The Hidden Game of Football

While the sabermetrics revolution in baseball is now fully institutionalized, other sports have embraced data analysis more slowly-especially American football. Yet thirty-five years ago, Bob Carroll, John Thorn, and Pete Palmer were laying the groundwork for the transformation of the sport when they wrote The Hidden Game of Football. Readers in 1988 found this book to be staggering, with myths and misconceptions left strewn in the wake of their analysis like the Columbia University secondary after a running play" (Allen Barra). Today, with statistical analysis becoming more widely accepted across the NFL, the book seems prescient and influential--as Aaron Schatz notes in his new foreword"--