Innovative NFL Stats and Analysis Website Football Outsiders Celebrates its First Anniversary - Website Seeks to Adapt Principles of Sabermetrics to Bring Football Commentary into the Moneyball Era

FRAMINGHAM, MA via SEO-PR) July 30, 2004 -- Football Outsiders, the Web's top site for intelligent football fans and innovative NFL stats, today celebrates its first anniversary. In one year the website has grown from a handful of fans to a thriving community of readers and writers who seek to bring to pro football the concepts of sabermetrics that have become famous in baseball due to the book Moneyball.

In its first year of existence, Football Outsiders has been covered or had its writers quoted in such publications as The Economist, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Street and Smith's Pro Football 2004. Internet news sources that have discussed the site include ESPN.com, SI.com, Salon.com, and Slate.com. Football Outsiders has also produced custom analysis on subjects including short-yardage rushing and playoff penalties for NFL.com. The audience for Football Outsiders grew from only 1800 unique visitors in August 2003 to over 31000 unique users in December 2003, the last month of the regular season.

Football Outsiders has been lauded by sportswriters and NFL coaches alike. Gregg Easterbrook of NFL.com says "Football Outsiders is the best independent football site on the Web." According to King Kaufman of 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."

NFL coaches also have come to appreciate the analysis at Football Outsiders. The website has worked with Jim Schwartz, defensive coordinator of the Tennessee Titans, who calls it "the most accurate insight on the Web into why teams really win and lose." Mike Eayrs, research director of the Green Bay Packers, says "our work is much more scientific than most articles and I like how you have worked to build context into your measures."

The creator and editor-in-chief of Football Outsiders is Aaron Schatz, who until February was the writer of the Internet's leading daily column on cultural trends, The Lycos 50. Schatz also writes regularly on issues at the conjunction of sports and culture/politics for The New Republic online. The four regular columnists for Football Outsiders -- Schatz, Michael David Smith, Russell Levine, and Al Bogdan -- also contributed to the upcoming book Brassey's Pro Football Forecast 2004. The staff of Football Outsiders is spread across NFL markets, based in Boston, Providence, Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, and New York.

Besides the four regular columns, features of Football Outsiders include:

· A daily weblog of the most important football news from around the Web;
· Weekly updates of our sabermetric-style NFL stats;
· Regular analysis of football's conventional wisdom and the proclamations of sportswriters to check if they agree with actual historical data;
· Numerous guest columns from readers on subjects ranging from breakdowns of specific on field strategies to the inconsistency of turnover statistics from year to year;
· An active community of fans on discussion threads devoted to each article; and
· The unique comic strip Draw Play from artist Jason Beattie.

Upcoming features for the 2004 season include objective projections of this season's winners and losers based on four years of NFL stats and trends, improved special teams statistics which take into account such things as weather and altitude, the unveiling of our innovative statistics for seasons from before the website launched, and a public contest based on our unique twist to fantasy football, the Loser League, which challenges fans to pick the league's worst performing players.

Football Outsiders is designed and developed by B:COMPLEX Creative of Atlanta, GA along with Built for the Future.





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