Football The math of the game

The last thing chili-eating, pennant-waving gridiron fans are thinking of is math, right? Au contraire! First and 10, moving the chains, field-goal ranges, running averages, pass distribution in fact, no sport seems to lend itself to number crunching like football, hence the value of this title in the Sports Math series. It is produced in conjunction with Sports Illustrated: Kids, and that is evident in the dazzling layout, which includes countless vivid photographs and overlays of facts and figures that could have come straight from the Telestrator of a master commentator. That is the real draw: play-by-play announcers a dream job of many young sports fans are statisticians at heart. And here the practical math runs the gamut, from fairly simple time-of-possession percentage conversions to the kind of Pythagorean theorem tight-end route calculations that would make Brent Musburger's head spin. This takes its concept and runs all the way to the end zone with it dense and heavy, but undoubtedly impressive.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist

Gr 5-9-These books delve deep into the statistics of favorite pastimes. They are not written for novices; acronyms and terms are used freely and not always defined. For example, readers learn how to calculate OPS in baseball, but what does OPS stand for? What is "the lane" in basketball? The math gets complicated and in a couple of places a diagram would have been helpful. The full-color photographs depict well-known sports figures. The spreads are busy with stats, graphs, tables, and interesting sidebars. Each book discusses the field or court, the basics of the game, the offensive and defensive stats, and how to make projections of performance for teams and individual players. Overall these books will appeal to serious sports fans who want to learn more about the numbers of the game. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.