Just when you thought it was safe to bet the spread again, Peter Gent has written another book about pro football.

Well, not exactly. Gent, author of the best-selling "North Dallas Forty," has written ["The Franchise"], a novel about venality, corruption, psychosis, sex, drugs, fraud and brutality, with our next-to-national pastime as focus and backdrop. In short, another best-seller.

It is a book tenanted almost entirely by villains, from the league commissioner on down. And down and down. Scum might be a more appropriate word, were it not for the insinuation that we, the beer-burping fans, are implicated in the conspiracy—through ignorance, of course. Still, better dumb than scum.

The relatively good guys who lurch and limp into Gent's abattoir invariably are football players, bloodied, bowed but defiant—at least until bought off or bumped off….

The Texas Pistols, the Franchise of the title, is put together...