There are many ways to be macho on a football field. In “NFL Confidential: True Confessions From the Gutter of Football,” a player writing under the pen name Johnny Anonymous relates a method of expressing masculinity that fans might not have considered.  “For some guys, linemen especially,” he writes, urinating in your pants while on the field “is actually a thing, a sign that you’re so into the game, so much of a fighter” that you won’t pause to use the toilet. “You’d rather let it spill out all over your legs.”  This is demented. The upside, I suppose, is that you have marked your territory. The downside: It won’t be hard to find urine for that drug test now.  Bodily waste plays a large and wince-inducing role in this tell-all book. At 6 feet 3 and 279 pounds, the author is skinny for an offensive lineman in the National Football League. Coaches order him to pack on pounds. He finds this hard to do.  So each week, on the evening before his weigh-in, he eats until he is gorged. “When I wake up, my colon feels like it’s going to explode, like there’s a midget punching me in the gut with every step,” he writes. “But I hold that little man in. He’s not going anywhere.”  Then he consumes a big breakfast, drinks an oceanic amount of water, makes his weight, and sprints to the bathroom for sweet relief. The drama in all this is fairly intense; it’s like a Jason Bourne movie about intestinal distress.  “NFL Confidential” is the story of one year in the N.F.L., as told by a third-string lineman (that’s what he tells us, at any rate) who kept a journal during the 2014 season. In a note to readers at the start, the author makes large promises. He will deliver “fun stuff, scary stuff, controversial stuff.” He declares: “To hell with being safe. I’m gonna be honest.”  This is bluster. The N.F.L. has nothing to fear from this mild book. There’s little in the way of sex or drugs or crazy scenes. There is little or no gambling, insane spending, domestic violence or real addiction. Over in England, where anonymous memoirs from football (soccer, that is) players have grown increasingly gory with risqué detail, readers would almost consider this a children’s book.  The author is a nice guy, maybe too nice for a book like this one. In the off-season he lives with his dad. He loves his girlfriend back home, though they eventually split up. He drives a pickup and listens to granddad rock. “God,” he says, “I love the Beach Boys.”  His idea of a good time is going to the nearest mall. His idea of an even better time is saving money on sheets at Macy’s. He’s cheap. After dinner with his girlfriend at a Cheesecake Factory, he writes: “I leave a nice 10 percent tip. That’s a lot, for me.” Is it wrong to long for an orgy or two?  The author tamps down whatever dark allure might exist in professional football. Forget the bling and the women, he says. Players watch TV and play too many video games. “We gotta be at our hotels by 10 p.m.,” he writes, “and we drink more protein shakes than alcohol.”  Are football players duller than they used to be? This book reminded me of a line from Roy Blount Jr.’s classic football narrative, “About Three Bricks Shy … And the Load Filled Up,” in which the great Pittsburgh Steelers defensive end Dwight White, after his retirement, said about later, less nutty Steelers players: “They don’t have any gizzards. We had gizzards, man.”  A better recent book than “NFL Confidential,” with more gizzards, is Nate Jackson’s “Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival From the Bottom of the Pile” (2013). He wrote it after he retired, but he put his name on it.  The author of “NFL Confidential” has played for four years in the N.F.L., we read in an author’s note, and was named one of the top linemen in the nation while in college, playing for a major football school. (Under a different pseudonym he contributes, the notes says, to the comedy website Funny or Die.)  To his credit, the author is frequently a good observer of everyday life among professional football’s proletariat, and he gets some important things said. He is a white man who describes how racially divided the N.F.L. is, with black players and whites ones mostly eating and partying separately. (He also describes — and seems largely, alas, to share — the anti-gay sentiment in pro football.)  He is bitter, at times, about what the sport does to players. He hates “what it does to our bodies, how it breaks us down, tearing our ligaments, shredding our knees, turning us into old men while we’re still in our 20s.” He adds, “Hate what it does to our minds, how it makes us forget things like where we put our keys and eventually who the hell we are.”  He writes about how players, especially when they lose, receive hate mail and are trolled on Twitter. “I know guys who home-school their kids because they don’t want their sons and daughters to face the abuse of their classmates after Daddy loses a game,” he writes. “The Players Association even offers us a discounted personal security package if we need to be guarded from the real psychos.”  Oddly, most of the best things the author expresses are the sorts of things he didn’t need to hide behind a nom de guerre to express. Still, he is likable enough that, if he hasn’t been injured or cut, I hope he’s still out there, his team in the playoff mix. Players get big bonuses for playoff games. Johnny Anonymous can start leaving better tips at the Cheesecake Factory.  True Confessions From­ the Gutter of Football  239 pages. Dey St. $26.99.  A version of this review appears in print on December 30, 2015, on page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Playing for the Love of the Game? A Football Lineman Puts a Hit on the N.F.L. Today's Paper|Subscribe
In this first-person account, a backup offensive lineman goes far beyond touchdowns and fumbles as he describes a fraught relationship with football.