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Following the success of the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Sean Lahman establishes himself as the Bill James of football by revitalizing the way that football statistics are used to evaluate the best players in the history of the most popular team sport in America.
Not Worthy of the Title
| Customer Rating:   | It's hard to know how to grade a book that calls itself the equal of Bill James' baseball works, but fails. Part of the failure is due to the sport itself -- as the author makes clear, football does not lend itself to individual analysis in the way that baseball does. While the author has to be given credit for his attempt, ultimately he has to be judged against two other sources: Bill James', since he references James in the title; and his own prior analysis found in his three years worth of Pro Football Prospectus.
There is a brief review of the history of football -- with a shocking number of factual errors, and an equal number of poorly written passages that "read wrong", that probably aren't as wrong as they first appear. Read, for example, the chapter on the 1940's which seems to contradict itself multiple times on the formation of the AAFC, the Cleveland Rams' move to L.A., and the extent to which those two things were, or weren't, connected. The actual story is interesting and a little confusing (the AAFC was to start in 1945, but was delayed a year; Dan Reeves had wanted to move the Rams from Cleveland for years, and didn't care if it was to L.A. or to Dallas). It's worth taking an extra paragraph to tell it properly. Hell, extra space wouldn't have been needed, just better organization since the same information is printed in three different places in the chapter.
One of the major disappointments is that there is virtually no analysis here, few questions posed, no answers sought. This was a highlight of the Lahman's latter editions of Pro Football Prospectus. Most of that book's team chapters had an article that posed a question: (from 2003) Is there a problem with the NFL's overtime system; Where do great quarterbacks come from; Will Jake Plummer Succeed in Denver; What is the return on investment for first round quarterbacks? These kinds of questions, and resulting analysis, are a highlight of Bill James' work. They were a highlight of Lahman's version of the PFP, and that style of asking and answering questions was preserved in the PFP when it was taken over in 2005 by Aaron Schatz.
The guts of the book is Lahman's analysis of players' statistics, the Adjusted Yards and Q rating. But the way it's presented gives itself the short shrift. All in all, his theories for this new (well, not new -- he'd published before in his three PFP's) method of comparative analysis take up 15 pages. Then there are 230 pages of player and coach biographies, with no statistics offered. That is followed by 220 pages of mostly whitespace, with small portions of each page dedicated to statistics.
That doesn't cut it. When you have a theory for how things should be changed, you have to sing it from the bleachers. Maybe 15 pages of talk and 220 pages of data (okay, so it's more like 80 pages of data and 140 pages worth of whitespace) works for a Ph.D. thesis, but we're fans, dammit. To borrow from the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, "Thesis? We don't need no steenking theses...."
He needs to do more. He needs to take it further. For example, his attempt to forge a new unit of measurement -- adjusted yards -- which allow you to directly compare a RB with a QB or WR is laudable. But show us what it looks like. Throw in the stats for the 1991 Cowboys or the 2001 Patriots or the 2004 Colts, so we can see how Brady & Co. stack up relative to the old triplets and the new triplets.
Also, there are obvious objections to his method, and they are worth dealing with. The way yards are allocated between a QB and a WR is 50/50. Well, okay, you have to start somewhere, but show us that it makes sense. Give us some combos of schlub QB's with stud WR's, and vice-versa, and show us that the studs aren't getting screwed by the schlubs. An obvious alternative is to give the QB's a high proportion of the yards at catch, and a low proportion of yards after catch. Why or why not? It's an obvious suggestion, talk about it!
Another obvious problem is his Q rating. It quite simply fails to recognize excellence, and "punishes" (for want of a better word) great performances that occurs in the same season as exceptional performances. You can see it in the numbers for Franco Harris, whose 1022 AYs in 1975 were worth a 5.7 Q, but the following year`s 972 AYs get a 6.9 Q -- because in 75 he was number two to O.J. Simpson by a large margin, but in 76 he trailed number 1 by a smaller margin, though he was 7th overall in rushing. Jerry Rice made everybody look bad, but it doesn`t make a whole lot of sense that Michael Irvin`s 1603 yards in 1995 gets an 8.5 when he`d scored a 9.5 and 9.0 with 1396 and 1330 respectively.
We`re football fans. We eat that crap up. So give it to us!
So, to summarize, there are approximately 350 pages worth of content, spread over 500+ pages. It offers too little of substance, too little to validate why it`s better that what you can find fan sites throughout the land. Moreover, while he offers some rankings that are bound to raise controversy -- Ricky Watters was a better back than John Riggins or Marion Motley, or why Jimmy Smith was a better receiver than Tim Brown, Cris Carter, or Henry Ellard -- he makes no attempt to persuade.
So, while the cover is pretty, and the book will look almost elegant sitting on the shelf, you will likely be disappointed if you take it down and start reading. |
The Pro Football Historical Abstract
| Customer Rating: | | Great book with history of Pro Football back to the beginning of the 1900's. Ranking of players for each decade are good. Missing a couple of players in rankings which I think should be included, Archie Manning for example is not among the top 100 QB's. Interesting read for those who like football history and stats. |
Excellent writing and analysis.
| Customer Rating: | Sean Lahman first became well-known among sports fans as the creator and maintainer of what has come to be known as the "Sean Lahman Baseball Database" -- a huge collection of over 140 years of baseball statistics that Sean provided for free to the baseball research community and game-playing public.
So I'm not surprised that Sean has now done the same thing for football. What does surprise me is the high quality of Sean's writing. Although I have a been an NFL fan my entire life, the first 60 pages of this book taught me more about the history of the NFL than I have gleaned from all my other reading put together. His decade-by-decade analysis is top-notch, covering play style, strategy, finances, demographics and key personalities.
Sean's writing is thorough, clever and funny. He has done a great deal of research about the history of the NFL (and the AFL), and it comes through in a book that is a joy to read.
I have to disagree with Polymath's assertion that "whether you like this book will depend on if you accept the author's approach to analyzing football statistics."
If you enjoy reading anything by Bill James, and you consider yourself a football fan, you will like this book.
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mixed feelings
| Customer Rating: | Ultimately, whether you like this book will depend on if you accept the author's approach to analyzing football statistics. His approach does result in some, at first glance, strange results, such as Billy Cannon being the 25th best tight end of all time, and Gale Sayers barely getting into the top 75 running backs. But the author explains his reasoning in depth, one part of which I certainly agree with, namely, looking beyond received knowledge and oral legends.
However, in my fairly closely reading the text, I was struck with the number of misstatements, some of which may just be misprints. The most curious of these occurred at the top left of p32 wherein the author states there were 8 teams in the NFL in 1959. If that was all, it could just be a misprint, but then the author goes on to calculate that there were 288 player positions available in the league that year by multiplying 8 times 36, the player limit that year. The calculation is correct, but of course there were 432 player positions available in 1959 (12 teams times 36). I'm sure the author knows there were 12 teams in the NFL in 1959, so these errors are unaccountable.
Several times the author mentions that before free substitution, players taken out one quarter could not reenter until the next quarter. This became true in the 1930s, but for some time prior to that, players taken out in one half could not reenter until the next half (and in the original rules, no subs at all were allowed). On the other hand, the author correctly points out that Steve Owen of NY took advantage of the quarter substitution rule to play two separate teams half-quarters in the late 30s.
In another misstatement that is one of my pet peeves, the author states that the goalpost were on the end line prior to 1933. They were actually on the goal line thru 1926, but when the colleges moved then to the end line for 1927, the pros followed suit. The author does correctly note that, in 1933, the pros did stop following college rules and began to create their own. Moving the goal posts back to the goal line was one such case. (In the development of football, the posts began on the goal line as there was no need for an end zone, and hence no end line, until forward passing became legal.)
My favorite part of the book were the well written comments on the players. Though I may have disagreed at times with the author's player rankings, I did enjoy these comments. In (correctly) ranking Jim Brown as the top running back of all time, the author mentions he was born too late to see Brown actually play. Since I did see most of Jim Brown's games, I actually felt sorry for the author. With his obvious love of the game, and my joy in having seen Jim Brown play, I can say the author really missed something. |
Great Football Book
| Customer Rating: | If you like football and have a keen interest in the history of the game you need this book.
You're not going to agree with all of the rankings, but that's not the point. What's revolutionary about this book is the depth and breadth of information about the game's great players. This is one of those books that is more fun to read by skipping from place to place rather than reading from cover to cover.
The first part of the book is a decade-by-decade look at the game. It's not a boring recitation of names and dates. Lahman gives the reader a feel for what football was like in that decade - who the best players were, how they played, where they played. Who was the biggest player, the smallest player, the dominant teams and the worst ones. He delves into the things that shaped each generation, whether it was sociological issues like segregation, rules changes, military service, innovative new playing styles, or the advent (and demise) of astroturf.
The second part of the book rates and ranks the players by position... the top-100 quarterbacks, running backs, etc. Lahman even ranks kickers, punters, and return men. There's a whole chapter dedicated specifically to players from the two-way era, and another that focuses on head coaches. Unlike all of the other football books you've seen, Lahman is not content to simply declare his rankings and offer up a few platitudes to defend them. Instead, he describes their playing style, looking beyond the usual quotes about how "tough" a player was, or how he "changed the game" to offer real, concrete insight on hundreds of players... guys you know well and guys that you never got to see play.
You'll learn more about those players from this book than from all of the others combined. For example, Lahman studied the play-by-play data for every game that Barry Sanders played, figuring out that he got tackled in the backfield on about 20% of his carries. It's amazing to think of how many yards he might have gained if the Lions' run-and-shoot offense hadn't put him at such a disadvantage. The analysis of Dan Marino's playoff failures made me reconsider the way I think about him, and I think if Lahman had written his essay on Art Monk five years ago, the guy wouldn't have had to wait until 2008 to get in the Hall of Fame.
The third section has statistical charts that help to put each player's performance in context. You can't do that with the raw numbers. Lahman's charts help show how each player's season ranked in comparison to his contemporaries. Otto Graham threw for 2722 yards with 11 touchdowns and 9 interceptions in 1953. Was that a great season or a lousy one? Was it better or worse than Drew Bledsoe's 3639/23/17 in 2005? Lahman's methodology compares each player season to give you the context needed to evaluate each individual performance.
All of this comes with Lahman's wit, insight and love of the game. It's a must-read for any serious football fan. |
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