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Title: Pro Football Prospectus 2003 (Pro Football Prospectus, 2003) by Sean Lahman, Todd Greanier ISBN: 1-57488-657-6 Publisher: Brassey's Inc Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: A big disappointment
Comment: I love books of this genre. The baseball prospectus books are a national treasure. I enjoyed Football by the Numbers and The Hidden Game of Football when they came out in the 80's. This book is so far behind where it should have been. 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. There was NOTHING groundbreaking about it. Where the baseball guys make are innovating, this is more mindless pablum. 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. 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? How 1984 pre-PC/excel spreadsheets can you get? 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Touchdown!
Comment: I bought this book last year, and was very excited to see that someone was doing serious football analysis again. When this year's edition arrived, my jaw dropped. It's about 100 pages longer full of fascinating stuff.
First, the player comments section is greatly expanded. 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. Sure, they cover the important points about each team... looking at why this team collapsed last year or what that team has done during the offseason. 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. For the Titans, they observe that running backs tend to have a sharp decline after the age of thirty. With the Browns, they look at the connection between the offensive line play and a team's overall success. For Seattle, they examine the criteria for coaches to get into the Hall of Fame.
Finally, I have to say that the authors knocked my socks off with the hard-core analysis that begins the book. They introduce a number of statistical tools, some of which we've seen before but most of which are brand new. 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. For stat-geeks like me, it's the sabrmetric-type studies that are most interesting. 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. 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. As someone who loves football as much as I do, I'm thrilled to see this book done so well.
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Title: Baseball Prospectus 2004: Statistics, Analysis and Insight for the Information Age by The Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts ISBN: 0761134026 Publisher: Workman Publishing Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Pro Basketball Prospectus by John Hollinger ISBN: 157488655X Publisher: Brassey's Inc Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The 2004 Bill James Handbook (2003 statistics) by Bill James ISBN: 0879462582 Publisher: ACTA Publications Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Major League Scouting Notebook, 2004 Edition by Thom Henninger, Tony Nistler, Don Zminda, The Sporting News, Inc. Stats ISBN: 0892047291 Publisher: Sporting News Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Neyer James Guide to Pitchers: An Historical Compendium of Pitching Pitchers and Pitches by Bill James, Rob Neyer ISBN: 0743261585 Publisher: Fireside Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2004 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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