Robert Nuehardt Carroll Jr. (July 10, 1936 – August 25, 2009) was an American sportswriter and sports

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...

. Carroll was best known for his contributions to

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

research. He was the founder and executive director of the Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA), and edited the group's newsletter, ''The Coffin Corner'', until his death in 2009. He was co-author of ''

The Hidden Game of Football ''The Hidden Game of Football: A Revolutionary Approach to the Game and Its Statistics'' is a book on American football statistics published in 1988 and written by Bob Carroll, John Thorn, and Pete Palmer. It was the first systematic statistica ...

'' (with

John Thorn John A. Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a German-born sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. Personal profile Thorn was born in ...

and

Pete Palmer Pete Palmer (born January 30, 1938) is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James '' Baseball Abstracts'', Palmer ...

), as well as ''Total Football: The Official Encyclopedia of the National Football League''. Carroll was the author of more than twenty books, most notably ''Pro Football: When the Grass Was Real'' and ''Baseball Between the Lies''. His non-sports books included ''The Importance of Napoleon'' and ''The Battle of Stalingrad''. Carroll was born in

Wheeling, West Virginia Wheeling is a city in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Located almost entirely in Ohio County, of which it is the county seat, it lies along the Ohio River in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and also contains a tiny portion extending ...

. He was an art and English teacher at McKeesport High School in

McKeesport, Pennsylvania McKeesport is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is situated at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers and within the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The population was 17,727 as of the 2020 census. It ...

References

External links

Bob Carroll's blog
(latest post January 13, 2007)
Obituary in Pittsburgh Tribune Review
* 1936 births 2009 deaths 20th-century American male writers Writers from Wheeling, West Virginia Historians from West Virginia Sportswriters from West Virginia Sports historians {{US-journalist-1930s-stub