This book, by Carroll, Palmer, and Thorn, can be regarded as Deep Stats 1.0, a serious attempt to get past raw numbers and generate a Theory of Everything. Well, football Everything.
For a statistically minded crew, it’s an absolute must read, because they completely destroy the NFL’s passer rating formula. They had thought a lot about the formula, and their critique is penetrating and incisive. It can also be treated as a critique of any goof who stands up and claims that today’s passers are superior because their ratings are better than the players of yesteryear, because, yes, Carroll et al have taken that whole argument and flayed it open on the written page as well.
That it is an older theory can be seen by the units the authors choose to use. They reduce everything to yards. Yards? Any self respecting creator of a theory of Football Everything knows that the unit du jour is wins. This has been true ever since Bill James’s Win Shares, at least, and as stats like WARP (i.e. wins above replacement player) have become common. This need to express everything in terms of wins, or better yet, playoff wins, is part of what is fueling the current micro-revolution in football stats (see, for example, this recent Fifth Down Blog article by Brian Burke). We don’t need no steenkin’ points, no yards. How does taking the head off the secondary receiver and separating him from the ball translate into wins, padre? What things does my team need to do to win games, win playoff games, and win championships? That’s what any self respecting data geek wants to know.
Any other issues? I note that they have a rather unique description, in their “how the game evolved” pages, of Earle Neale’s Eagle defense and Steve Owens’s umbrella defense, differing from the descriptions given by Dr Z in Thinking Man’s or Jean Bramel in the Fifth Down blog. And no, I don’t think the Eagle was a 6-2 or that Steve Owen’s “Umbrella” was a 7-diamond. I think Dr Z and Jean are correct and this otherwise fine book wrong.
That said, they go over all aspects of the game, analyze them in terms of yards.. yes, they even convert scoring to .. yards, and then present their version of football Everything to the reader. It’s actually a fine first attempt, and were it not for the trends of the day, to think and eat and breathe in terms of wins, we might still be rating offenses by how many yards they “score”, and defenses by how many “yards” they prevent.
May 17, 2011 at 4:37 pm
[…] NFL Classic Books: The Hidden Game of Football: Code and Football with some thoughts on the seminal book by Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn. […]
August 8, 2011 at 9:31 am
[…] is also an old one, the critique of the NFL QBR by Carroll, Palmer and Thorn in the book “The Hidden Game of Football“. They devote the whole of Chapter 11 to the various formulas the NFL has used, why they were […]
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June 4, 2013 at 3:37 pm
[…] the discussion, a reader who called himself Ritchie took it upon himself to start trashing “The Hidden Game of Football” (which factors in because Bob Carroll, a coauthor of THGF, was also a contributor to PFW). […]