Past Time

What if NFL teams went back to power offenses like the late-80s Parcellsian Giants? Are running backs over 220 pounds more effective and less likely to get hurt? Can a running quarterback survive if he’s deployed more like a running back? And why are there whole groups of people out there this obsessed with the past? Author Ted Kluck found online a community of computer nerds and football enthusiasts so rooted in the past and so uninterested in the future that they have created algorithms and computer software that can accurately simulate football games seasons and careers using fields of data that already exist on the thousands of players who have suited up in the National Football League. In this book part memoir and part Bill-Jamesian exploration into football nerdery The Odyssey Online Football league takes the author—a jaded journalist a lifelong football player and a burned-out coach—through a year immersed in the late 1970s in hopes of rekindling his love for the game. Past Time is an homage to football’s past and a meditation on its present and future.