Football Outsiders in the Media

Football Outsiders was featured in the New York Times Magazine's 2004 "Year In Ideas" issue [1]

JIM SCHWARTZ, DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR, TENNESSEE TITANS

"The most accurate insight on the Web into why teams really win and lose."

MIKE EAYRS, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, GREEN BAY PACKERS

"Your work is much more scientific than most articles and I like how you have worked to build context into your measures."

PARAAG MARATHE, DIRECTOR OF FOOTBALL OPERATIONS, SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS

"Always unique and thought-provoking."

WHAT THE MEDIA SAYS ABOUT FOOTBALL OUTSIDERS

GREGG EASTERBROOK, NFL.COM

Tuesday Morning Quarterback [2], September 7, 2004

"Football Outsiders is, by a huge margin, the Web's best independent football site."

KING KAUFMAN, SALON.COM

"Pro football, in all its fluid complexity, has been crying out for years for the kind of sophisticated statistical analysis that's been afforded baseball. Football Outsiders is the best answer to that cry so far, and it keeps getting better. It's a must for anyone interested in going beyond 'This guy has more yards, so he must be better.'"

King has written about us a few times, including:

• September 11, 2003 [3] in a column about football weblogs.
• October 24, 2003 [4] in his Week 8 picks.
• December 2, 2003 [5] in a column about Gregg Easterbrook

GREGG ROSENTHAL, ROTOWORLD.COM

July 20 2006 [6]
"Football Outsiders is to pigskin what Baseball Prospectus is to hardball. Their forward thinking statistics hint at the complex work that NFL teams use, but don't reveal to the public. Their annual book, Pro Football Prospectus, is a great read beyond the numbers. It's already the best annual I know on the market. They challenge much of what the lazy analyst accepts as a fact with quality writing."

DAVID DAMIANI, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE

June 16 2006 [7]
"If you love professional football and happen across the website Footballoutsiders.com, be prepared to say goodbye to whatever you had planned for the next several hours. Founded to bring about a revolution in NFL statistical analysis similar to what sabermetricians have brought to baseball, Football Outsiders is nothing short of a treasure trove for any fan with aspirations to better understand the sport."

ROLAND BEECH, TWOMINUTEWARNING.COM

Review of Pro Football Prospectus 2005 [8], August 2005

"We have been very impressed with the efforts over at Football Outsiders and the progress they've made. Indeed they've taken concepts we pioneered like drive stats and play-by-play ratings and made sophisticated, logical enhancements. Moreover, they do a wonderful job of presenting stats in easy-to-read tables, and with scales that give context to numbers, even when reflecting relatively new statistical ideas for football ... Aaron Schatz and the FootballOutsiders.com crew have crafted the best book on the NFL since the classic Hidden Game of Football."

BILL SIMMONS, ESPN.COM

"More Cowbell" blog, September 12, 2005

"After watching what happened Sunday, it's clear that (a) the NFC South is the best division in football, and (b) Tampa Bay is better than anyone thought except for the guys at Football Outsiders."

JASCHA HOFFMAN, BOSTON GLOBE

Pigskin Pythagoras [9], February 1, 2004
"By measuring each of the 40,000-odd plays made in a typical NFL season and evaluating them according to a complex array of situational factors, Schatz aims to do nothing less than revolutionize football writing and analysis."

YAHOO PICKS

November 14, 2003 [10]
"Thanks to this site devoted to dissecting the pigskin, there's great change blowing across the frozen tundra. Not just for fantasy geeks, the site offers opinions, articles, and plenty of discussion about Sunday's grudge matches... If their work thus far is any proof, these "outsiders" won't be out in the cold forever."

PETER KING, SI.COM

Monday Morning Quarterback, [11] December 8, 2003
"I have to hand it to the authors of the first-ever MMQB parody [12]... Excellent job, from the fawning lead on a hunting trip with Brett Favre, to the sly reference to the Tejada ball, to this non-football thought: 'I finally saw Brother Bear. I'd give it a B-plus. Now, the book was an A-plus, a masterpiece, one of the best books written during my lifetime. A powerful, uplifting message about friendship and community. Rick Moranis is one of the greats.' But they saved the best for the sixth-grade volleyball note of the week. Nice work, whoever you are, even if I'm the only one who gets half the stuff."

CAY DICKSON, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

January 20, 2004
"Statistics in a classroom can be boring as all get out but when it comes to football they can be the most important things that ever came down the pike. If you're statistically oriented in this direction, Football Outsiders, at www.footballoutsiders.com has a unique approach to numbers... Odds are that you'll hang out at this site just to take in the enormous amount of information, if nothing else. You can bet that the witty approach adds a lot to the overall success of the site as well."

BOB COOK, FLAK MAGAZINE

Football Abstract [13], December 1, 2003
"Schatz spent from December 2002 to June of this year studying play-by-play sheets, tweaking formulas offered in The Hidden Game of Football, and absorbing the influences of other writers... to come up with answers to his statistical questions... The centerpiece of those answers comes from terms like Value Over Average, Replacement Level and Adjusted Line Yards.  They have nothing to do with the top 10 leading rushers, receivers, passers, et al., that appear in Tuesday's newspapers. And they set up interesting debates like, is it better to kick an extra point or go for the two-point conversion  after every touchdown."

DAVID LEONHARDT, NEW YORK TIMES

Incremental Analysis, With Two Yards to Go [14], February 1, 2004 (free registration required)
"Consider the Patriots' behavior when they need just a couple of yards for a first down or a touchdown. No other team ran the ball more often in those situations this season, according to Football Outsiders, an Internet site that analyzes statistics, even though the Patriots are considered to have one of the weaker running games in the league... Belichick also seems to understand an idea that economists call "hyperbolic discounting," which holds that people tend to place too much value on the here and now. Taking advantage of this, the team made two trades during last year's draft that essentially swapped a lower pick in 2003 for a higher one in 2004, noted Aaron Schatz, the editor of Football Outsiders."

PAUL GUTIERREZ, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Source's Anonymity Isn't Much of a Secret [15], April 29, 2004 (free registration required)
"A recent New York Times story quoted a 'general manager of an American Football Conference North Division team who requested anonymity' on the fix the San Diego Chargers were in regarding the Chargers holding the No. 1 pick and Eli Manning's voicing his disdain for playing with them.  Seems fair enough, but according to Michael David Smith of FootballOutsiders.com, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the identity of the mystery GM.  'That division has four teams,' Smith wrote. 'One has an owner who handles the duties of general manager, and two have no one with the title of general manager. That leaves the fourth team, the Baltimore Ravens, and its general manager, Ozzie Newsome, as the obvious source of this quote.'"

JOSH LEVIN, SLATE.COM

Number Crunching:Why Doesn't Football Have a Bill James [16], December 19, 2003
"At Football Outsiders, Aaron Schatz has his own sets of equations: His team offensive- and defensive-efficiency numbers take into account the score and time of the game and make adjustments for schedule strength. He's also imported concepts, like the notion of the replacement-level player, from advanced baseball analysis.

SPORTSRETORT.COM

Keep Your Eyes on FootballOutsiders.com [17], February 3, 2004
"I linked to their Super Bowl preview in an earlier post. One article does not a genius make, and they did not actually try to call the winner, but their preview was accurate enough that the site bears watching next season... Football Outsiders didn't make a prediction regarding the amount of scoring, but they did correctly analyze the relative strengths of the squads and what struggles would be salient... All in all, Football Outsiders did a great job providing substantial analyses rather than the usual vague fluff that could be generated by Madden NFL on your nearest game console."