In college football circles, the first Wednesday in February is New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, and Christmas all rolled into one. It’s payoff time for a year spent screening miles of videotape and probing mountains of data, balancing the promise of a dazzling 40-yard-dash time against the perils of a putrid GPA, and text-messaging high schoolers 50 times a day. It’s the day when coaches across the country camp out in front of their fax machines waiting for their football futures to be decided by a bunch of 18-year-olds. It’s National Signing Day. In this surprising and unprecedented dissection of college football’s secret season, author Bruce Feldman takes you deep inside the war room of Ole Miss head coach Ed Orgeron, the combustible Cajun who built national championship teams at the University of Miami and USC before setting up shop in the Deep South. In a blow-by-blow account of the year leading up to National Signing Day 2007, Feldman reveals the inner secrets of Orgeron’s success, recounting every step along the way as Orgeron and his Ole Miss staff pick 25 winners from a list of 1,000 names.

Meat Market makes the actual football season—the one that runs from September through January— read like a postscript.