| Italic Title: | The Hidden Game of Football |
| The Hidden Game of Football | |
| Author: | Bob Carroll, John Thorn, and Pete Palmer |
| Title Orig: | The Hidden Game of Football: A Revolutionary Approach to the Game and Its Statistics |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Publisher: | Grand Central Publishing |
| Publisher2: | Total Sports Publishing |
| Pub Date: | January 1, 1988 |
| Pages: | 415 |
| Isbn: | 0446514144 |
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 statistical approach to analyzing American football in a book.[1]
The original was published in 1988.[2] 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.
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, is being published by University of Chicago Press.[3]
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, found the application of statistics to football "cumbersome."[4] 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, described the book as "a seminal work of football analytics" in 2022.[5]
The book inspired Aaron Schatz to found Football Outsiders, and develop the Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) statistic.[6]