TMB Book Club: Study Hall

A summer reading series to get us through the offseason.

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Welcome to TMB Book Club! The thought process behind this series is pretty simple: it’s the offseason, I like to read, and I’m a teacher so I usually don’t have much time to read during the year. That usually means that the summer months are my time to catch up on any reading I’ve saved up over the school year, but this year I wanted to do something a little different on top of that.

See, the summer months are usually pretty dry from a content standpoint, and while we will likely have some stuff next month to celebrate the start of UCLA’s Big Ten tenure, things really won’t start ramping up until August from a sports standpoint (imagine looking forward to fall camp, Chip Kelly would never). Thus, I’ve decided to start TMB Book Club as a way for all of us to read a bunch of sports books and better prepare for the next year. I want this to be open to everyone when it comes to recommending books to read, but I want to set a couple ground rules first:

1. Nothing UCLA-specific - I think part of the problem we as fans have is that we can become too hyper-focused on our own specific teams and histories and lack a greater appreciation for anything outside of that focus. We could read something like Ben Bolch’s 100 Things UCLA Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, which is absolutely a good book that you should pick up and read, but I wanted to use this to expand our understanding of sports as a whole.

2. No biographies - I’m a social science teacher by trade, so you should know that I don’t really subscribe to the Great Man Theory of history. I would much rather read about a segment of history involving multiple perspectives or the actions of a few people than read some hagiography about the same few coaches.

3. The book should provide insight on the sport or overall history - For this first summer run, I want to focus on books that aim to educate, whether it be tactical innovation or a clear-eyed view of the history of college sports (that second bit is reserved almost solely for Sinful Seven, which I am considering for a spot but have no idea how I would write about it).

With all that said, let’s get into the first book: Study Hall by Bill Connelly.

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Football is a tough game to write about, in so many respects. There’s the tactical stuff, sure, but for so long there has been a problem in how we use numbers to discuss the game. Football is not like baseball or basketball when it comes to advanced statistics for a variety of reasons, from the lack of games being played to the shape of a football leading to weird bounces and variance. As Bill Connelly writes,

You’ve got 11 players on each side of the ball, and some will only touch the ball if something went drastically wrong, so evaluating individuals, with different roles and jobs on a given play, is somewhere between difficult and a total lost cause. Whereas in baseball you’ve got some true, well-defined outcomes - player pitches ball, player hits ball, player fields ball - football is quite a bit more complicated.

Now take all that, and throw it in the blender of college football, where there is a vast talent disparity between the Alabamas of the world and the Bowling Greens. For a long time, writers were stuck using imperfect tools to try and find meaning in the noise of an imperfect game.

That’s where Bill Connelly comes in. Bill has long been on the forefront of advanced statistics in college football - you’ve likely seen me reference SP+ in various Eye Tests, which is a statistic that Bill came up with - and his magnum opus came in 2013 when he released Study Hall. Study Hall is more than an outlining of his theories regarding advanced stats in college football, but rather a love letter to college football in general.

From the very beginning, Connelly establishes his college football bonafides. A Missouri alumni, Connelly’s first chapter is dedicated to the things that made him fall in love with the sport, both specific to his fandom (there are pages dedicated to the Flea Kicker, and Tyus Edney does get mention as a person who caused Connelly specific grief in his adolescence) and the more general. There’s a chapter in here that is oddly prescient to today’s landscape, getting into the problems of trying to regulate a sport that brings in billions of dollars while not paying the athletes that are driving those profits.

Connelly then pivots into a discussion of the history of advanced stats in sports and his own journey trying to develop a statistical system that could handle the chaos of college football. The whole segment, which takes place over four chapters, is a fascinating part of the book, but the one that stands out is the smallest chapter focusing on Kansas State. Over the course of seven pages, Connelly utilizes Kansas State to showcase the difficulty of creating a statistical model for college football, as the Wildcats consistently acted as an outlier during the Bill Snyder years. By all accounts, the Wildcats should have been a perfectly average team, given the level of their talent compared to their peers. Yet the Wildcats were consistent overperformers, in part due to an excellent coach and developer of talent in Snyder, but also due to the randomness of college sports. But what makes the chapter stand out is not Kansas State at all, but what they represented to Connelly and his burgeoning systems.

The two biggest chapters are reserved for Connelly’s explanation of his system of advanced stats, and it is here that Connelly’s writing style really shines. The concepts Connelly is talking about are pretty advanced, as one would expect given the subject matter, but Connelly approaches the topic with the simple language that one would expect from a former blogger. There’s a lot of numbers and tables flying around in these chapters, but Connelly deftly provides explanations for everything while laying out his vision for how to approach the sport.

One of the things I have always stressed about my writing about UCLA football is that I approach everything from an outsider’s perspective. I never played organized football growing up, instead being a baseball player, and I currently coach basketball. So a lot of my approach to writing about football has been shaped by people like Bill Connelly, who were able to break the game down in a statistical way that made a lot of sense to me. I owe a lot of my writing to the work of Connelly, and Study Hall was a very formative book in my development as a football writer (and, full disclosure, Bill Connelly was a former writer at SB Nation when we were affiliated with the site).

In the time since Study Hall’s release, our understanding of football advanced stats has changed, as has the acceptance of advanced stats in football as a whole. Companies like ESPN, Fox, and Amazon have incorporated more advanced stats into their broadcasts, while there is an explosion of sites that have cropped up over the last decade like CFBGraphs, BCFToys, and others that have continued the work of the now-defunct Football Outsiders. Even Bill Connelly has grown in prominence; he was hired by ESPN in 2019, taking his S&P+ system with him to create SP+ for the company. But if you’re looking for a jumping off point to better understand the numbers in college football, you can’t do much better than this book.

Study Hall by Bill Connelly is available on Amazon and other retailers. If you have a suggestion for a book for this series, leave a comment below.

Next up in the series (likely): The Perfect Pass by S.C. Gwynne.

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