Reddit reviews Study Hall: College Football, Its Stats and Its Stories

Two easy recommendations: The Essential Smart Football from Chris Brown and Study Hall from Bill Connelly. The former is the easier read but both go in-depth without being too confusing. When I was done reading them I felt smarter, for whatever that's worth.

Study Hall: College Football, Its Stats and Stories by Bill Connelly this book is incredible. It is a great blend of pure college football stories and raw advanced statistics. He has interviews with coaches, former players, and top college football writers. He has personal stories, he discusses pay for play, concussions and other hot topics, and explains his advanced saber metric-esc statistics. You can read the first chapter here

1. Did you find it as confusing as I did when Mike Sam played the WILL linebacker?
   
   
2. Football seems to lend itself to ad hoc theorizing, in which we try to fit an intuitive line to a bunch of noisy data. But we've got the tools now to test these fan explanations fairly rigorously. I'm curious about your logical process when you're writing an article - how would go about proving or disproving something like, "For the past four seasons, Baylor's offensive is consistently excellent, and they win or lose the game based entirely on a wildly inconsistent defense"? Feel free to pick a different example.
   
   
3. Setting aside the obvious GIGO issues -- injuries to key personnel and insufficient/poor data from early games -- what is the factor that gives you the biggest pause about advanced stats? Is there an intangible physical, psychological, or strategic quality that you think can't or can't yet be captured?
   
   
4. I believe it was Andy Staples on Stewie Mandel's podcast who was lamenting that there weren't any geeks on the Playoff Committee, and mentioned you by name as the obvious omission. Would you have any interest if your name was floated? If not you, whom would you nominate?
   
   
5. I really enjoyed Study Hall. I was surprised at the wide variety of answers from coaches on how they use stats, from motivation to quality control to strategic guidance to not at all. Do you think we're approaching a Billy Beane moment, where an on-paper inferior team pulls a number of upsets and publicly credits it to statistical analysis over subjective traditions?