Book review: "After Further Review" by Mike Pereira

There are a lot of things wrong with the book "After Further Review" — it's poorly organized and the writing is amateurish, just to name a couple. Still, I really liked it.

"After Further Review" is the autobiography (mostly) of former National Football League reffing czar Mike Pereira, a man many know from his appearances as the rules expert on Fox NFL broadcasts. I'm almost the perfect target market for this book because I have a lot of interest in both football and refereeing.

Pereira brings us inside the tent of a couple notably closed worlds — the NFL and the reffing community. He tells stories of good refs and bad ones, of difficult times in his personal life, and of off-the-field battles he had with various NFL executives and coaches. Wonderfully, he's not afraid to name names.

The book succeeds largely because Pereira comes off as a likeable guy with a lot of good stories to tell. Many of these are the kind of tales a guy would tell in the bar — rough and unpolished, but told with conviction.

He recalls  a crucial call — plus a missed non-call — he made in a 1998 playoff game. He describes fighting to get replay review made a permanent part of the NFL. And he tells of fighting cancer not just once, but twice.

Still, if you don't love the subject so much, the flaws of the book may drive you crazy. First, the book is maddeningly disorganized. The first quarter of the book starts straightforwardly enough as Pereira tells the story of his boyhood and early adult life, his mind focused on his ultimate goal: Joining the NFL.

But at this point — just when you're eager to hear about his first years in the league — Pereira abandons the chronological format and starts jumping all over place. Jarringly, he throws in a chapter on how much referees are paid. I actually enjoyed it, but it is completely out of place.  The same can be said about another chapter in which he analyzes key referee decisions from the NFL's past (of which he had no part).

I guess Pereira and his co-writer Rick Jaffe must have had some method to this madness, but the constant back and forth in time is confusing. A chronological approach would have been better. For example, instead of separating Pereira's battles for rule changes and his experience fighting cancer into separate chapters, putting them in context with each other would have given us a more well-rounded picture.

It's a little hard to believe that Pereira had a co-writer on this because the book it is written like Pereira dictated it all over several nights while holding a vodka tonic. Phrases like "So you can guess what happened next," "You should have heard the response," and "I fell for it, hook, line and sinker" give you some idea of the casualness of the writing.

For all the interesting stories Pereira has to tell, he sometimes skips away just when things are getting intriguing. Early in the book, for example, he says that when he first reffed football (a kids game) he realized, "I had found my passion." What was it about the experience that excited him? He doesn't explain.

Later, when he was supervising officials in the Western Athletic Conference he describes catching a bunch of referees cheating on their annual rules test. This would seem to be a big deal, but he laughs it off with a chuckle and moves on.

Those are forgivable flaws, though. If you like football — and especially if you like football and refereeing — you will find "After Further Review" an enjoyable read.