The release of Football Outsiders Almanac 2009 is just around the corner, and to get people excited, we've decided to release some sample material from the book. Last week, we released one of the 32 NFL team chapters absolutely free. If you want to read about the New York Giants, you can click here [1].
The big addition to this year's book is a set of college chapters which use Bill Connelly and Brian Fremeau's college stats to preview the 2009 NCAA season. There are write-ups on every team from the six BCS conferences, plus a seventh chapter featuring a baker's dozen of independents and mid-major teams. Our summaries will take you from the Trojans (USC) to the Trojans (Troy State).
To give you an example of what you can expect from these new college chapters, here's a free download of the first half of the Big 12 chapter from FOA 2009, written by Bill Connelly. The number listed at the top for each team is the 2009 projected FEI rating.
Let your friends know all about it and spread the word for us.
Download the Big 12 South (half) chapter here [2].
Pricing for FOA 2009 will be as follows:
For college football fans who may not be familiar with Football Outsiders and want to sample our work for the first time, we'll also be selling a PDF with just the seven college chapters (and one college-oriented research essay) for five dollars. This won't include any of the NFL material, and everything in this package also appears in the regular Football Outsiders Almanac.
Some good news for those of you who use the Amazon Kindle: Apparently, the new version of the Kindle handles PDF files as if they were standard Kindle files. So while we can't sell a "Kindle version" of the book, you can simply purchase the PDF version and read it on your Kindle. Will Carroll has already checked out a sample and says it looks great.
It looks like we'll have the PDF version of FOA 2009 as well as the KUBIAK fantasy football projection spreadsheet available sometime around July 8. The KUBIAK workbook will have all the functionality of past years, plus a new "fantasy playoffs" feature that will let you re-order the values based on slightly different strength of schedule adjustments that count Week 14-16 double and remove Week 17.
Finally, answering one question from the comments on last week's Giants posting: Yes, there is a new version of DVOA, and we should be introducing it on the site next week when we start selling FOA 09.
Links:
[1] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/ramblings/2009/foa-2009-preview-new-york-giants
[2] http://www.footballoutsiders.com/files/Football Outsiders Almanac 2009 - Big 12 South.pdf