Book Review: Seventeen and Oh by Marshall Jon Fisher

Release Date: July 12, 2022

Football is the only major American sport where an undefeated season is remotely plausible, and the 1972 Miami Dolphins are the only team to reach that milestone (at least when playoffs are included, thank you Eli Manning). An undefeated NFL season is a big deal now: there is always a flurry of media coverage whenever a team flirts with going unbeaten and then the inevitable “Mercury Morris and his 1972 Dolphins friends are uncapping a bottle of champagne right now…” (which they don’t actually do) comment when that team ultimately succumbs to the vagaries and randomness of a now-18 game regular season and the playoffs. Back in 1972, however, the Dolphins achieved immortality without all that much fanfare beyond southern Florida. They were only one-point favorites coming into Super Bowl VII, with prominent prognosticators such as Jimmy the Greek picking their opponents the Washington Redskins (this was 3 years after the AFL-NFL merger and there was lingering skepticism about the quality of play in the AFC). 

But the Dolphins ended up triumphing in the Super Bowl and closed out their 1972 campaign with a sterling 17-0 record. That means that even though they weren’t the best team ever (or even the best all-time Dolphins team, as the 1973 Dolphins are widely regarded as being superior), the 1972 Dolphins are a big deal among history-minded football fans and there already has been one book written about the team (Mark Freeman’s fair Undefeated in 2012). 

With the 50th anniversary of the Dolphins’ unbeaten season now upon us, Marshall Jon Fisher has taken another literary stab at chronicling the 1972 Dolphins. Fisher grew up in south Florida in the seventies and his book Seventeen and Oh attempts to be the definitive account of the team. I’d say Fisher largely succeeds in that endeavor, though the book is hurt by the fact that the 1972 Dolphins weren’t terribly interesting besides the fact that they won a lot. 

Fisher meticulously reviews every game from the Dolphins’ 1972 campaign, weaving in various player profiles and some of the political and social events going on during the time, especially in the Miami area. The book goes game-by-game with each chapter covering one contest and the aforementioned non-football odds-and-ends. The game descriptions are decent albeit somewhat generic. The Dolphins were involved in some close games and had a few fourth quarter comebacks so there is some excitement in reading the recaps. 

I don’t really have any big problems with the book but rather just found it serviceable but nothing fantastic. The bulk of the Dolphins were lunchpail pluggers in the mold of their exacting disciplinarian coach Don Shula. The backfield trio of Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, and Mercury Morris had some flair but they still aren’t that engaging and Undefeated doesn’t yield any new insights about them beyond what you’re probably already familiar with. Mercury Morris wanted more playing time, Earl Morrall was a bit of a square but workmanlike, Bob Greise got injured, Nick Buoniconti was very talented. This is all stuff I knew already. The sections on the history of Miami and its rise during the middle of the 20th century was interesting, while the passages on Richard Nixon (Tricky Dick was a big football fan and would call Shula sporadically) didn’t seem terribly necessary or add much.

The Nixon material illustrates a kind of Catch 22 with Seventeen and Oh: if you’re interested enough to devote 400+ pages of your time to reading a book about the history of the 1972 Dolphins, you probably already know enough about the topic and history of the time so that nothing is going to be all that groundbreaking to you. Seventeen and Oh is overall a good but not great trip down memory lane for Dolphins fans and anyone nostalgic for the NFL of the seventies, and it is the best book (so far) on the team. It’s hard for me to recommend it too strongly to folks outside of that demographic but if you want a general football history read it’s not too bad, just nothing amazing. 

6/10