No coaching rivalry in American sports features as many layers as Woody Hayes vs. Bo Schembechler. The Woody-Bo relationship started as coach-player, moved on to head coach-assistant coach, and ended with the two men as head coaches across the field from each other in the most storied rivalry in college football. In the 10 years they faced each other, Michigan’s median national ranking entering the game was 4. Ohio State’s was 4.5.

But what happened on the field is only part of this story.

“War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler and America in a Time of Unrest” traces how the culture of the United States changed from 1969 to 1978. For much of that era, the country was literally at war in Vietnam and figuratively at war with itself.

If the University of Michigan had not already had a football team in 1969, nobody would have dared start one. Ann Arbor, Michigan, was a hotbed of campus radicals. Corporate recruiters who visited the university ran the risk of getting locked in a room. Students held teach-ins and sit-ins and built bomb craters on campus. Some were not satisfied with mere craters – in 1968, Ann Arbor had seen the bombing of a local CIA office; the bombing of an engineering laboratory that was conducting classified government research; and the bombing of an ROTC staff car. It was not particularly cool to play football. One of the best players in school history, Dan Dierdorf, would not wear his letter jacket on campus for fear of being recognized as a football player.

Columbus, Ohio, meanwhile, was the capital of college football, and Woody Hayes was its de facto leader. Hayes had won the national championship in 1968 and had the best team in the country again in 1969. His biggest heroes were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gen. George Patton, but he also believed that his football program produced heroes for a country that badly needed them. Hayes viewed his Buckeyes as a model for America.

By 1978, with Watergate and Vietnam in the nation’s rearview mirror, the radical politics of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s had faded. What was left was a culture of drug use, drinking and partying on campus – and at schools like Michigan and Ohio State, football was at the center of it. Bo Schembechler struggled with these changes. Woody Hayes struggled even more.

This is their story.