Frank Wilson, Jr., is preparing for his second season as Tennessee Tech's special teams coordinator and nickels coach. Previous stops include North Carolina, Houston, Old Dominion, McNeese and Norfolk State, among others across a 13-year career. He's married and the father of a 2-year-old child. Ordinarily, those dual roles would be more than enough to fill a day. But not for Wilson.
For the past three years, Wilson has filled his late evenings and early mornings researching and writing a definitive history of college football. More than 1,400 hours of work and 420 pages later, One Game at a Time is out now on Amazon.
Having read it, I can say it's a well-written -- not well-written for a coach, well-written for anyone -- education on the game's history that will appeal to newbies and diehards alike. Divided into 177 different vignettes stretching from 2025 to 1869 and from the College Football Playoff to Division III, One Game a Time explains how football became the cultural juggernaut it is today, well, one game at a time. I like to think I know a thing or three about college football's history, and there was plenty here I had no idea about, and plenty more I only thought I knew about the game's most important contests.
Wilson carried One Game at a Time with him across multiple jobs in multiple states, through a pregnancy and childbirth, and now it's out. Below is a brief Q&A I had with Wilson, edited for length and clarity.
FootballScoop: Do you recall a specific moment when you decided you needed to write this book? What drove you to finish it?
Wilson: I don't know that there was a lightning bolt moment, but I knew when I would finish it. In 3rd grade I figured out how to read well, I had a stack of Sports Illustrateds up to my doorknob. In high school I remember John Feinstein's book A Civil War: Army vs. Navy, I adored that book. My dad got me Friday Night Lights when I got to Texas. When I got to (McNeese), and I'd been in the Poconoos and I'd been in Texas, I knew I had a whole bunch of stories. I just started writing. I got to (an analyst job at North Carolina) and had about 50 stories. That's when I realized, You'd been around Mike Kelly, Denny Douds, Mack Brown, guys who had 200 wins. You need to tell these stories. Kind of rearranged the whole project, started making a list of 365 games, 500 words a piece. Then I realized you can't even introduce the characters in 500 words.
I got three years into this thing, 180 stories. Let's just finish it, be done and organize it in a way that tells the history of the game through these little over-stories.
FootballScoop: When did you find time to write and research?
Wilson: I did most of my research in the evenings, when I got home. If I wrote in the morning, the work was way better, I could get it done more quickly with better word choice. I laid out the path of the story at night. Let's say I'm going to write one about Slippery Rock. I would lay out the arc with bullet points, and I would edit the next morning. 5 o'clock, mostly dark. Everything I wrote at night was mostly terrible. I did all my research at night.
FootballScoop: How did your head coaches and your wife react when you eventually told them, "Oh by the way, I'm writing a book"?
Wilson: The first head coach that even knew the project existed was Dawson Odums at Norfolk State. He said, "That's a big project." That's the only word I ever said about it. My wife didn't know this project existed for 14 months. I didn't know what it was going to be. Eventually it got to the point where I had to tell people. "Why are you up on the computer at 5 every morning?" She was very helpful, and learned a lot as someone who didn't grow up around the sport.
FootballScoop: Did you have a favorite game you knew nothing about before you started writing this book? What was your favorite thing to learn?
Wilson: My favorite story that I did absolutely was Operation Frijoles, Wabash and DePauw. Theft of the Monon Belt. Subterfuge meets Friday Night Lights. They pull a fast one on the administration and managed to pull off a fantastic heist. It was phenomenal to read about, write about, and learn about.
My favorite thing to learn about encompasses the whole book and the long arc of the history of college football -- the reality of college football since its inception, the problems of 1869 through 2025 are essentially the same. We have to deal with safety, we have to deal with paying players. Jim Thorpe was not an amateur, allegedly. Every single system, we keep using them and we keep having the same dialogue. Funding for the program, in 1909 it was a big to-do to spend $40,000 on a program. Teams get canceled. Every single thing that happened back then, happens today. It's interesting to extrapolate what happened back then to try to solve the problems we have today.
FootballScoop: What did you learn about yourself during this process?
Wilson: Probably that I was a better writer than I thought I was. Hopefully. I think I was able to find a way to manage my time better. Once I decided to get this done, it became something I knew I had to intrinsically get done for myself.
After 3+ years of writing, revising, and going down the rabbit hole,
— Frank Wilson Jr (@FrankWilsonJr) July 28, 2025
One Game at a Time is now available.
It’s the story of college football’s rise from dangerous beginnings to a national obsession.
What we forged, what we forgot, and what it all meant.https://t.co/xlxCoCb22l
FootballScoop: Can you put a number on how many hours of writing and research you put into this?
Wilson: Over the course of a 3-year period, it's 180 chapters approximately, I don't know, 1,000 hours? 1,400 hours? If it took me eight hours of planning on one topic, it's probably a minimum of 1,400 hours across three years.
FootballScoop: Did you ever have any days where you dreaded writing, researching or editing, or was it a labor of love the entire time?
Wilson: Because I had so many pre-determined games to talk about, there weren't hardly any of those days. A game from 1914 is going to be so different from an overtime shootout of 2014. Over 180 chapters you get a glimpse of my personality, and in some of them you can tell I'm not in as good of a mood
As coaches, this is what we do all day anyway. Twelve hours of football all day, then four more at night. I got some good ideas, I think, in terms of motivating and stories to tell for players. It benefitted the team I'm on now.
FootballScoop: Give me your best elevator pitch to a college football fan who doesn't know this book exists.
Wilson: This is a book that will explain the 150 history -- a stage for heroes, a place for legends, and reflecting a mirror across our sport and across society.