Michael Lewis is a genius. I am in awe of his talent, and I don't say that very often.

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While The Blind Side simply illustrates one of the oldest ways of doing business in college-football recruiting: Getting outstanding athletes adopted by families that, in the absence of the kid's talent, would be unlikely ever to encounter him, much less have anything to do with him.

Both are great stories, I agree. But one is about changing the game, and the other is about business as usual. The former actually has much deeper conflicts to dramatize -- although whether they're actually dramatizable is a key question.

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Blind Side does have it's game-changing point, the rise of the Refrigerator-type, but Moneyball was a more interesting book, just far less narrative. Hollywood likes personal stories, not mathematical ones. And Blind Side has far more interesting, fully-developed characters, in part because Lewis was personally acquainted with everyone in that book.

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In The Blind Side -- and I'll say it again, it's a riveting book -- I just don't see dramatizable conflicts at work. Freakish natural talent sweeps the field and renders social barriers meaningless -- that's the best I can do with that book, unless you're really going to try to illuminate some kind of hypocrisy in the Tuohy family (tough sledding there). Who are your antagonists -- the poor undersized Christian-school kids forced to play nose tackle against this unholy behemoth? (And frankly I thought the NCAA lady who got treated so dismissively by Lewis was actually one of the good guys. I have a soft spot for bureaucrats, I guess.)

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