Review of Football Outsiders Almanac 2010

Title:

Football Outsiders Almanac 2010

Author:

Aaron Schatz, ed.

Publisher:

Football Outsiders, Inc.

Date:

2010

ISBN:

1453671188

Pages:

575

Price:

$21.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@jetcafe.org

August 26, 2010

There is a lot of material produced every year covering the game of football. Most of this is aimed at the casual fan or the fantasy player and is largely useless to sports bettors. A few rare publications actually contain the appropriate kinds of information to be relevant to those who bet sports seriously. The Football Outsiders Almanac, as it has been called for the last two years, is the football cousin to the well-researched Baseball Prospectus that is indispensable for those who seriously study that sport. In fact, this is the same annual work that used to be called Football Prospectus, and it's one of the few football annuals with a significant amount of information that can be applied to sports wagering.

The book begins with some introductory material including an explanation of the complex jargon used in the book. Just as Baseball Prospectus has introduced stat-heads to the terms VORP and PECOTA, Football Outsiders Almanac introduces us to DVOA and KUBIAK. If these sort of formulae and statistical measures scare you, then this book may not be for you.

Also in the introductory material is a summary of some of the basic findings of the group over the years. Rushing success is a byproduct of winning games, not a predictor of it. Past success or failure in fumble recovery is not a good predictor of future success or failure in fumble recovery. Offensive penalty yards are inversely correlated with success, but defensive penalties are uncorrelated with success. For me, reading these statements was an Hallelujah moment.

These are the sorts of things that I have discovered independently by examining football statistics, but nobody seemed to understand but me. It's revelatory that despite all the idiots babbling on TV, the Internet, and sports radio, there are some people out there who do get it. There do exist a small cadre of people who can back up their claims with real math, rather than just their blatant assertions culled from the decades long rambling of people who really know nothing. Either these two paragraphs will make you excited about Football Outsiders Almanac or they will turn you off. Perhaps that's all you need to read to make up your decision about whether or not to purchase this book.

The majority of the book covers the NFL team-by-team. The coverage is similar to what you would find in Baseball Prospectus except that less space is devoted to individual players and more to units, such as offense and defense. Also, there is more analysis of each team's schedule, and they project team wins based on their statistical criteria. FO doesn't provide power ratings, which would be especially helpful for sports bettors, but with a little work a set of ratings can be extrapolated from their season wins projections.

After the information on each team, the FO staff examine all the prominent skill players in the league, providing projections on how well they expect them to perform this season. These should feel familiar to anyone who has taken even a casual look at Baseball Prospectus, although these data are probably of more interest to fantasy players than sports bettors. However, this information can provide a good basis for handicapping NFL player and team props, especially early in the season.

The book concludes with about 125 pages on the major conferences in the NCAA. It's a lot more difficult to do these sorts of statistical comparisons for the NCAA than the NFL. The NCAA has a lot more roster turnover, there are far more teams to deal with, and there is relatively little data to use when comparing teams that aren't in the same conference. What the FO folks put together here is interesting, and maybe it's the start of something that will be impressive some day, but it's not there yet. As bonus material included at the end of the NFL guide, it's interesting and worthwhile. For those who are only interested in college data, I think it's insufficient to warrant purchase of this book.

Every year, serious sports bettors search for those few publications that will assist them in handicapping the upcoming season's games. For me, Football Outsiders Almanac is one of those select guides for the NFL. It uses a very mathematical approach to analyzing the game, but that approach is right up my alley. Check it out.

Capsule:

Football Outsiders Almanac 2010 aims to do for the NFL what Baseball Prospectus does for Major League Baseball. It is a rigorous and analytical look at the NFL, and even though it's not about NFL betting, it provides a lot of valuable resources for NFL bettors. I think it's well worth a look by those who bet the NFL.