The Cheat Sheet

Nathan’s position as starting quarterback for the fictional NFL team the Los Angeles Sharks makes him a major national celebrity, and his relationship with Bree is the subject of intense public interest even before it begins. American football is an immensely popular form of entertainment, with the NFL consistently producing much of the country’s most watched television. The NFL’s championship game, the Super Bowl, is the single most watched television event in the US every year. This enormous viewership makes the Super Bowl attractive to advertisers, who pay lavishly to run ads during the game. The plot of The Cheat Sheet revolves around one such ad, as detergent company Tide seeks to take advantage of the publicity around Nathan and Bree’s relationship—and around the viral video in which an intoxicated Bree wishes that she could use a Tide pen to erase all the other women in Nathan’s life.

Nathan’s NFL career informs his character development. Football was everything to his parents, who pushed him to find success from the start of his high school career. They did not let him hold a job or do anything else that would distract from his potential athletic success. Even though he’s now an NFL quarterback, he still feels the pressure of his parents to participate in charity functions and do publicity events. While being an NFL quarterback affords Nathan great financial success and celebrity, he puts pressure on himself to work harder than anyone to “deserve” his success. He earns millions but deals with anxiety and panic attacks. The dual perspective of the book allows Adams to explore how celebrity impacts Nathan’s inner life and how it impacts Bree’s perception of him. While the fans and even others in their lives, like Dylan and Lily, see Nathan’s life as luxurious, only Bree gets to truly see and appreciate the toll it takes on him mentally and emotionally. 

The Cheat Sheet belongs to the subgenre of romance fiction known as sports romance. Romances in which the love interest is a professional or elite athlete have risen in popularity in the wake of Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce’s romantic relationship with global pop music superstar Taylor Swift, and celebrity culture has had a fascination with prominent NFL athletes’ relationships since the early-mid 2000s (e.g. supermodel Gisele Bundchen and quarterback Tom Brady, singer Ciara and quarterback Russell Wilson, etc.). Romantic comedy books more broadly have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years with the rise of social media marketing for books, like TikTok’s #Booktok community. Sports romance as a genre offers authors the opportunity to explore a number of themes connected to sports, such as teamwork, loyalty, passion, and competition. In The Cheat Sheet, loyalty and dedication are two qualities that are integral to Nathan’s character, as he is dedicated to his sport and team and also to Bree. The teamwork element allows Adams to introduce a number of side characters on the Sharks team and set up a series with romances between other characters from the series, a spin-off move often taken by romance authors.