Are you ready for some Prozac?

Just finished a highly entertaining book I wish I had written, A Few Seconds of Panic by the WSJ's Stefan Fatsis. For the first time since George Plimpton embedded with the Lions in 1963, an NFL team allowed a writer to join a team for training camp. Fatsis suited up for the Broncos as a kicker. That's obviously not the most exciting position to read about -- getting his bell rung by John Lynch while running a post pattern would have made for more drama. But Fatsis steps outside his realm of finicky kickers often enough to deliver plenty of X's and O's, some startlingly blunt interviews with players, coaches and front-office types and, most interestingly, provides a peek into the players' psyche:

The modern NFL player craves what we all crave: to be understood ... They are athletes, cocky and confident, at least outwardly. But the Broncos did want to be seen as more than the characters in the NFL video games they themselves play. They wanted me to understand that football is manic-depressive. The game itself is a fun, thrilling, scary, addictive turn-on: Sunday! The rest of the job is a largely joyless, stultifying, demoralizing, infantilizing, breakdown-inducing drag: Wednesday.