American football is the most popular sport in the United States and is the ninth most popular sport worldwide. Every year, football fans look forward to the start of a new season in September, the 17 weeks of play that follow, the playoffs that start in January, and the championship game known as the Super Bowl in late January or early February.

In this chapter, we will obtain some football statistics, analyze them to get a sense of what the data looks like, determine a way to calculate which team should win when two teams play each other, and then use this to simulate games to produce a virtual winning team and losing team. There are many different ways in which you can construct such a simulation. For example, if you want to construct your simulation at the level of individual plays, you can get the statistics for every single player on a team and every play that a team runs, and use these to simulate a game in a play-by-play fashion. This approach would be great if we were...