Game Plan: A Radical Approach to Decision Making in the National Football League [Kindle Edition]

Frank DuPont (Author)

Book Description

Written for football fans who loved Michael Lewis' Moneyball, or Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, Game Plan is a book that will entertain and inform.

Game Plan is the ultimate book for the thinking football fan.

The book tackles the issue of decision making and strategy in the NFL from the viewpoint of a true contrarian. No NFL tradition is sacred in this look at why so many NFL teams have such a difficult time making good decisions. More importantly, Game Plan offers a radical solution that can make almost any team better.

Along the way Game Plan makes a number of compelling comparisons between football and other domains. The NFL’s coaches are compared to poker players, while the league’s front offices are compared to doctors. By using analogies like these, Game Plan illustrates how NFL teams can solve their problems by looking at the way that other industries have already solved similar problems.

The book is over 55,000 words of anecdotes, comparisons, and analysis that comes together to prove the point that the NFL’s worst teams can climb their way out of the cellar, they just have to change their approach to how they make decisions.

Other issues covered in Game Plan:

Why do some teams engage in a never ending cycle of hiring and firing coaches?
Why do some teams pursue outdated strategies like running the football, 10 years after the advent of the passing era?
How can 20 year old players of the Madden video games get decisions right that analysts say NFL teams regularly screw up?
Why does the NFL draw its coaches almost exclusively from ex-football players?
Would teams be better off hiring younger coaches?
Why do some teams regularly screw up their draft picks and free agent signings?

Product Details

• File Size: 922 KB
• Print Length: 174 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007SBHUHA
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,436 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #33 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Football (American)
  • #84 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Football (American)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Time for the NFL to enter 21st Century April 16, 2012

By Steve Painter

Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is a remarkable study of the NFL and the processes it undertakes to hire and fire coaches, GM's, prepare for games, manage the clock during games, call plays during crucial moments in games and introduces qualitative and quantitative analysis to scouting, drafting and managing the clubs themselves.
This is a clarion call to the NFL to join other industries in an analytic approach to management. For the "Stats are for Loser's" club, this represents the fear and uneasy feeling they feel when they utter those words about stats because now they have no excuse to not use their brain to determine the best course of action to take in any given game situation.
The NFL is full of dinosaurs that make poor decisions because of poor cognitive ability, lack of practice, void of analytics and no collaborative learning process in place. Why is that? Could it be that the game relies of a very small talent pool from which to draw staff and management? Yes, says Frank DuPont, author of this wonderful, illuminating book.
This book uses several comparisons, backed up by scientific studies, to make the point that coaches and their staffs, even GM's could benefit from using simulators and learn techniques from other endeavors to better their game and enhance their chance for victory. There is an excellent quantitative study between video games and the NFL. Look at it this way, pilots use simulators to fly planes, why can't NFL teams use simulators to gain practice for their coaches? Simulation is the key for better outcomes.
DuPont uses the No Limit Texas Hold `em Poker revolution in 2003 that enabled millions to learn and play the game online and thus gave many the experience and confidence to play in the World Series of Poker matches. What was the result? The top players of poker are now, on average, twenty years younger than the pre-2003 status quo nature of the game. By enabling millions to play and enter the poker world, the internet gave experience and thus enlarged the talent pool to the point where it has revolutionized the game. The same thing can happen to the NFL.
Think of the talent pool for NFL coaches now: It's pretty thin, right? If you open up and enlarge the pool, then you get the best talent in the land, not just because you were a former player or a relative of management or ownership. Football coaches must have the same qualities as a puzzle solver or computer programmer, according to DuPont. He claims, and we know, that the brain becomes less effective at reasoning as we get older. NFL coaches are up against the clock throughout the game and the ability to quickly and accurately reason through decisions is still needed. These are abilities that decline with age. Studies show, as stated in the book, that video games improve reasoning ability, or fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is our ability to solve new problems.

This is an important book and I want you to read it. You can find it here on Amazon: Game Plan: A Radical Approach to Decision Making in the National Football League, and it's cost is only .99 cents. It will change the way you look at the game, for the better. It's only available on Kindle at Amazon. The Kindle app is free for your PC and Smartphone. You can find Frank DuPont on Twitter @FantasyDouche, give him a follow.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Radical = Practical? October 29, 2012

By Jesse

Amazon Verified Purchase

First, let me say that the author's (Frank DuPont) assertion that the NFL relies on mid-twentieth century processes to evaluate players, coaches, and overall on-field strategy is a valid point. This is visible every Sunday during the season, during the draft, and at training camp. Teams often confuse and misinterpret visual cues and language for honest evaluation.

So, what IF technology, similar to sabermetrics, were more fully implemented? Would teams more accurately assess player skills? Would coaching staffs be more fully capable of executing development strategies if rigid formulas were developed and adhered to? What about league operations?

DuPont tries to make the point that a larger talent pool of individuals could, and should, be given access to the NFL, creating a new era of leadership, where higher minds build stronger strategic teams. Nice, but DuPont largely ignores what coaches ACTUALLY do!

It's insufficient to address the problems inherent to coaching and building a strong strategic model without addressing the ability to reach and get players to buy in to the coaching! Sure, it would be nice to develop all kinds of X and O stuff, a strong front office, and a wonderful set of minds controlling things, but if the players on the team find the staff overbearing, thick-headed about their "new way" of doing things, or poor at motivation, then many of the best players on a team will seek free agency or demand a trade because the head coach and his staff "don't get it", so to speak.

And, I must say, the thought that Madden Football video game players would make good coaches, just because they can play thousands of games a year on an Xbox is absurd. No legitimate NFL, college, or even high school football program will see "Played 4000 games of Madden in 4 years" on a resume and regard that experience relevant to the job description. Not realistic at all.

Further, what the author claims as an analogous to NFL franchise coaching is playing poker. Poker, where you are only responsible for your own performance, not the performance of 53 players, dozens of coaches and trainers, and where you would not have to answer to your GM and team owner. Sure, the intellectual in all of us may assume that playing thousands of hands of poker would surely increase the strategic knowledge of the game, reflected in winnings, fame, and so on. But the realist also MUST assume that a poker player's skills increase proportional to experience of only him/herself, not others reliant on you to raise, call, etc...

Lastly, although NFL franchises should look to the future, allowing deeper statistical analysis to prevail over "gut instinct", the author never quite arrives at pointing out "where" these analysts should fit in to a franchise's model. I kept wondering when he was going to get to the point. When was he going to point out that a new office placard should be engraved with the title: "Statistically based Strategic Modernization and Evaluation Department". Who would sit in that seat? A poker player? A Madden Player? But, apparently, certainly NOT a former football player.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Excellent premise but fails in the execution January 2, 2013

By Paul Campbell

Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm hard pressed to remember reading a book that I liked less or found less convincing, while agreeing with its core premise. This ebook is in the vein of Moneyball, Baseball Behind the Numbers, Scorecasting etc. in its heterodoxy and dissemblance of conventional wisdom. While the crux -- that teams should expand the talent pool of potential NFL coaches, use more analytics and advanced statistics to inform decision-making, and...punt less on fourth down (that one seems to crop up in every advanced football stats book), the tenor is off-putting. It comes off at times as a screed against the old guard/conventional wisdom that doesn't do much to combat the stereotypes of sabrmetricians as arrogant, outsider iconoclasts. Additionally, for a book that's main thrust is that football teams should be more analytical and data-driven, the examples seem cherry-picked, shallow, and deficient. Way too often through the book are statistical truisms thrown out with little supporting evidence. Worse, there are basic typographical and numeracy errors throughout the book that undermine the legitimacy of what claims are included, e.g., the ratio of 160,000 to 200 is 800:1, not the 8,000:1 cited in the book (loc 651). The burden of proof for an ebook is naturally lower than a full commercially-published book, but this could have used the careful eye of a proofreader/fact-checker and definitely could have used an editor.