With a no-superstar Super Bowl game being played today, I was wondering about the role of statistics in Football. After all, Bill James' Statistical Abstract of Baseball had been making the press quite a bit. Long an outsider, there is
now a core of managers who follow the Jamesian approach to baseball. James
is himself an advisor to the Red Sox.
It turns out that new analyses of Football strategy are being formed, and
are incorporated into the strategies of the New England Patriots. A New York Times article reports that the Coach of the Patriots had read a working paper by David Romer on fourth down strategy.
The Boston Globe has an article on Aaron Schatz, a football Pythagoras in the words of the article.
A lot more of Schatz' football data is at his Football Outsiders web site.
Posted by lacey at February 1, 2004 03:17 PM