Game Plan: A Radical Approach to Decision Making in the National Football League

by Frank DuPont

Written for football fans who loved Michael Lewis' Moneyball, or Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, Game Plan is a book that will entertain and inform.

Game Plan is the ultimate book for the thinking football fan.

The book tackles the issue of decision making and strategy in the NFL from the viewpoint of a true contrarian. No NFL tradition is sacred in this look at why so many NFL teams have such a difficult time making good decisions. More importantly, Game Plan offers a radical solution that can make almost any team better.

Along the way Game Plan makes a number of compelling comparisons between football and other domains. The NFL’s coaches are compared to poker players, while the league’s front offices are compared to doctors. By using analogies like these, Game Plan illustrates how NFL teams can solve their problems by looking at the way that other industries have already solved similar problems.

The book is over 55,000 words of anecdotes, comparisons, and analysis that comes together to prove the point that the NFL’s worst teams can climb their way out of the cellar, they just have to change their approach to how they make decisions.

Other issues covered in Game Plan:

Why do some teams engage in a never ending cycle of hiring and firing coaches?
Why do some teams pursue outdated strategies like running the football, 10 years after the advent of the passing era?
How can 20 year old players of the Madden video games get decisions right that analysts say NFL teams regularly screw up?
Why does the NFL draw its coaches almost exclusively from ex-football players?
Would teams be better off hiring younger coaches?
Why do some teams regularly screw up their draft picks and free agent signings?

Genres: Football, Sports, Nonfiction

174 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

Agree with the core concept, and thought a few parts were interesting (most notably the idea of simulators or some kind of gameday decision making practice for coaches to get reps). But man this book is a great example of what people hate about statistical arguments: certain, limited, dismissive, and insulting. Also it is like 60% about poker. All the examples are cherry picked and none of the very obvious counter arguments or additional possibilities to consider are even mentioned, which I hate. It sounds like this guy read a Football Outsiders article and decided to pretend it was his idea and use it to make other people feel stupid.

[Paul Campbell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm hard pressed to remember reading a book that I liked less or found less convincing, while agreeing with its core premise. This ebook is in the vein of Moneyball, Baseball Behind the Numbers, Scorecasting etc. in its heterodoxy and dissemblance of conventional wisdom. While the crux -- that teams should expand the talent pool of potential NFL coaches, use more analytics and advanced statistics to inform decision-making, and...punt less on fourth down (that one seems to crop up in every advanced football stats book), the tenor is off-putting. It comes off at times as a screed against the old guard/conventional wisdom that doesn't do much to combat the stereotypes of sabrmetricians as arrogant, outsider iconoclasts. Additionally, for a book that's main thrust is that football teams should be more analytical and data-driven, the examples seem cherry-picked, shallow, and deficient. Way too often through the book are statistical truisms thrown out with little supporting evidence. Worse, there are basic typographical and numeracy errors throughout the book that undermine the legitimacy of what claims are included, e.g., the ratio of 160,000 to 200 is 800:1, not the 8,000:1 cited in the book (loc 651). The burden of proof for an ebook is naturally lower than a full commercially-published book, but this could have used the careful eye of a proofreader/fact-checker and definitely could have used an editor.

[Dusty Nowak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some arguments are cherry picked for convenience, but I agree with the majority of the book. As someone who has logged thousands of hours playing poker, his comparisons of the NFL to pre-Moneymaker Hold'em are spot on. I also especially agree with his opinion that current NFL decision makers don't understand proper sample size and thusly make far too many incorrect result-based decisions. Interesting read.