players only love you when they're playing (football)

Yes, this summer I watched the Quarterback show on Netflix. Mostly, it was one of those things that usually happens to men when their wife or daughter is watching gripping reality TV. I am the dad and I have started to watch all of my husband’s sports shows almost against my will. Just trying to read my sexy little book and found myself continually putting it down to watch, to ask questions, to request a rewind. Sad to report that I was hooked. Incredibly embarrassing to become someone who pays attention to football in the year of our lord 2025 but I am always a sucker for a compelling narrative. I have vague memories of seeing the first season. It featured Patrick Mahomes (don’t care), Kirk Cousins (goofy), and Marcus Mariota (who?). This season brings back Kirk and introduces Jared Goff and Joe Burrow. Now, I know these two! I will be clear that I have almost no idea what is happening when a game is occurring in real time. I need a slow motion camera and a replay to understand. I can usually figure out a trick play. Everything on screen is typically moving too quickly and I find it incredibly overstimulating. Now, F1, that I can follow! Soccer, sort of! Baseball, easy! In football, the pressure on the kicker gives me a level of anxiety that is nearly unbearable but maybe undeniably exciting (especially if that doofus Butker misses). There’s too much lining up! Must every game go to 11 PM and include overtime? Why is everyone fumbling? Or injured? (can they do something about all the injuries?!) How many of these dudes are MAGA? I can’t see anyone’s face! Both Tony Romo (famous evil ex of Jessica Simpson) and Tom Brady (can we talk about the face tune) are now commentating! There is the unavoidable CTE of it all. I cringe more than I cheer. But much like when I learned to sail, I love the words. Halfback. Fullback. Quarterback sneak. Tush push. Fumble. Sack. Scramble. Blitz. Pick six. Interception. Flea flicker. Y’all are onto something with your little made up language. 

It’s not that I think football is stupid or beneath me (I am no Susan Elizabeth Phillips heroine). I do think it is dangerous and the NFL has severe problems with race and gender and health. I’d say hockey has it all too! But if you give me a narrative entry like the Quarterback show, you’ll nab me. Cannot overstate what Drive to Survive has done to me! I have always been someone who can find a 30x30 I enjoy. Cousins and Burrow are visibly disenchanted with their roles in the sport. Forced to move away from his home state, injured, and relegated to second string, Cousins seems lost in the back half of the show. Very sad dad vibes. Burrow is a victim of a robbery (which also outted his new girlfriend allegedly!), plays pretty well, but not well enough to make the playoffs. He is both clearly relieved to not have to do a playoff run and also DEPRESSED. The dead eyed look he gives the camera is nearly always an almost comical juxtaposition to his elaborate wardrobe. I love the fact that he dresses exactly like my five year old son yet has the same level of fatigue as a mom of eight. He’s maybe the most conventionally attractive of the crew here but doesn’t do much for me. In October of 2025, he is again out of a playoff run for turf toe??? Turf toe. The only time I saw a glimpse of joy on his face is when he discusses a behind the scenes trip to a natural history museum. After all, Oscar Wilde did say “the only horrible thing in the world is ennui.” 

Goff is the real hero of the series and I found him incredibly compelling. Is he my crush or is he just tall? (Just kidding, his wife is my crush!) He talks about football in the way I like best: sincere teacher energy. Coach Taylor coded. He’s walking you through every minute of his thought process and everything he did to get the Lions almost all the way. He has a laminted set of papers with nonsense codes written on them that he seems to have to memorize daily. His success is also bolstered by the frequent appearance of his (again) very hot wife, Christen, and his wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown (did someone say romance hero name? Fight me!). Naturally this show is supplemented by the fact that I’ve been reading Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Susan, are you watching this too!?! Fascinating that the crippling depression of these characters was captured in romance novel form by Phillips in 1994 and again on my TV in 2025. Money and fame can’t buy happiness, yadda yadda.

I’ve read many popular contemporary romance writers from the 1990’s and early 2000’s though definitely not all. Nora Roberts, of course, stands out, Julie James, Jennifer Cruise, Jill Shalvis, and that’s not even including Category romances. Susan Elizabeth Phillips is, to be quite honest, a ridiculous name choice. Susan ELIZABETH Phillips! I’m thinking of people who say “oh actually it’s DOCTOR!” when you address them. Susan Elizabeth Phillips terrorizes a DAR chapter. She absolutely could have been a famous suffragette. She might be someone that Rory Gilmore’s grandmother tried to force her to be friends with. She sounds like a nightmare (she sort of is, affectionately, but more on that later). In reality, Susan Elizabeth Phillips is widely credited with, if not INVENTING the sports romance, then popularizing it. It Had to Be You was released in 1994 and let me tell you, what a fucking book it is. The Chicago Stars series has 11 books total and the first four books are unlike anything I have ever read. 

What I think is so magical and frankly, infuriating, about these books is that they are completely bonkers. Phillips is swinging for the fences. Nowadays, a football player hero feels a little basic but at the time, almost no “famous” people were chosen as main characters. We had dukes and cops and ranchers but almost no professional athletes or celebrities. Probably due to some valid fears about copyright infringement! 

It Had to Be You - I want you to know that this book is somehow abhorrent and amazing. I feel about it the way I feel about A Hunger Like No Other. It is Susan Elizabeth Phillips at her most intense, her most unhinged, her most toxic. Like Kresley Cole, it really is a “if you can’t take her at her worst, you should find other books”…Our hero, Dan Calebow, former star quarterback turned head coach of the Chicago Stars, opens this book still engaging in kink heavy consensual non consensual sex with his ex-wife. It’s the 90’s! People have to be careful about the sex and medical history of their partners now! (This is driven home on more than one occasion). He’s also platonically courting a preschool teacher because he believes she will be a great mother to his future children even if he has next to zero desire to touch her. Enter Phoebe Summerville, the bimbo. Phoebe is called a bimbo by almost everyone in this book. She is stacked. She is blonde. She speaks like Marilyn Monroe and she has just inherited a football team, obviously the Chicago Stars. The thing about Phoebe is that she is a survivor: of her verbally abusive dad, of sexual violence, of everyone’s expectations. Behind Phoebe’s Marilyn Monroe persona is a sharp mind and a vastly insecure woman. The reader knows this from the get go, but watching Dan get bludgeoned by this realization is the real star of the book. There is a sex scene in this book that honest to God made me cry. Phillips is never truly worried about whether you like her characters or agree with them. She will make you understand them, though. She will let Phoebe scream at Dan that he’s looking for his own mommy, not someone to have children with. Often, contemporary romances balance on the knife’s edge of a misunderstanding and I don’t hate that. People are silly and secretive and open communication is a learned skill. The risk Phillips takes is to have her characters read each other for filth time and again. She takes you right up until someone says something nearly unforgivable and then digs herself out. Again and again. 

Heaven, Texas - In Heaven, Texas, our intrepid heroine must get former quarterback turned movie star BOBBY TOM DENTION (that is his NAME) back to his hometown in Texas to film a blockbuster movie. Raised in a nursing home, Gracie Snow is hoping to prove herself in the film industry. This book. I cannot believe how much I loved this book. Bobby Tom (BOBBY TOM!) and Gracie travel to Texas, she gets fired for being late, he starts to secretly pay her salary as his assistant rather than the film studio’s…hijinks ensue. I cannot even accurately tell you how many. The secondary love story centers around his widowed mother and the local bad boy turned rich man with an Indecent Proposal for her. All I can say is that by the time Bobby Tom commits a jail break and does his final love confession, I was sure I had never read anything quite like this and could not believe I was loving it. 

Nobody’s Baby But Mine - Imagine that YOU, a world-renowned physicist, want a baby! But you have trauma about being basically Doogie Howser so you want a DUMB HOT man to help you conceive your baby. Who better than a slightly aging star quarterback (that’s Joe Flacco, y’all)? They’re dumb right?! Anyways, super easy to cosplay a sex worker and get yourself pregnant. Less easy to deal with when he finds out and is mad as hell. Now you’re married and going to spend the summer in his North Carolina mountain hometown. Oops! His parents, who got pregnant with him as teens might be divorcing! His brother is a hot minister! You’re living in a mansion that used to belong to a now-dead, disgraced evangelical pastor. You hate each other, but the sex is so hot! This book is a balance beam. A feat of engineering. A situation maybe only topped by the magic of Lorraine Heath’s Gorilla Twins. 

Dream a Little Dream - Remember the disgraced dead televangelist…Okay so here’s his hot destitute widow. She’s come back to find his buried treasure (?!?!) and is now working for a deeply depressed widow who is also a former veterinarian rebuilding a drive-in movie theater. Are you still with me? So what if she decided to hook up with him? What if he hates her child because he reminds him of the son he lost? This emotionally throttled me. 

This Heart of Mine - Phoebe’s younger sister, Molly, and struggling star quarterback we have seen a few times in previous books. This one does not shine as bright as the others in the early Chicago Stars books. Maybe because Molly and Kevin feel so young. (SPOILER ALERT)

Maybe because there is pregnancy and miscarriage on page. I did love our second chance romance between Kevin’s secret estranged mother and a very temperamental artist. Not to mention the hilariously young married resort employees that try to give Kevin and Molly marriage advice. Overall, the aforementioned resort setting shines brightest. 

Match Me If You Can - Another hilarious note in It Had to Be You is that Phoebe is the owner of the team but the General Manager (who Dan naturally hates) is a man named Ron. He is one of the only characters to see Phoebe initially as anything other than a sex object AND SEP describes him as almost the mirror image of Tom Cruise. His short height and general boyish non threatening appeal is so safe for Phoebe and so non threatening for literally any other character. SEP, in the early 90’s, going Tom Cruise, cute but not leading man material! Phillips decides to challenge herself in Match Me If You Can by giving us a sports agent hero. This book is prime Jerry Maguire territory. If Jerry fell (against his will) for a woman he hired to match make him. This book feels like maybe it was a struggle to write. There is a trans side character that isn’t handled with enough care and overall, the entire book falls a bit flat for me. 

Natural Born Charmer - OKAY BACK IN BUSINESS HERE. Remember I said I watched the Netflix Quarterback show? I cannot overstate how much Dean Robilliard is Joe Burrow. The hair. The vibe. The clothing obsession. The slightly weird interests and hobbies. Imagine then that he is on a road trip to his newly purchased Nashville farm. There his long lost former groupie sober mom, rock star dad, and depressed younger sister will all collide. Along the way, he picks up a hitchhiker in a Beaver mascot costume. She’s an artist! Their banter and chemistry is a delight. I don’t want to give away any more about this book because it was so fun to read. 

Suffice to say that sports romance is booming more than ever and I am unsettled by the amount of rookie sports guy romances out there. I don’t want a sports guy in his early 20’s…he shouldn’t settle down yet. I want a sports guy pushing 40. He’s got chronic pain and depression! He might NOT be able to go all night. He is looking for something, anything else, to do with himself. I just want to have the feeling that an author is fearless in showing flaws. That an author is willing to dig her characters out of the hole that is calling a woman a BIMBO her face! Be fearless in the messiness you need to drag these people through. 

Other sports romance recs! Most of these are gay because to be honest, that makes sense!!

• Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid. I refuse to think about this book as anything less than a classic of the genre. What if two rival hockey players were both enemies AND secret lovers? Read this whole series and if you don’t want to read all of them, then at least this one. How have you not seen the show trailer and its 500 TikTok edits??? I can’t quit you energy with a happy ending. Perfect book.

• Cleat Cute, duh! Heard good things about Ready to Score by Jodie Slaughter.

• Chloe Liesse’s Everything for You. Part of an ongoing sibling series but new star soccer player + old chronic pain filled soccer player. Loved this and gave me much of the same vibes as my beloved Kulti (age gap/hot for coach). 

• The Endgame by Riley Hart. Uber famous in KU and indie circles. This football book broke my brain and made me cry.

• Kristen Callihan’s Game On series. The first two books in the series are technically New Adult (they’re in college) but it moves on from there. Fair content warning that these books have lots of heavy themes: injury, toxic parents, accidental pregnancy and miscarriage, violation of privacy with regards to phone hacking…etc. Callihan is brilliant though, trust me. The Friend Zone is one of my favorite himbos and my favorite friends to lovers arc of all time. 

• Kennedy Ryan’s Hoops series is universally beloved but also Kennedy Ryan scares me. I am not sure I am meant to feel that much angst in my body. And I have heard these have an absurd amount of content warnings. 

• Alexa Martin obviously with Intercepted. It’s sort of like The Wedding Date with football and book two is her pre- Taylor Travis Kelce single mom secret baby fan fic. 

talk soon,

Britt