rules. Michael Oriard, a former NFL player turned academic, picks up this theme to ask what it means to love a sport that can destroy its players.

He opens with a dilemma familiar to many fans and parents: when young men can end up with broken bodies and shattered minds – and when the science linking football to CTE is no longer in doubt – what kind of brutality are we prepared to tolerate in the name of tradition and entertainment?

Oriard sets these modern concerns against a long and troubling history. In the early 20th century, player deaths threatened football’s future. The solution was not to eliminate the violence, but to regulate it, preserving the physical intensity while managing public outcry. From the start, football was promoted as a builder of men, a proving ground of toughness in a supposedly softening world.

Over time, a shift occurred. Where college football once emphasised stoic endurance – “taking it” – the professional game glorified domination: dishing it out. Oriard traces how this mindset filtered back down to high schools, fuelled by coaches like Bear Bryant and later amplified by NFL marketing that sold brutality as spectacle.

Title: Sanctioned Savagery
Author: Michael Oriard
First published: University of North Carolina Press, 2025
Buy the Book: Amazon US | Amazon UK*

RELATED

Top Five: Football Business
Review: Brand NFL
Review: How Football Became Football

Today, that spectacle has a cost. As some families turn toward safer alternatives like flag football, Oriard sees a sport increasingly stratified by class, race, and risk. The questions remain: who plays football, who benefits from it, and at what price?

THE AUTHOR

Michael Oriard is a retired academic who was a professor at Oregon State University. A former football player for Notre Dame, he was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970 and played four seasons in the NFL. He completed his PhD after retiring from football and has written six books about the history of football, including Brand NFL.

QUOTES

For well over a century, a belief that football, through its violence, builds character has coexisted with regular calls to eliminate foul play.

Writing in Outing in December 1900, near the onset of the United States’ imperial adventures, yet another Harvard man, W. Cameron Forbes (once player and coach, future governor-general of the Philippines and ambassador to Japan), would call football “the expression of the strength of the Anglo-Saxon… the dominant spirit of a dominant race”.

In the hush of 70,000 witnesses, Sheridan was removed on a stretcher, to die from a broken neck after two days in a New Haven hospital, without regaining consciousness. After thoroughly covering Sheridan’s condition for three days, newspapers simply went back to the business of covering the weekend’s upcoming big games. … Football had become too popular and too important to too many powerful institutions even to consider abolishing the game.

In Pittsburgh, during the Steelers’ Super Bowl years under Chuck Noll in the 1970s, it was announced in advance, attended by wildly cheering fans and covered by wildly enthusiastic sportswriters, one of whom in 1973 proposed that the Oklahoma drill had been “invented” by “The Marquis de Sade” and “perfected in a Siberian concentration camp.” Mike Webster’s auspicious debut in the drill as a Steeler rookie the following year would provide the opening chapter (“The Nutcracker”) of the Fainaru brothers’ 2013 League of Denial, the symbolic moment when Webster began destroying his brain.

How safe could football be and still be football?! The NFL had no choice but to start doing more to protect its players. It also had to convince fans that it was committed to doing so and assure parents that football was safe enough for their sons (the NFL’s future players) to play.

REVIEWS

Sanctioned Savagery is written in a clear, engaging style that blends historical depth with accessibility. Michael Oriard moves briskly through more than a century of football’s evolution, setting changes in rules, playing styles, and coaching culture against the backdrop of shifting American attitudes toward masculinity, violence, and risk.

The book never loses sight of its central tension: how much brutality are we willing to sanction for the sake of sport? Oriard isn’t dogmatic, but he does ask uncomfortable questions. He traces how football’s early emphasis on “taking it” – stoically absorbing punishment – eventually gave way to a culture that glorified “dishing it out.” Legendary figures like Bear Bryant helped institutionalize this mindset, bringing it from the pro game into college football, where it spread to younger players. By the 1970s and ’80s, the NFL was marketing itself on its sheer violence.

Even readers uninterested in the concussion crisis or ethical debates will come away with a deeper understanding of how football has developed, how it has been portrayed, and how it has portrayed itself. But for those willing to grapple with the book’s questions, Sanctioned Savagery offers no easy answers — only a sobering view of where the sport may be headed.

Oriard closes in a place of uncertainty. He sees a growing divide in who plays football: a future in which the sport is dominated by those with the most to gain, and avoided by those with the most to lose. It’s a thoughtful, important book that rewards close attention.
Shane Richmond, Pigskin Books

BUY THE BOOK

Amazon US | Amazon UK*

* As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.