Snoop Dogg USC 2004

Rap artist Snoop Dogg knocks down tackling dummies during a visit to the top-ranked University of Southern California football team Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2004, on the campus south of downtown Los Angeles. Snoop Dogg donned football gloves and a red USC sweat suit and ran drills with the team. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)

Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football is revealing all kinds of juicy details about Penn State's tumultuous 2012 season.

The new book from Michigan journalism professor John U. Bacon offers a behind-the-scenes look at four Big Ten programs: Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan and Northwestern. The book is set to be released Sept. 2, but a number of excerpts and reviews have been published in the last week.

Most of the attention has been paid to Penn State, where Bacon gives an all-access look at the chaos of last summer. He talks about Penn State's fight to keep the roster together in the face of the NCAA's free transfer rule, as well as a halftime scuffle between then-quarterbacks coach Jay Paterno and the entire Nittany Lions' defense.

In the book, Bacon goes into greater detail about Silas Redd and how important it was for the staff to keep him in State College. Redd left for USC, of course, after a widely publicized wooing process that included a Mercedes private jet and a full-court press from nearly every member of the Trojans' coaching staff.

Kiffin said he recruited Redd "in true SC fashion" with his staff's lavish trip to Norwalk, Conn., to visit Redd and his family. Days after the visit, Redd flew to USC for the weekend, which ultimately sealed the deal on his departure.

What we didn't know before Fourth and Long was that rapper Snoop Dogg was waiting for Redd in a limousine when he touched down in Los Angeles.



From the private jet to the favor called in with Snoop Dogg, Kiffin pulled out all the stops to score a late-summer roster coup. He got his man, but Redd couldn't save the Trojans from a disappointing season from start to finish.

Update: USC refutes Bacon's claims and Redd's father calls them 'total misinformation'

USC started the season at No. 1 in the Associated Press rankings and finished with a 7-6 record and a Sun Bowl loss to Georgia Tech. Redd led the Trojans in rushing with 905 yards and underwent surgery to repair a torn meniscus in the spring.

Meanwhile, his defection didn't start the chain reaction that many at Penn State feared, Bacon wrote. And the Nittany Lions eventually found a replacement for him in bruising running back Zach Zwinak in a surprising 8-4 season.

Redd was the poster child for the defections, but the impact of his departure was minimized, first by a scramble to keep the roster together and later by a "next man up" approach that yielded a diamond in the rough in Zwinak.