Overly Earnest Breakdowns of Movies About College Sports: The Blind Side

You may have heard, but it's in the news. Let's dive into it to see how accurately it depicts our beloved world of college football

Welcome to Overly Earnest Breakdowns of Movies About College Sports, a series where we do exactly what the title says.

Here, we’ll take some of the most well-known movies about college sports across the history of American cinema and analyze them through an undeniably tedious and nerdy lens. These screenwriters and directors are putting together movies, not documentaries, but whether it’s out of laziness or an understandable sacrifice to craft a compelling narrative, many of these films, enjoyable as some of them are, aren’t entirely accurate when it comes to depicting a realistic version of big-time college football or men’s basketball.

So that’s where we come in. Over the course of this series, which will run periodically, we’ll dissect a movie to see how precisely it details this enterprise we all know and love. What’d they get wrong? Where do they deserve some kudos? And what’s hilariously off?

If you’ve got any suggestions for this exercise in absurdity, feel free to sound off in the comments or email me at craigmeyer19@gmail.com

After debuting with The Waterboy a couple of months ago, we’re back at it with The Blind Side. This one had been on my list for a future installment, but considering it’s in the news – and this nascent newsletter ain’t too proud to capitalize on whatever stray clicks might come from having “The Blind Side” in the title – I figured this would be as good a time as any to run with it. Unlike The Waterboy, this is based on a true story, so at times, it may come across as more nitpicky rather than a fun examination of a fictitious world. I’ll do my best not to come across as a “Well, actually…” guy because nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, likes that person.

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron, Tim McGraw, Jae Head, Lily Collins (playing a character, fittingly, named Collins), Ray McKinnon, Kim Dickens, Kathy Bates

Release date: Nov. 20, 2009

Budget: $29 million

Box office: $309.2 million

Synopsis: Michael Oher is a tall, hulking teenager who, due to his mother’s drug addiction, bounces around from couch to couch in his hometown of Memphis. After being enrolled at Wingate Christian School, he is spotted walking the streets alone one night by Leigh Anne Tuohy, who has him stay with her well-to-do family in their lavish house. Eventually, Oher becomes a part of the family and, after improving his grades, joins Wingate’s football team. Given his size and burgeoning skills, he becomes a hotly-pursued recruit at left tackle, where, true to the movie’s title, he protects the quarterback’s blind side. With a slight nudge from the Tuohy family and those close to him, he chooses Ole Miss, where he ends up after qualifying academically and clearing NCAA enforcement. He stars at his adopted family’s alma mater and becomes a first-round NFL Draft pick, completing a rags-to-riches story.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 66%

Notable reviews

​​”As a fable about the power of giving, it hits pretty hard.” J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

“The plot of uncommon human kindness and charity is a formula for box office success and reasonable entertainment, but the execution is incredibly conventional.” Mike Massie, Gone With the Twins

“A Photoshopped image of reality that is bland, parochial, and stereotypically acted by a cast who have nothing like the subtlety and range of Trey Parker's puppets from Team America: World Police.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Generally enjoyable, but it isn't until the credits roll that you'll realize what a major sentimental impact it has on you.” Perri Nemiroff, CinemaBlend

“It felt tired and clichéd and the frequent and obvious emotional button-pushing failed to ignite any real response from me.” Kate Rodger, Newshub (New Zealand)

“Issues of race and racism are not left on the side, though, and the onscreen chemistry that Bullock and Aaron score is a game winner from the get-go.” Tom Meek, Cambridge Day

“This is a horrid film, and I hated it, and while, I suppose, you can't argue with a true story, you can always argue with the way it is told.” Deborah Ross, The Spectator

Is this school(s) real?

Wingate, the school Oher and the two Tuohy children attend, is not. It’s based on Briarcrest Christian School in suburban Memphis, where Oher graduated from in 2005.

All of the schools recruiting Oher in the film – Ole Miss, Tennessee, LSU, Arkansas, Auburn, South Carolina and Clemson – are real.

On to some takeaways…

This movie has the wrong hero

Long before the ongoing drama currently engulfing him and the Tuohy family, Oher has been on the record as hating the movie (which was based on a 2006 Michael Lewis book of the same name). After watching it again, it’s easy to see why.

In the film, Oher is portrayed as a hopeless oaf. In the classroom, he’s lost, unable to process even the most basic facets of any subject. On the football field, he seems to have no real concept of the game and because of that, his inherent size and athleticism go to waste. According to the movie’s narrative, he needs intensive training from the Tuohys’ eager pre-pubescent son, Sean Jr. (or SJ), to grasp elementary concepts like the rules of the game or the job of an offensive lineman.

Oher’s actual life followed a slightly different script. Most notably, he was an all-state player as a junior, months before he was brought into the Tuohys’ orbit. His sagging GPA – Lewis’ book reported that it was 0.6 at one point – was a product of absences from school and bouncing around from institution to institution, both of which had infinitely more to do with his desperate circumstances than a lack of intelligence.

Though the film earned praise at the time it was released, with Bullock winning an Oscar for her portrayal of Tuohy, it didn’t escape criticism that it played into the trope of the “white savior,” a point that’s frankly hard to argue against, especially 14 years later. Based on the movie’s telling, what the Tuohy family did was unbelievably generous and kind. They fundamentally altered their comfortable lives to bring a complete stranger into their home and offer him the kind of opportunity for success he hadn’t been granted at any point previously in his life. By framing the movie around that selfless act, though, it removes a level of agency from Oher, who climbed up from the horror and perpetual uncertainty of poverty to earn $34.5 million over an eight-year NFL career.

That’s enough of a Hollywood-ready story. The Tuohys were important supporting characters in Oher’s larger tale, but he’s truly the star. In the movie, he’s a lost, helpless soul who only achieves what he does because a rich white family let him into their BMW one fateful night in west Tennessee.

“‘The Blind Side’ is about how one family helped me reach my fullest potential, but what about the people and experiences that all added up to putting me in their path? As anyone in my family will tell you, they were just part of a complicated series of events and personalities that helped me achieve success,” Oher wrote in his 2011 memoir. “They were a huge part of it, but it was a journey I’d started a long time before.”

The Hugh Freeze stand-in doesn’t ooze nearly enough sleaze

While the Tuohy family has undoubtedly benefited financially from the emotional resonance of Oher’s story in paper on, especially, on screen, they were already worth millions of dollars before the future NFL lineman became a part of their lives.

Perhaps nobody rode Oher to a larger, more lucrative platform than Hugh Freeze. Yes, that Hugh Freeze.

Freeze doesn’t actually appear by name in the movie, as Wingate’s coach is the fictional Burt Cotton. From 1995-2004, though, Freeze was the head coach at Briarcrest, where he oversaw the program during Oher’s time there. In 2005, the same year Oher enrolled at Ole Miss, the university hired him as assistant athletic director for football external affairs before he was promoted to tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator the following year, helping kick off what has been a generally successful, albeit scandal-plagued, college coaching career.

Cotton is portrayed in the film as a bit of a bumbling, feckless coach. He has his moments, sure, like when he advocates for Wingate to admit Oher to live up to the school’s Christian values and when he stands up for Oher to a referee who missed a clear personal foul committed against his star left tackle. Mostly, though, he’s there to be a punching bag for Leigh Anne Tuohy’s overbearing Karen-ness.

That ain’t enough. This is Hugh Freeze we’re talking about here, the man who used a university-issued phone to contact an escort service, got Ole Miss slapped with a slew of recruiting and academic violations after trying to pin many of those misdeeds on his predecessor (Houston Nutt, who plays himself in the movie from his time at Arkansas) and, most unforgivably, messaged a sexual assault survivor to vigorously defend the person who oversaw one of the largest rape scandals in college football history. The only reason Bobby Petrino isn’t unquestionably considered the most irredeemable ghoul roaming a college sideline is because of Freeze.

In defense of the filmmakers, Freeze was a relatively anonymous figure in the coaching profession at the time of the film’s release. We didn’t have the lengthy record we do on him now. But even going back to his time at Briarcrest, there were red flags. A number of former Briarcrest female students alleged that Freeze engaged in behavior that made them uncomfortable. He had one girl change into a different shirt in front of him because it violated the school’s dress code. Another student alleged he was “hyper attentive” to the length of her skirt and that he loomed around the parking lot as she went to her car to change clothes.

It’s perhaps an unfair critique. These are screenwriters, producers and directors, not soothsayers. But it’s unnerving – and, admittedly, kind of funny – to see Freeze depicted as anything other than the man whose true motives and actions often run counter to his devoutly religious image.

That was way too benign of a recruitment

For a college football nerd, a lot of the movie’s entertainment value probably comes from the parade of coaches who appear in it during the scenes depicting Oher’s recruitment – Tennessee’s Phil Fulmer, LSU’s Nick Saban and Ole Miss’ Ed Orgeron, among others.

Each of them gives Oher and a giddy SJ the basic pitch in the family’s living room – my school competes for national championships, you’ll be a star here, I’ll get you to the NFL and you’ll get basically anything you could ever want. The most interesting inducements are for SJ, with coaches trying to one-up each other on what they can offer Oher’s adopted brother, from sideline passes to the chance to lead the team on the field.

That’s it, though. I would point out that this was the SEC in the mid-2000s, but the time stamp isn’t really necessary. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to think back to a time when the power brokers at its non-Vanderbilt members weren’t dropping bags for blue-chip prospects. This is a feel-good movie released around the holidays, so I’m not expecting a gritty depiction of the college football recruiting underworld. But these are ruthlessly competitive men who are going after each other for a top-50 recruit at one of the sport’s most important positions. We couldn’t at least get some small wink at impropriety?

The closest thing we get is Leigh Anne Tuohy bemoaning to Orgeron that Oher was taken to strip clubs on a couple of his previous college visits. Orgeron plays it up, acting aghast at hearing such a thing in his wonderful Cajun Cookie Monster accent. But you know the second he walked out of that house, he rushed to his car, yanked out his phone and told his recruiting coordinator to cancel all the reservations for champagne rooms at Oxford-area strip clubs for when Oher came down.

The NCAA is miscast as the villain

The film reaches its dramatic apex near the end, when Oher is brought in to be questioned by an NCAA investigator shortly after his commitment to Ole Miss. Over the course of her interview with Oher, the NCAA employee’s queries become more and more pointed. How is it that a poor, athletically gifted Black kid gets pulled off the streets of Memphis by a wealthy white family only to develop into a football star and just so happen to end up at said family’s favorite school? That’s one hell of a coincidence, right?

Through those exchanges, she and the organization she represents are clearly made out to be an easy bad guy for the audience (since the crippling effects that poverty and drug addiction have on families doesn’t quite do the trick). The reason she brought Oher in, though? It’s entirely reasonable. Hell, we saw it play out for the first 90 minutes of the movie.

The Tuohys are rabid Ole Miss fans. The father, Sean, was a basketball star at the school. Leigh Anne was a cheerleader there. They have a property in Oxford that allows them to make the trek down there for as many Rebel sporting events as they want. The tutor they hired to improve Oher’s grades is another Ole Miss grad. Most critically, they donate money to the school, making them boosters.

Such allegiances shouldn’t forbid a family from carrying out an act of extraordinary altruism by housing an at-risk youth, but with the film version of the Tuohys, it wasn’t just that. The family is obsessed with Ole Miss, regularly wearing clothes with the school’s colors or logo (or both), drinking out of Rebel-branded cups and talking about their alma mater constantly. The aforementioned tutor, Miss Sue, makes the most egregious push of all, telling Oher that dead bodies are buried under Tennessee’s football field to try to dissuade him from attending a school he seemed very interested in. 

Even if it’s not quite that brazen, the family’s close and omnipresent ties with Ole Miss nudge him in a direction he otherwise may not have wanted to head (and considering the Rebels’ football stadium effectively banned Confederate flags less than 10 years before Oher enrolled there, it’s fair to wonder if that would have been a preferred destination for a young Black man). The family’s desires could have simply been left unsaid. This was a teenager who had been housed and clothed by a family who seemed intent on providing him with a path to a better life. If he could pay them back in a small way by helping their beloved football team win some more games, he’d have to do it, right?

I’m not one to extol the virtue of folks claiming that they’re just interested in asking questions – nor am I one to defend the NCAA enforcement bureaucracy – but in this instance, it’s certainly merited.

Tommy Tuberville isn’t a bad actor

At the very least, he’s better at that than he is as a U.S. Senator.