WELCOME TO FOOTBALLOUTSIDERS.COM

WHAT MAKES FOOTBALL OUTSIDERS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER FOOTBALL WEBSITES?

Football Outsiders brings you a series of brand new, in-depth statistics you can't find anywhere else. With these stats, we will attempt to bring objective analysis to football that matches the revolution in baseball writing and analysis over the past 20 years. We have new methods for analyzing skill players, offensive and defensive lines, special teams, and total team efficiency. Right now these statistics are complete for the years 1996-2006, and they are updated each week during the 2007 season.

We don't just have reams of stats, though; we'll also have in-depth articles explaining these statistics as well as articles to answer specific questions and challenge conventional wisdom about the game. We'll also have articles that aren't necessarily based on statistics, but still give a more intelligent viewpoint on professional (and college) football, combining fan obsession with a bit of acerbic wit. Our lineup of regular columns is split between those articles which appear first here on Football Outsiders, and those which appear as part of our partnership with FOXSports.com.

The FOXSports.com exclusive articles include:

• MONDAY: Quick Reads, by Aaron Schatz, with the best and worst performances of Sunday's games according to our DPAR (Defense-adjusted Points Above Replacements) stats.
• TUESDAY: DVOA Rankings and Analysis, by Aaron Schatz, with our innovative statistics updated for the past weekend and analysis of what these numbers say about the teams that are going to the playoffs and the Super Bowl.
• WEDNESDAY: Rundown, by Mike Tanier, with a summary of what to watch in the upcoming weekend of games.

FootballOutsiders.com articles include:

• MONDAY: Audibles at the Line, a slightly-edited look at the e-mail discussion amongst the FO staff talking about that weekend's games.
• MONDAY: Confessions of a Football Junkie, by Russell Levine, analyzing the weekend's action in the NFL and the NCAA.
• TUESDAY: Any Given Sunday, by Ned Macey, analyzing the biggest upset of the week with our innovative stats.
• WEDNESDAY: Every Play Counts, by Michael David Smith, where each week Mike will pick one specific aspect of one NFL game and look at it over every single play of the contest.
• THURSDAY: Scramble for the Ball, by Bill Barnwell, giving fantasy football advice and Best Bets on the week's betting lines.
• THURSDAY: Seventh Day Adventure, by Russell Levine and Vinny Gauri, with commentary and picks on the upcoming weekend of college football.
• FRIDAY: Too Deep Zone, by Mike Tanier, basically a catch-all column discussing whatever's on Mike's mind that week from strategy to history to fantasy football.

We publish other statistical analysis columns on an irregular basis and regular reviews of each division called Four Downs during the off-season. Plus, we welcome guest columns from our readers.

Football Outsiders also features Extra Points, a daily blog of the best NFL articles from around the Web. We don't like to every single AP release updating player injury status, we'll just link you to the best-written, most insightful articles on the NFL from around the Internet and from the newspapers covering all 32 teams. Like BaseballPrimer.com's Clutch Hits, we hope each article will inspire a thread where football fans can discuss and debate these articles and what impact they have on our reason for waking up on Sundays.

Finally, each week we have an open discussion of that week's games, a thread which is quite active both before and during Sunday's action.

The Internet has a lot of websites giving fantasy football advice, and a lot of websites giving strategies for picking Sunday's games with your bookie. Is this another one of those sites? Well, we all play fantasy football here, and have a special fun little twist on fantasy we call the Loser League. Many of us like to put money on the games each week, and we all play in a small-cash pool picking the week's games. So we're going to talk about fantasy football some, and the statistics we introduce will help you build your team. And we're going to talk about gambling some, and the statistics we introduce will help you win more often. But we're hardcore fans, like you, and just as interested in the real games in the real stadiums, where covering the spread is meaningless if your team tanks the final game and blows the playoff tiebreaker.

WHERE DID THIS ALL COME FROM?

by Aaron Schatz

It started with a simple question. The conventional wisdom of the Boston media said that the New England Patriots were losing games because they couldn't establish the run. It didn't make sense to me - did winning teams really run early? I always thought winning teams padded their run totals later in games, holding onto leads.

I thought back to the early days of Bill James. The Bill James Baseball Abstract started because Bill James had some questions about the conventional wisdom of baseball, and he figured that the only way to answer his questions was to add up the data. Did specific pitchers have as much influence on stolen base rates as catchers? In those pre-Internet days, James added up the stolen bases from 162 box scores for each team to find out the answer. Those questions and answers became a book that James mimeographed in his garage and advertised in the back pages of The Sporting News. Read Moneyball by Michael Lewis if you want the rest of that story.

The world has changed a lot since 1978. Every NFL game now has play-by-play available on the Internet. "OK," I thought to myself, "Let's go through every game, and figure out how many times each team ran during the first half, and see if teams that run more in the first half have a tendency to win games."

I started counting manually, and about four games in I realized this was silly. Why not just paste the text of each game's play-by-play into a spreadsheet, and use another column to add up the rushing attempts? And once I thought of this, I realized, there was no need to count only rushing attempts. You could count passes and compare receivers, or quarterbacks.

What started as a small project became a big one. Hey, I'm a dork, and my company was on Christmas hiatus so I had a lot of time on my hands. I ended up creating a database of every single play in the 2002 NFL season, based on the ESPN.com play-by-play files (and later tweaked based on the NFL.com play-by-play files).

So, now that I had this huge spreadsheet, I could answer a ton of questions. Did teams win more often if they established the run? Did big backs wear out defenses more than small backs did? Who was worth more, a running back with 500 yards and 10 TDs, or one with 1000 yards but only 5 TDs?

Now I was stuck with all this work I had done, and nowhere to share it with other football fans. The solution: start my own site. Of course, statistics are fun, but I needed more than that to start an NFL website. I wanted to combine the critical analysis of BaseballProspectus.com with the community discussions featured on BaseballPrimer.com. Luckily, I had a group of friends who love the NFL as much as I do.

We launched in August 2003 with only two regular columns, DVOA analysis and Scramble for the Ball. Over the course of our first season we added new writers like Michael David Smith and Russell Levine, and even for a brief time Gregg Easterbrook of Tuesday Morning Quarterback fame. We got attention from ESPN.com and SI.com and other newspapers and websites who recognized our unique take on the NFL. By the end of the season we had grown from a handful of visitors each week to more than 2,000 NFL fans per day. In 2005, we began our partnerships with FOXSports.com, providing the majority of content for their NFL page, and with Baseball Prospectus, producing the annual book Pro Football Prospectus. Each year we add new writers and new regular columns in our never ending quest to be the most interesting, most entertaining independent NFL website online.