The Blind Side

“Offensive linemen were the stay-at-home mothers of the NFL: everyone paid lip service to the importance of their contribution yet hardly anyone could tell you exactly what that was. In 1985 the left tackle had no real distinction. He was still expected to believe himself more or less interchangeable with the other linemen. The Washington Redskins’ offensive line was perhaps the most famous in NFL history. It had its own nickname. The Hogs. Fans dressed as pigs in their honor. And yet they weren’t understood, even by their own teammates, in the way running backs or quarterbacks were understood, as individual players with particular skills.” 

When Lawrence Taylor came on the scene in the 1980s, and even a few years into his career, left tackles were indistinguishable from other linemen. Statisticians did not collect data on their performance. Even their own teammates under-appreciated left tackles as athletes with a unique skill set. Everyone from coaches to players to fans saw left tackles as part of a collective—the offensive line—that was important as a group but not of individual importance. The stereotype about linemen was that they were big. As implied by the Redskins line’s nickname, “big” referred to pounds: offensive linemen were boulders who stopped defenders with their size rather than with muscles, speed, or strategy. As stopping pass rushers became more complicated, this would change, but the stereotype lingered. Michael confronted it as late as 2005, when an opposing player called him fat, underestimating Michael’s strength, speed, and agility. 

“When I saw the tape I guess I didn’t really believe it. I saw how he moved and I wondered how big he really was—because no one who is that big should be able to move that fast. It just wasn’t possible.” 

Here, Lemming recalls the first time he saw Michael’s performance tape. Briarcrest coach Hugh Freeze sent his tape to Lemming, as many hopeful coaches and parents did. At that point, no one had heard of Michael, as he played for a relatively-obscure high school team. Michael’s most noteworthy feature was that he was both big and fast: size and speed had become the highly-coveted combination associated with successful left tackles. It was such an unusual combination that the phrase “freak of nature” was used to describe athletes who possessed it. By 2004, the year Lemming received Michael’s tape, the left tackle position had emerged from obscurity to become, on average, one of the most highly paid on the field, and the tape in Lemming’s hands revealed that Michael fit that mould.

“Eight times a year Lemming published a newsletter to which al but seven of the 117 Division 1 college football programs subscribed. After they’d read it, all these college football coaches would call Lemming for the kids’ addresses, phone numbers, and anything else he might know about them. High school football players across the country, with the help of their fathers and their coaches, inundated Lemming’s little office in Chicago with tapes of their performances, press clippings, and letters of recommendation. All they wanted was for him to make them famous.” 

When Lemming began rating high school football players in 1978, no other independent authority scouted high school football players. Scouts were typically employed by a college to find the best high school players in their geographic region. Lemming’s project changed that, bringing the best players into a national spotlight and to the attention of coaches who would not otherwise have discovered the players. High school athletes around the country could be discovered not because of their connections to a school or coach but because their talents merited attention. Lemming’s rankings were accurate enough to gain him a following, and over time, his word became enough to call attention to a player. It was his scouting report of Michael that propelled Michael into the spotlight. 

“They were predatory by nature but they often came just to say they had seen it, in the spirit of tourists making their first trip to the Grand Canyon. The people at Briarcrest had trouble thinking of themselves as an athletic tourist attraction, and they had their own curiosities. Carly Powers asked one of the coaches: ‘What makes Michael so good?’ And his answer was: ‘He’s a freak of nature.’” 

Here Lewis describes the frenzy of attention that surrounded Michael after Lemming released his scouting report of him. Hugh Freeze aside, most Briarcrest coaches failed to see the gem in their midst. They knew that Michael was larger and stronger than the average high school athlete, but they did not understand the specific qualities he possessed that made him so well suited to the left tackle position. Coaches from top football programs around the country descended on the relatively-obscure Evangelical school and raved about what they saw. It became clear they envisioned possibilities for Michael’s future no one else had foreseen, and those possibilities hinged on him being the rare “freak of nature” that defined the best left tackles.  

“The frenzy over the player who would become the most highly sought after offensive lineman in the nation had begun, and it had only just begun. And no one had a very clear idea of who he was, where he came from, who his parents were—or even, truth be told, if he was a very good football player. Within two weeks Michael was both as famous and as unknown as a high school football player can be. There wasn’t an offensive line coach in the country who wasn’t aware of him, and a lot of the head coaches of the bigger football schools had seen him in the flesh. And yet the most basic details of his life were a mystery.” 

When Michael first moved in with the Tuohys, they knew little about him. They knew he came from inner-city East Memphis, did not consistently sleep in the same place, and could not afford to buy lunch. Other than these basic realities of his present, they knew little about his past and did not ask him to disclose it. Michael was not inclined to share any more than he had to, Sean theorizes, because Michael saw cageyness as a survival mechanism. After Michael’s unresponsive interview with Lemming, he saw Michael as a potential character risk but wrote an honest report of Michael’s size and skills. They were enough to attract coaches who had never seen him play a down of football. The initial frenzy was based solely on possibilities based on Michael’s size and skills rather than proven football prowess and character.  

“[T]he left tackle wasn’t a big deal in high school because the passing game, and thus the pass rush, weren’t quite so important. Hugh now understood that in big-time college football, and in the NFL, the left tackle was some kind of huge deal. You find the freak of nature who can play the position brilliantly and you have one of the most valuable commodities in professional sports.” 

Lewis explains how the frenzy over Michael revealed to Hugh that he had a future NFL left tackle on his hands. Hugh recognized Michael’s talent enough to send Lemming his tape, but Hugh did not realize that Michael was NFL material. Top coaches passed through Briarcrest repeating the same predictions: that Michael would eventually “play on Sundays,” meaning play in the NFL (83). Listening to the coaches rave about Michael’s assets, Hugh realized he had “one of the most valuable commodities in professional football” on his team (83). Michael had been playing on defense and as a right tackle. Hugh moved him to left tackle. In the months to come he would ride Michael’s talent into a coaching position at Ole Miss.

“The market for football players had reshaped the offensive line and, in effect, broken out this one position and treated it as almost a separate occupation: What caused that?

The answer lay buried in the history of football strategy. Football history, like personal history, is cleaner and more orderly in retrospect than it is at the time. It tends not to have crisp beginnings and endings. It progresses an accident at a time. As the left tackle position evolved, it experienced as many false starts and dead ends and random mutations and unnatural selections as the other little evolutions deep inside football.” 

Here Lewis reflects on the difficulty of fully parsing events to arrive at definitive answers. It is possible to isolate turning points and seminal moments, as Lewis does throughout the book: Taylor breaking Theismann’s leg, Walsh creating five- and ten-yard passing routes to compensate for a weak quarterback. Through these events, the left tackle position emerged as an important position strategically, but salaries stagnated, and old perceptions persisted. It took multiple events to culminate in systemic change: pass rushers becoming faster and more brutal, free agency opening the market, salary caps compelling management to be increasingly careful about how they allocated free agent dollars, quarterbacks becoming too expensive to lose to injury. Ultimately, Lewis shows how complex a process large-scale, long-term evolution is.   

“This single strand of the history of the game—the strand that would become the rope tied around Michael Oher’s waist and haul him up in the world—is clearer than most. Over time, the statistics of NFL quarterbacks, on average, came to resemble the statistics of Bill Walsh’s quarterbacks—because other coaches borrowed heavily from Walsh. The passing game was transformed from a risky business with returns not all that much greater than the running game to a clearly superior way to move the football down the field. As a result, the players most important to the passing game became, relatively, a great deal more valuable. The force that pulled on the rope around Michael Oher’s waist was the mind of Bill Walsh.”

Though, as Lewis demonstrates, large-scale evolution is multi-faceted, some developments are clearly connected. In trying to understand how a relatively-unknown and inexperienced high school football player could become one of the most highly sought-after college recruits, Lewis points to Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense. By sending wide receivers downfield, it left fewer players behind to defend the quarterback, making those players increasingly valuable. As coaches saw the merits of Walsh’s approach, they began adopting it widely. More coaches adopting Walsh’s strategy meant more coaches confronting the importance of the left tackle position. By 2004, it was acknowledged, in words and salaries, as one of the most important positions of all. Michael emerged into a spotlight that was especially invested in discovering that rare “freak of nature” combination of size, speed, instinct, and intellect.

“In 1981, people were starting to take notice of his new and improved little passing game, but Parcells had something new and improved, too: a passing destructomatic called Lawrence Taylor. Just as Walsh was lowering the risk of throwing the ball, Parcells was raising the risk to the men who threw it.” 

Lewis highlights another indisputable explanation for Michael being valued so highly: the clash of brute force and clever strategy. Walsh designed his passing game to lower the risks associated with throwing the football: interceptions and threats to the quarterback. His strategy relied on short passing routes that allowed quarterbacks to release the ball quickly and place it accurately. The way to defend against this, Parcells learned, was to have speedy pass rushers who could get to the quarterback quickly, which put the quarterback in increasing danger of being knocked out of a game. An exceptional athlete was required to protect the quarterback, and Michael fit the description perfectly.

 “He was, for that one moment, the critical component of Bill Walsh’s passing attack, and hardly a soul in Candlestick Park noticed. He was a reminder that what sets football apart from other sports is that what you don’t see is often the most important thing. What John Ayers was doing seemed routine. But to the few who knew, and watched, it was a thing of beauty.” 

Here Lewis is referring to John Ayers' performance in a 1982 playoff game between Walsh’s 49ers and Parcells’ Giants. In that game, Ayers, who trained as a cowboy during the off-season, played in the left guard position. He functioned as an “impenetrable wall between Taylor and his quarterback,” and the 49ers scored more points than any team had scored against the Giants all season (103). Montana later said his offense made scoring touchdowns seem effortless, but it was not, and he credited his line’s ability to stop the rush for the team’s success. Yet few recognized Ayers’ skill. Lewis goes on to break down his reactions and how he was able to stop Taylor in that game. Though both Walsh and Parcells would recognize the need for a left tackle in the future, Ayers’ exemplary play showed how much skill is required to shut down the pass rush.  

“The wooing of Michael Oher was pure southern ritual: everyone knew, or thought they knew, everyone else’s darker motives, and what didn’t get said was far more important than what did. The men seized formal control of the process. The women, acting behind the scenes, assumed they were actually in charge. Of all the people around there was really only one who spoke his mind directly, and advertised his own naked self-interest: eleven-year-old Sean Junior.” 

This section highlights the questions the recruiting process raised for Michael. He did not trust the NCAA. To him, the coaches cared only about securing him for their schools. Hugh Freeze attempted to sway Michael for his own personal gain—a coaching position at a top-tier football program. The only person in Michael’s life who was forthright about his personal motives was Sean Junior, who asked each coach who visited Michael what he planned to do for Sean Junior. While Michael later admitted to enjoying the coaches’ interest, he was troubled by the questions the recruiting process raised, and raises, and the way it exposed the ambition and selfishness of those around him.  

“‘Is this going to get me by the NCAA, or not?’ he asked.

It was. If Michael’s IQ really was as low as advertised, Jessup explained, he wouldn’t have been classified as learning-disabled: he was just learning as well as his brain would allow. Now that he was established to have greater capacities, his problems could only be interpreted as a disability. Michael, to everyone’s delight, was certifiably LD.” 

The “he” in the above quote is Sean when he asks the evaluator if Michael can be classified as learning disabled. When it became clear that Michael would not be able to raise his GPA enough to meet NCAA eligibility requirements, Sean, through Coach O’s help, discovered the BYU courses, but Michael was running out of time. They needed a learning-disabled diagnosis to gain him extra time to raise his GPA to meet the minimum. The phrasing of Sean’s question—his use of “I” and his wanting the evaluator to dispense with the explanation and provide a yes or no answer—show his personal investment in the outcome. Whether this casts his motives into doubt, Lewis does not theorize about, but it does make clear that what Michael lacked was not intelligence and ability but context and experience. He was interested in and capable of learning.  

“A market doesn’t simply shut down when its goods become contraband. It just becomes more profitable for the people willing to operate in it. There were a number of colleges—and Ole Miss was one of them—for which the expropriation of the market value of pre-professional football players was something very like a core business. Whether NCAA investigators impeded, or enabled, this state of affairs was an open question.” 

Here, Lewis discusses the effect of NCAA rules and their investigations into rules violations. During the NCAA’s investigation into the Tuohys’ motives, Michael asks his investigator why college players should not be paid. The investigator shrugs him off, and Lewis, in a rare show of opinion, believes she should not have done so. He reports that Michael wondered about his “market value” and how much he could have earned if he had been permitted to “auction his services” in 2004, when college coaches were recruiting. Lewis also says he believes the NCAA rules encourage black market exchanges that result in boosters showering athletes with gifts and, in some cases, paying them outright.

“The left tackle position, as it had been conceived by the modern pass-oriented offense, presented a new psychological challenge for the offensive lineman. In the old days, no one could really see what you were doing, and you usually had help from the lineman on the other side of you. That was still true at the other line positions. A mistake at guard cost a running back a few yards; a mistake at left tackle usually cost a sack, occasionally cost a team the ball, and sometimes cost the team the quarterback.

And—here was the main thing—you only needed to make one mistake at left tackle to have a bad game. The left tackle was defined by his weakest moment. He was measured not by the body of his work but by the outliers.” 

The left tackle coming to greater attention brought benefits to players (most notably though larger salaries) who excelled at the position, but there was also a cost: more attention meant more emotional strain. Left tackles had to worry not only about seeing the poor performance endlessly replayed but also, and more seriously, about the safety of the quarterbacks they were responsible for protecting. Consequently, a left tackle needed to be able to focus intensely on the present moment, without being dragged down by negative thoughts and experiences. By highlighting this quality, Lewis implicitly shows how Michael was temperamentally suited to the position. His physical suitability was covered extensively, and though the coaches did not know it, because they knew so little about Michael, his ability to forget would be a helpful quality for a player in the high-stress, left-tackle position.

Hardly anyone knew who he was—yet. But they knew the guy he was paid to stop! And two days after the game it would occur to them that Chris Doleman or Lawrence Taylor or Bruce Smith hadn’t factored into the game. It was as if the star hadn’t played.

That was the great left tackle’s shot at recognition. He wasn’t himself in the spotlight. No one was taking his picture. But he reflected the light of the star across from him. He was a kind of photographic negative.” 

In this section, Lewis further discusses the way football strategy broke up “the collective” of linemen and brought one, the left tackle, into the spotlight. Yet it was a limited spotlight. Fans were still unlikely to notice the exemplary play of a lineman. Rather, they would notice the absence of big plays from the star players. This is why Lewis refers to it as a “photographic negative”: the left tackle is noticeable because of what he takes away rather than because his unique abilities are recognizable.  

 “In part because of the needs of their local football team, there wasn’t a town in America more concerned than Oxford, Mississippi with seeming to have dispensed with race as an issue. The effort the locals put into avoiding obvious racism rendered the near-total lack of interaction between black people and white people in Oxford, Mississippi, almost as invisible as it was in the rest of the country. The history of the place was inescapable, however, if for no other reason than all these extremely annoying outsiders kept dragging it into otherwise pleasant conversations.”

This passage captures Lewis’s at-times wry tone—“almost as invisible as it was in the rest of the country” and “otherwise pleasant conversations” being prime examples. Throughout the book, he describes more often than he opines. This passage also highlights how segregation in Oxford continued in practice. The “extremely annoying outsiders” Lewis refers to are other SEC coaches who warned Michael about racism at Ole Miss (214). Racism was far from eradicated, which makes the support Michael received from the white community notable.

To help the black kids feel as if they belonged at Ole Miss, Nix often took them into the places frequented by the old white affluent Ole Miss crowd. The Grove, say, or the Square. Usually [Nix] would end up feeling awkward and self-conscious. ‘When you show up with them,’ he said, ‘you’ll get this look. It’s like you have the crying baby on the airplane.’” 

Nix is Bobby Nix, “a white Ole Miss graduate from the early 1980s who now tutored football players” (214). Lewis points out that black athletes could feel out of place for a number of reasons, from the way they dressed to the way they spoke. The end result was the same: they were made to feel like they did not belong at a school to which they contributed significantly as football players. Ole Miss students and graduates loved their football team yet treated the team’s players like outsiders. In this section, Lewis implies the warnings Michael received—that black athletes were not welcome at Ole Miss—had merit, but his white family of Ole Miss graduates and current students (the Tuohys’ daughter, Collins, entered the same year Michael did) put him in a position to have a different experience.

“He devoted so much time and energy to defying his own size that it couldn’t help but yield results. Even as he became one of the biggest human beings in Hurt Village, he remained quick and agile. He willed himself to be graceful—to remain a little man, inside a big man’s body. Later, college coaches who came to watch him would see a freak of nature. But where had nature left off, and nurture taken over? It was, as always, hard to say.” 

Here Lewis explores the interplay of nature and nurture as it relates to Michael’s size and skills. As a young boy, Michael saw a basketball game on television and dreamed of becoming the next Michael Jordan. Due to his extremely poverty, he did not have regular access to mirrors and rarely saw his own reflection, so he remained unaware of how little he physically resembled his idol. He focused on developing his skills—again displaying his ability to shut out negatives that impeded his progress. He nurtured his ability to be graceful, agile, and fast, thinking they would serve him well on the basketball court. Those same skills, when paired with his unusual size, would make him a coveted left tackle. 

“One night they came home with money that wasn’t theirs, and Big Tony found out and tried to explain to them a little bit about white people and how, lacking street smarts, they had established some rules to preserve their species and that, odd as those rules might seem, Steven and Michael needed to obey them. Rule number one was that a kid did not steal, or fight, or get into trouble of any sort; and what was a rule for white kids was an iron law for a black kid. Because a black kid who got into trouble in the white world was a black kid on his way out of that world.”

In this section, Lewis describes Steven and Michael’s early days attending Briarcrest. To Michael, the students seemed “ill-designed for survival,” given their excessive friendliness, dramatic overreaction to minor scrapes and bruises, and propensity for leaving their valuables unattended (256). Big Tony provides Michael and Steven with their first lessons for assimilating into Briarcrest and, by extension, with wealthy whites: observing the rules and recognizing that they will be held to a higher standard of adherence to those rules than the white kids. 

“Ignoring the calls from Leigh Anne and the text messages from Sean, he drove around Oxford in a fog of anger and confusion. He was angry because Antonio had said what he’d said and then struck him; he was confused because he was newly vulnerable. He now had these people he owed, who loved him. Through them, other people could get to him. He was no longer just another poor black kid going nowhere. He understood that most people, white and black, treated him a lot differently than they would have if he wasn’t a football star. But he couldn’t bring himself to be cynical about the Tuohy family. He knew other people, white and black, were saying that these rich white Ole Miss boosters had identified him early on as a future NFL lineman and bought him the way you’d buy a cheap stock or a racehorse. That they might not need his money but they liked his status, and had envisioned how he might serve the Briarcrest and Ole Miss football teams. Michael didn’t believe it. ‘I wasn’t anything when I first got to them, and they loved me anyway,’ he said. ‘Nothing was in it for them.’” 

After beating up teammate Antonio Turner and fleeing the scene, Michael drove around Oxford overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. Antonio, and others along the way, had questioned his relationship with the Tuohys. The NCAA investigator had questioned the Tuohys’ motives. Meanwhile, Sean worked his connections behind the scenes. He instructed Michael to turn himself into campus police, who he felt would be more understanding and reasonable than the Oxford police would be. Sean hired an excellent lawyer and spoke with the father (tutor Bobby Nix) of the child who was hurt (not seriously, it turned out).Lewis does not address the ethics of downplaying well-to-do white kids’ bad behavior, or crimes; his focus is on how the same behavior can lead to very different outcomes depending on the support system around the student.

“It was a part of being hopelessly poor that events conspired to keep you poor; if it wasn’t one thing, it was another. That cycle, in Michael’s case, had been broken. He was like a quarterback who had gone from playing in an unimaginative offense, incapable of making him look good, to playing in an offense designed by Bill Walsh.” 

Lewis shows how Michael’s mother, Dee Dee, drifted into drugs as a result of her environment. Big Zach gave up his opportunity to play football at Florida State University, under revered coach Bobby Bowden. Delvin lost his opportunity when he was sent to prison. Each fell into a cycle that they could not pull out of. Michael broke out of the cycle, and Lewis suggests much of this had to do with the environment around Michael changing. 

“The world that had once taken no notice of Michael Oher was now so invested in him that it couldn’t afford to see him fail. Of course, he wasn’t the first black kid to rise from poverty and make it in the white world. But Michael was different, because the white world had so unusually aided and abetted his rise. The white world had watched Michael Oher happen, or thought they had, and so could imagine how he might be replicated. He haunted that world.”

After Michael graduates from Briarcrest, applications to the school from inner-city students increase dramatically, but the school administration is ambivalent about accepting large numbers of them, despite Sean’s offer to pay for tuition. This development disappoints Sean and others at the school who agree with him. Through Michael, they saw how extending support could turn someone’s life around. Given the persistence of racism and segregation, Lewis suggests, white people providing support—as opposed to excluding, impeding, or ignoring—is noteworthy. At the end of the book, Leigh Anne expresses her desire to start a foundation to support student athletes, but it is clear much work remains to be done more broadly.  

“Sports was the closest thing in America to a pure meritocracy, the one avenue of ambition widely thought to be open to all. (Pity the kid inside Hurt Village who was born to play the piano, or manage people, or trade bonds.)” 

Here Lewis notes that, at least theoretically, anyone can emerge as a star, no matter what their background and upbringing, because the only thing that matters in sports is whether you can perform on the field or court. In reality, Lewis shows, this is not entirely true. Athletes with a support system will go further. They will not only be noticed but also nurtured. Big Zach and Delvin did not succeed, Lewis says, because they did not have people around them who guided them in the right direction. Unlike Michael, Big Zach did not have well-connected parents with the means to hire tutors to meet academic requirements. Michael was, Lewis notes, a quiet loner who did not get close to many people, and this protected him to a degree. Also helping him, Lewis argues, is the Tuohys’ connections and commitment to keeping him on a path to success.