Anticipating the National Football League‘s 2020 Draft, I finished reading a book about professional football players that I began reading nearly seven years ago. I came across The Pro Football Historical Abstract: A Hardcore Fan’s Guide to All-Time Player Rankings by Sean Lahman at a book store in Lynn‘s hometown, and was intrigued by the concept of a Bill James style treatment to the underlying sport of football.
(Sean Lahman wrote The Pro Football Historical Abstract: A Hardcore Fan’s Guide to All-Time Player Rankings).
The concept of reading The Pro Football Historical Abstract hit me in a way similar to my enjoyment of the table top board games of Bowl Bound, Paydirt, or Data-Driven Football, which I wrote about in December 2016. Given that I was taken by the concept of Bill James and his concept of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, a project with the same goals and techniques in football held immediate appeal. The notion of looking back at American Football League and All-America Football Conference teams and players also held a particularly high appeal to me as well.
(Logos of the National Football League).
A book reviewer named Tom Gower at Reading and Thinking Football looked at The Pro Football Historical Abstract, identifying three particular points that made this first step into ranking by Sean Lahman into the abstract particularly hard to accept.
1. The rankings produce screwy results;
2. The ranking methodology that produces the screwy results is not sufficiently justified;
3. Irrespective of the rankings and the quality of his methodology, Lahman for some to many players fails to properly execute his methodology, invalidating to some extent all of his rankings for those positions.
Gower’s critique has merit, along with some pointed questions geared at the statistics and methodologies in use for The Pro Football Historical Abstract are not properly justified with explanations of the methodology, or they do not fully take into account how reliable the statistics themselves in fact are. Critiques, for example, that get into understanding how Lahman’s rankings of Larry Johnson‘s performance in 2006 performance should compare to O..J. Simpson’s 1973 or 1975 campaigns seems valid.
(Logo of the American Football League).
In Lahman‘s defense, I view the project that The Pro Football Historical Abstract could spur as a first step for projects geared at building databases that look into the past. There is broad information accumulation that helped to contextualize performance much more broadly across eras in baseball, which in large part is a builder of the credibility that lends credit to Bill James. Gower said this in the opinion in his article. Further accumulation of data, including the contextualizing of it that quite possibly exists with professional teams today, largely does not seem to exist on a per play basis or go back into statistics like sacks, plays on third and short that resulted in first downs, and other things that we have in baseball. The calling for this type of work, and a public domain for that, is identified by Lahman and theoretically resides through access points such as this.
(Logos of the All-America Football Conference and its teams).
The merit that could exist moving forward with the book The Pro Football Historical Abstract: A Hardcore Fan’s Guide to All-Time Player Rankings was not exactly the exciting or educational experience that I had hoped for from the beginning. There quite honestly is a reason that it took me almost seven years to finish reading the book. On that point alone, my rating is not that high. However, I would truly like to see something that addresses the critiques of Reading and Thinking Football with the loftier goal that Sean Lahman had with his project. My rating for The Pro Football Historical Abstract: A Hardcore Fan’s Guide to All-Time Player Rankings by Sean Lahman is 3-stars on a scale of one-to-five.
Matt – Saturday, April 25, 2020
Matt Lynn Digital 