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 by bribe, threat and blackmail sometime in the near future—shortly "after the second merger." The game, as we know and love it, is virtually the same, although by now, the stakes are billions….

[Everyone] has fingers in the pie, and for the best of reasons: The Pistols are destined, in improbably short order, for the Super Bowl, on the back, legs, mind, heart, but mostly the arm of Taylor Rusk.

Rusk, the consummate quarterback, has football in his jeans, and around him the Franchise is built, by foul means and foul.

Coaches, referees, union reps, U.S. senators, cheerleaders, even journalists are bought, sold, bartered, maimed and murdered to one end—a Super Bowl victory for the Pistols. Or maybe a Super Bowl loss. It all depends on the point spread.

Lost in the scurvy scramble for the big bucks are the men in the trenches, playing their guts out (sometimes literally) for the love of the game or the price of a few grams of cocaine.

Win, lose or shave, Gent's sympathies are with these macho misfits….

Parallel but subservient to the extramural carnage is a football tale that surfaces too briefly but is almost worth the wait. If Gent goes absolutely wacko over off-field mayhem and squalor, he does have a rare insider's cauliflower ear for player dialogue, the saltiest solution this side of the Dead Sea.

On the rare, ripe trips to the gridiron, the locker room, the training camp, the story rings as sharp and true as a helmet slap, and a lot funnier.

Pacing, too, is superb—a two-minute drill sustained through a long novel.

Unrelenting motion notwithstanding, the story falls short by a few yards. Unlike the game of football, "The Franchise" is nonstop action. Unlike football, too, all of it is ugly.