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Pro Football Prospectus 2008: The Essential Guide to the 2008 Pro Football Season
The most authoritative and innovative guide to professional football is back for an all-new season with more cutting-edge statistical analysis, obsessive film study, and trademark humor.
Building on a winning record of accurate predictions, the 2008 annual includes comprehensive coverage of all 32 NFL teams, analysis of off -season personnel changes, and exclusive forecasts for where each team will finish the 2008 season. With statistics for more than 500 skill players along with commentary and KUBIAK projections forecasting their 2008 fantasy football numbers, Pro Football Prospectus is an outstanding and reliable resource for fantasy players, Monday-morning quarterbacks, and die-hard fans everywhere.
Building on a winning record of accurate predictions, the 2008 annual includes comprehensive coverage of all 32 NFL teams, analysis of off -season personnel changes, and exclusive forecasts for where each team will finish the 2008 season. With statistics for more than 500 skill players along with commentary and KUBIAK projections forecasting their 2008 fantasy football numbers, Pro Football Prospectus is an outstanding and reliable resource for fantasy players, Monday-morning quarterbacks, and die-hard fans everywhere.
- GenresSportsFootballNonfiction
528 pages, Paperback
First published July 9, 2008
3 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 16, 2008
Even if I hated football this would still be worth reading - the prose is witty and accessible, sometimes uproarious (there's a poem about a certain recent late-round Georgia Tech draftee that had me laughing so hard on the subway that people were giving me dirty looks.)
There's still a handful of really worthwhile articles (the best in my opinion being an assessment of the impact of the 32 teams' medical staffs; there's also a good article on the rampant painkiller use that has hit the league over the last few years.) There's still a relative lack of raw fantasy football data, which is probably by design, since there are so many different kinds of leagues out there.
The authors of this book (the Brown-grad proprietors of footballoutsiders.com) are usually fairly conservative in their estimates, and this year they expect a bit of a regression to the mean on the part of many of last years' darlings, especially Tom Brady, Derek Anderson, and the Giants more generally. (Don't expect Eli to be evading six Pats tackles every week.) They lowball a couple of fan favorites, like Maurice Jones-Drew, Dwayne Bowe, and expect Larry Johnson to keep wending his way to the scrapyard. They like Marshawn Lynch a lot, as well as Earnest Graham and Ryan Grant (both of which surprised me due to the small sample size from last season.) Their assessments are a bit more tentative than usual - they write about what could happen IF Derek Anderson keeps playing the way he did last year rather than putting their money down one way or the other.
The biggest adjustment they've made in the way they calculate their projections this year was going from DPAR (which calculated how many points each player's performance would add or subtract to their team's performance on average) to the piratey DYAR, which calculates how many yards each player will add on average. Sort of. See, Schatz & co. are constantly reminding people on their site and elsewhere that gaining a yard doesn't matter when your butt is in your own end zone on a 4th and long, but it matters a lot in the red zone on a 4th and 1. Yards are too contextual to be used as an accurate measurement of a player's importance. But they decided to go from DPAR to DYAR to make their analysis more accessible, even though DYAR is just DPAR * 14.5. I don't get it, but I typically use DPAR/DYAR a lot less than I use other aspects of this book and a few of their other proprietary calculations like DVOA, so no big deal. I can understand some of the hardcore FO readers feeling a little peeved, though.
There's still a handful of really worthwhile articles (the best in my opinion being an assessment of the impact of the 32 teams' medical staffs; there's also a good article on the rampant painkiller use that has hit the league over the last few years.) There's still a relative lack of raw fantasy football data, which is probably by design, since there are so many different kinds of leagues out there.
The authors of this book (the Brown-grad proprietors of footballoutsiders.com) are usually fairly conservative in their estimates, and this year they expect a bit of a regression to the mean on the part of many of last years' darlings, especially Tom Brady, Derek Anderson, and the Giants more generally. (Don't expect Eli to be evading six Pats tackles every week.) They lowball a couple of fan favorites, like Maurice Jones-Drew, Dwayne Bowe, and expect Larry Johnson to keep wending his way to the scrapyard. They like Marshawn Lynch a lot, as well as Earnest Graham and Ryan Grant (both of which surprised me due to the small sample size from last season.) Their assessments are a bit more tentative than usual - they write about what could happen IF Derek Anderson keeps playing the way he did last year rather than putting their money down one way or the other.
The biggest adjustment they've made in the way they calculate their projections this year was going from DPAR (which calculated how many points each player's performance would add or subtract to their team's performance on average) to the piratey DYAR, which calculates how many yards each player will add on average. Sort of. See, Schatz & co. are constantly reminding people on their site and elsewhere that gaining a yard doesn't matter when your butt is in your own end zone on a 4th and long, but it matters a lot in the red zone on a 4th and 1. Yards are too contextual to be used as an accurate measurement of a player's importance. But they decided to go from DPAR to DYAR to make their analysis more accessible, even though DYAR is just DPAR * 14.5. I don't get it, but I typically use DPAR/DYAR a lot less than I use other aspects of this book and a few of their other proprietary calculations like DVOA, so no big deal. I can understand some of the hardcore FO readers feeling a little peeved, though.
August 11, 2008
I read this every year...it's interesting.
September 1, 2008
Your standard pre-season manual, but, you know, with actual data. Gives me hope for the Packers.
October 27, 2008
I'll rate it after the fantasy football season.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews