THE PLAYBOOK

A revealing look inside the NFL’s front office, heaven for number-crunchers.

Wall Street Journal sports editor Robinson and executive news editor Clegg open with a football fanatic named Howie Roseman, who had pursued a position with a NFL team since high school. Finally hired to formulate salary-cap strategy, he became the league’s youngest ever general manager. For all his analytical savvy, Roseman was edged out of management by an old-school jock; Roseman gets some sweet revenge, but it takes a while to get there. Meanwhile, Robinson and Clegg have the hard job of explaining just how that salary cap works, for which it helps to have a math degree. Its intent, along with the structure of the annual draft, was to level the playing field, so to speak, so that dynasties could not form. The draft, for instance, gives preference to the teams with the lowest record of wins in the previous season. In theory, this makes it hard to guess who’ll end up at the Super Bowl. Sometimes it works that way, as with the Seattle Seahawks in their time of glory, with little money but plenty of psychotic on-field rampages. Sometimes it doesn’t. Teams soon figured out how to game the game, though, some by playing the equivalent of penny stocks, picking dozens of low-value rookies in the hope that some work out, others by putting all their money on blue chips. In the end, the authors note, it was all about math: “You could no longer win on the force of talent or grit or Xs and Os alone,” not when suiting up now means Armani and not shoulder pads. Of course, the money side has worked out just fine for the owners, given that viewership of Game 7 of the 2025 World Series “was outdrawn by thirteen NFL matchups from the regular season alone.”

Spirit-deflating but eye-opening reading for hardcore students of The Game.