No, I’m not changing the focus of this blog, but as a football fan (particularly college, especially one university that already has a great blog following it) I’m happy to see the season ready to get rolling again.
Along those lines, if you like the statistical bent of this site then there are a couple of football sites you might want to check out. One is Football Outsiders, a site that uses a lot of “value over average†style statistics to help break down football games (for those familiar with baseball sabermetrics, think of it like value over replacement player stats). Among the writers for this site is Kevin Pelton, a guy whose very insightful work on advanced basketball statistics I’ve quoted here and who has been a good friend of the site (even if he is a Sonics fan).
Roland Beech, the man who brought us one of my favorite hoops sites, 82games.com, has a football site as well called Two Minute Warning. It has things like stats for team drives and for individual players things such as points per play used (a nice stat for those pulling together fantasy teams).
Finally, ESPN.com has added a guy they are calling the football scientist, who does intensive game charting then breaks down statistics out of that. He’s on the pay-to-view Insider pages but if you’re already forking over cash for the mostly overrated “insider†stuff check him out (John Hollinger and Rob Neyer are two key exceptions to the overrated tag, by the way).
All the football sites focus more on predictions (often against the spread) than do similar basketball or baseball sites, largely because there is such a demand from people who may bet on football (I have no idea who these people are, cough, cough). Still, if you’re into the stats or football these are worth checking out.