Even though I'm not a big fan of the "teacher reforms the students" genre, Rookies is very well done. It really gets you emotionally involved to where you can rejoice when the team rejoices and weep when the team weeps. I can see why it won best drama for the season it aired in. I enjoyed it a lot. I also thought that it made for an excellent allegory of Christianity since Kawato sensei was, IMO, the most Christ like character in any drama I've seen. He constantly believed in his students and encouraged them into healing, transformation and recovering their dreams. Oh and the baseball games were intense. They were my favorite part of the show. The drama involved made the games very exciting. There's also a nice episode layout where it's not episodic like many other teacher dramas. The one flaw however would be that if you were to marathon it you might get a little sick of the heartwarming moments, there's a lot of them. Thankfully I took a couple days break between some eps so I didn't, but I could see how someone could.