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Where the baseball guys make are innovating, this is more mindless pablum. I love books of this genre. I enjoyed Football by the Numbers and The Hidden Game of Football when they came out in the 80's. There was NOTHING groundbreaking about it. How 1984 pre-PC/excel spreadsheets can you get. This book is so far behind where it should have been.
For example, to not even adjust the expected yards per carry by the 3 d's : Down, distance, and defense. The baseball prospectus books are a national treasure. The basketball one had some improvements over the Basketball abstracts and Hoopstats of the late 80's-early 90's, but this football left me flat. Sure it's decent analysis but no better than you can get in any fantasy football magazine. I really could have done better with about a month of typing. How can you still publish 'analysis' comparing to league averages.
It's not terribly written, there's some entertainment to it, but no more analysis than you can get by dropping 4.95 on a Street and Smiths.
When this year's edition arrived, my jaw dropped. With the Browns, they look at the connection between the offensive line play and a team's overall success. Sure, they cover the important points about each team. They introduce a number of statistical tools, some of which we've seen before but most of which are brand new. Not sure if they included more players, but the writeups are significantly longer. They've added sections for coaches (not just head coaches but the whole coaching staff) and special teams.Second, the team essays are just fascinating. I bought this book last year, and was very excited to see that someone was doing serious football analysis again. Finally, I have to say that the authors knocked my socks off with the hard-core analysis that begins the book.
I haven't had time to fully digest all of the work here, and I intend to so my own studies to weigh the merits of what Lahman and Greanier have done. For Seattle, they examine the criteria for coaches to get into the Hall of Fame. But it's exciting to see that this sort of analytical approach is being undertaken for football, that there is a football book worthy of the "Prospectus" name. For each team they ask a general question, and while it certainly relates to the team in question, it tends to be a full-fledged statistical study that has broader applications. It's about 100 pages longer full of fascinating stuff.First, the player comments section is greatly expanded. My guess is that most readers will skip past the number crunching to find out about their favorite team or to scout players for their fantasy league.
looking at why this team collapsed last year or what that team has done during the offseason. For the Titans, they observe that running backs tend to have a sharp decline after the age of thirty. For stat-geeks like me, it's the sabrmetric-type studies that are most interesting. As someone who loves football as much as I do, I'm thrilled to see this book done so well.
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