Football Outsiders

» see footballoutsiders.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In August 2003 Aaron Schatz put up a website to settle an argument. A Boston Globe columnist had written that the 2002 Patriots missed the playoffs because they could not establish the run, and Schatz, who did not believe it, built a statistic to check. The statistic was DVOA, Defense-adjusted Value Over Average, and it worked by comparing every single play of the NFL season against the league average for that exact down and distance, then adjusting for the quality of the opponent.

Football Outsiders grew into the place where that sort of work happened. It added DYAR to value individual players and Adjusted Line Yards to separate what a running back did from what his offensive line did for him. It put out an annual in print, Pro Football Prospectus from 2005 and the Football Outsiders Almanac from 2009. From 2008 it was ESPN's analytics partner, which is how DVOA ended up being read out on television to people who had never visited the site.

Schatz sold to EdjSports in 2018 and stayed on as editor in chief. In late 2021 EdjSports was itself acquired by Champion Gaming, a Canadian company that went public through a reverse takeover of a shell corporation. That is where the trouble starts. Freelance contributors stopped being paid around December 2022, and in April 2023 four of them went public, saying thousands of dollars in invoices were outstanding. They signed with a competitor and looked into action through the National Writers Union.

Schatz left for FTN Network on 29 August 2023 as its chief analytics officer and took DVOA with him. Three days later, on 1 September, footballoutsiders.com stopped being reachable.

~ the dossier ~

~ the number ~

DVOA is worth describing, because it is the reason any of this mattered. Conventional football statistics count yards, and a yard total on its own is close to meaningless: eight yards on third and twelve is a failure, two yards on third and one is a success. So DVOA scored each play against what the rest of the league actually managed in that same situation, adjusted for who the opponent was, and reported the result as a percentage above or below average.

The method came out of baseball's sabermetrics and had to be rebuilt for a sport where every play has eleven moving parts on each side and almost nothing is cleanly attributable to one person. Football Outsiders was doing it in public years before the league's own teams started hiring for it.

~ a game that never arrived here ~

American football has almost no footprint in Turkey. There is a university league and there are people who stay up for the Super Bowl, and that is roughly the whole of it. The rules are opaque from the outside in a way soccer is not, and the broadcast schedule lands in the middle of a Turkish night.

What crossed over anyway was the method. An outsider with a spreadsheet and a public argument against the received wisdom of a sport is a recognizable figure in any country with a league in it, and the same fight was being had in soccer at the same time. I read this site maybe twice and followed about a quarter of it.

~ the last two owners ~

The Champion Gaming deal closed at roughly a twelve million dollar post-money valuation with about three and a half million in funding attached. Within a year the people producing the content were not being paid. It is a specific and common way for a small publication to die: somebody buys it wanting an asset on a balance sheet, and the asset turns out to be a group of writers who appear on that balance sheet as a cost line.

Today footballoutsiders.com answers with a page whose title promises an article archive coming soon. It has promised that since 2023. The DVOA numbers are alive at FTN Fantasy under the man who invented them, and twenty years of writing is the part that did not get out.

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