''The Hidden Game of Football: A Revolutionary Approach to the Game and Its Statistics'' is a book on

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 ...

statistics published in 1988 and written by Bob Carroll,

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 ...

. It was the first systematic statistical approach to analyzing

in a book.

Original publication

The original was published in 1988. The purpose of the book is to look at the statistics of football and how they change the game based on coaching decision and player selection.

Updated edition

In 1998, a new version title ''The Hidden Game Of Football: The Next Edition'' was published by the authors. The new version is updated and includes more commentary on past statistics. A 2023 edition, with a foreword by

Aaron Schatz Football Outsiders (FO) is a website started in July 2003 which focuses on advanced statistical analysis of the NFL. The site is run by a staff of regular writers, who produce a series of weekly columns using both the site's in-house statistics ...

, is being published by

University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including ''The Chicago Manual of Style'', ...

Reception

The book received mixed reviews at the time of its original publication, but has been assessed more positively by retrospective reviews. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in a 1988 review for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', found the application of statistics to football "cumbersome." By contrast, Shane Richmond of ''Pigskin Books'' wrote that "it’s likely that the book changed the way teams themselves think about the game; it certainly changed how the smarter sportswriters and analysts looked at it." Rustin Dodd, in a retrospective article in ''

The Athletic ''The Athletic'' is a subscription-based sports website that provides national and local coverage in 47 North American cities as well as the United Kingdom. ''The Athletic'' also covers national stories from top professional and college sports ...

,'' described the book as "a seminal work of football analytics" in 2022. The book inspired Aaron Schatz to found

Football Outsiders Football Outsiders (FO) is a website started in July 2003 which focuses on advanced statistical analysis of the NFL. The site is run by a staff of regular writers, who produce a series of weekly columns using both the site's in-house statistics ...

, and develop the Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) statistic.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hidden Game of Football American football strategy

Original publication

Updated edition

Reception

See also

References