SB Nation: Getting You Ready For College Football

Are you ready for some football? Most of us are and the college football season is just about to get going. We love football season at SB Nation, and we have plenty of ways to give you all the NCAA coverage you could want.

For a general overview of coverage head over to the SB Nation page for NCAA football. That is a great resource. Another page you may want to visit is the incomparable Every Day Should Be Saturday.

But what we really want to do for you is make you the smartest college football fan in your neighborhood. To that end, we present Study Hall, a book written by Bill Connelly. Bill writes for SB Nation at a few different places including Rock M Nation and Football Study Hall. He also does some work at Football Outsiders.

Bill's book is available at Amazon and is a must-have resource for the college football enthusiast. If you want to get a taste of it head over to this article, it will have you so pumped up for college football you'll be ready to run through a wall. Seriously, you have to check out this longform article that contains part of the book, plus a lot of other stuff and some fantastic photos. It's a treat.

Once you're done with that, you'll want the whole book. To find out more about it, I spoke to author Bill Connelly about what's in Study Hall, who he wrote it for and more.

Generally speaking, Study Hall is simply a book about the facets of college football I most enjoy. I figured that was a pretty good place to start with a first book. I came up with an interesting (to me) list of topics -- stats, why we love college football, underdog topics, how coaches use stats, head injuries/paying players/the not-so-fun stuff, etc. -- and set out to talk to as many writers, coaches, and nerds as I could.

Study Hall is basically one-third current events (the giant "Why we love it" chapter shown in longforms, followed by a rebuttal chapter of sorts about all the issues college football faces and why everything negative people say about the sport is basically true), one-third stats (how coaches use it and should, how the box score is totally outdated, and what coaches and fans can both learn from advanced stats), and one-third randomness (the importance of field position, underdog tactics, the spread offense meme). If you've read everything I've ever written (not that anybody has), you'll find plenty of new writing and fun interviews. If you're new to or scared of the world of advanced football stats, you get a pretty clean, easy-to-follow (I hope) primer on the basics.

That's basically it. It was a labor of love, and I enjoyed thinking and talking about college football more after I was done than before I started. And the bar for that was set awfully high.

At SB Nation, we feel we have some of the best writers covering sports anywhere. This book by Bill Connelly just proves that point. Congrats Bill!

Support great sports journalism by buying Study Hall now.