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Title: Pro Football Prospectus 2002 by Sean Lahman, Todd Greanier, Michael Ellis, Kenneth Shouler, Joe Sheehan ISBN: 1-57488-557-X Publisher: Brasseys, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.22 (9 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Mediocre
Comment: Not nearly as good as the Baseball or Basketball Prospectus, though part of it might be that this kind of book is just harder for football.
Rating: 3
Summary: reply to dewdrops
Comment: Perhaps the authors meant the first half of the season, not the first half of the game.
Rating: 3
Summary: An okay first entry into (hopefully) a long-lived series
Comment: Following in the footsteps of the Baseball Prospectus series of books comes the Pro Football Prospectus. I think it's a good first try but I can't tell if it will grow to be as strong as BP, which covers each major-league team and presents new and interesting research in each annual. If you're buying PFP for a fantasy football draft it will be useful to get the rankings at each position and see the trends of all the skill-position players' rate stats (although not that much better than one of the newsstand fantasy mags). It's also nice to see the authors go back several years in grading the drafts of each team.
The research does not, however, stack up to the corresponding analysis in Baseball Prospectus. Of course this is an unfair comparison for a couple of reasons: baseball research has been going on for far longer, and BP has been publishing for seven years now and has gotten a lot of framework in place for studying the game; and even more fundamentally, football is a much harder game to analyze. Each play in baseball involves primarily the batter and the pitcher and usually one fielder; it is relatively easy to assign credit or blame on each play. (Rating fielders is difficult, but play-by-play data and new techniques are helping to improve fielding metrics.) Each play in football is affected by the majority of the 22 players on the field -- even, say, wide receivers on a running play are throwing blocks or acting as decoys to stretch the defense. As a result, the authors' rankings of each team's offensive line, front seven, and defensive backfield seem pretty dicey when just calculated from raw stats. For instance, they rank offensive lines just by looking at the allowed-sacks-per-pass-attempt rate and the team's yards-per-rush, which is a good start but leaves out the QB's mobility, the RBs' quality, and about 50 other things that affect these stats. Analysis of these nearly stat-less units is long overdue and much appreciated, but there is so much noise in the numbers (from different styles of play, strength of schedule, interaction with other units, etc.) that you have to take these relatively simple rankings with a large grain of salt.
On the other hand, if I recall correctly the authors said that over the off-season they reviewed every play from every game from last year. Between compiling their own play-by-play data and initiating a statistical framework in which to build on, they've got the potential in future books to break new ground. Admittedly though, I don't remember reading anything exciting in PFP 2002. (I might also be biased against the book because they panned my team, the Browns. Certainly many fans were way too optimistic before the season started, but I think PFP's 6-10 prediction went too far the other way.)
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