Can thinking people love football? Of course. They can love sex, too, and beer, along with hamburgers, power windows and air-conditioning—even Jesus. Inman Majors writes about people who enjoy most of the above and are at the same time likable, funny, unassuming guys you would enjoy hanging out with, unless you’d prefer Rick Santorum.

Among the fun things Inman Majors writes about is indeed football, and in fact that’s the subject of his latest novel, Love’s Winning Plays (W.W. Norton, 2012), available at an Avid Bookshop near you.

It should be pointed out, and frequently is by his publicist, that Inman Majors is well qualified to write about football. He grew up in a larger-than-life football family. His uncle is Johnny Majors, legendary player and coach at Tennessee, and his father played at Alabama and Florida State and went on to become a powerful behind-the-scenes presence in Tennessee politics. Inman knows the inside of a football—the kicks and the hot air. He also has a deft touch for developing likable characters thrust among the not-so-likable powerful and surviving by their wits and their wit.

In this case, “Love” is Raymond Love, a “non-coaching” graduate assistant on a powerful SEC team helmed by Coach Driver, a man who embodies every bad cliché of his profession, a dolt whom Love must impress if he is ever to move up to “coaching” graduate assistant as the next step toward his goal of someday becoming a college coach himself, having been a winning college quarterback, though only at a Division III school.

So, here’s the setup: the thinking-feeling nice guy on the inside of a football factory presided over by a Bon Jovi-loving behemoth who is perfectly at ease talking football intricacies buck naked in the locker room. (This was written before Penn State erupted, but it puts you into that milieu where men are casually naked together.)

Love would much rather be naked with Brooke, the blonde beauty who has enticed him into her pop-lit book club, where he endures the inane chatter just to stay in her good graces, with the hope of someday moving up to boyfriend status from hopeful attendant.

Love’s various predicaments are observed with ironic detachment by his classmate in Advanced Biomechanics of Human Movement, the bright, pretty girl who is not Brooke. Among Love’s predicaments observed by Julie is his rivalry with the current “coaching graduate assistant,” the seersucker-suit sycophant, Sparkman, who also has his confident eye on Brooke.

All these pressures come to a head when Coach Driver taps Love as escort for Coach Woody, the fiercely competitive but eccentric Erk Russell-like defensive coach, on the Pigskin Cavalcade, the pre-season motorcade to the fans in the hinterlands. Love is sternly admonished that his sole task is to keep Coach Woody on schedule for the various dinners at the various country clubs and out of the pools, clothed, and out of the bedrooms of alumni wives, unclothed.

Woody proves to be more than Love can handle, but during the harum-scarum trip amid the fanatic fans and big-shot alumni, the non-coaching graduate student and the defensive legend come to understand and respect each other in spite of the challenges. And, yes, love blossoms for Love, too, amid his struggles to keep Woody straight, while keeping Coach Driver’s wry wife supplied with clandestine gin and tonics.

Will Love find true love? Will he survive Sparkman’s suave undermining? Will Coach Driver’s neanderthal natterings drive Love screaming from coaching? Will Coach Woody go too far? Grab yourself a copy of Love’s Winning Plays and enjoy finding out the answers. With a writer like Inman Majors, you’re in good hands, and you’re assured of an entertaining and thoughtful read. This book is the perfect way to prepare yourself for the new football season, especially if you like football (or don’t) but abhor all the mindless trappings and boorish behavior. As an added incentive, I might point out that Inman Majors is also author of, among other books, Wonderdog, the comic novel that makes you glad to be a fun-loving liberal, one of my all-time favorite books, now, alas, out of print, but still available on Amazon and perhaps at Jackson Street Books.