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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. There was NOTHING groundbreaking about it. The baseball prospectus books are a national treasure. I really could have done better with about a month of typing. For example, to not even adjust the expected yards per carry by the 3 d's : Down, distance, and defense. How can you still publish 'analysis' comparing to league averages. I enjoyed Football by the Numbers and The Hidden Game of Football when they came out in the 80's. Sure it's decent analysis but no better than you can get in any fantasy football magazine.
Where the baseball guys make are innovating, this is more mindless pablum. How 1984 pre-PC/excel spreadsheets can you get. I love books of this genre. This book is so far behind where it should have been. 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.
With the Browns, they look at the connection between the offensive line play and a team's overall success. It's about 100 pages longer full of fascinating stuff.First, the player comments section is greatly expanded. As someone who loves football as much as I do, I'm thrilled to see this book done so well. For the Titans, they observe that running backs tend to have a sharp decline after the age of thirty. 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. For Seattle, they examine the criteria for coaches to get into the Hall of Fame. For stat-geeks like me, it's the sabrmetric-type studies that are most interesting.
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. 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. looking at why this team collapsed last year or what that team has done during the offseason. When this year's edition arrived, my jaw dropped. Not sure if they included more players, but the writeups are significantly longer. 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.
Finally, I have to say that the authors knocked my socks off with the hard-core analysis that begins the book. 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. I bought this book last year, and was very excited to see that someone was doing serious football analysis again. 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.
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