Football Outsiders

Football Outsiders is a website started in 2003 that analyzes football teams and players using a statistical analysis formula called defense-adjusted value over average, or DVOA. Aaron Schatz, who created the DVOA formula, is the site's founder and editor. He and a staff of regular writers and editors run a series of weekly columns and rankings during the NFL season.

The 2004-2005 season saw a great increase in traffic to the site. The Outsiders benefitted from their popularity and have since published Pro Football Prospectus, a book of essays and mathematical player and team evaluations that was inspired by and in published in conjunction with the orginal Baseball Prospectus. Midway through the 2005-2006 season, the site partnered with FOXsports.com, which now cross-publishes many of the Outsiders' regular features, and uses a "weighted" version of DVOA for its weekly power rankings.

DVOA

This is the acronym for Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. It is a statistic that analyzes a given offensive play, and compares its success with the league average for a play in that situation. The system takes into account down, distance to go, position of the ball on the field, score, time remaining, and whether the player scores or achieves a first down as a result of the play. Finally, the skill of the opponent's defense is taken into account. The system is applied to every play of the season, to provide DVOA rankings both for individual players and teams as a whole.

It was invented by Aaron Schatz, who wanted to disprove a statement by Boston Globe reporter Ron Borges that the 2002 New England Patriots failed to make the postseason because they could not establish the run. It is regarded as a step towards new and more comprehensive statistical measures that can more accurately measure a team's success over traditional statistics like yards and points.

Regular Features

The site has a number of regular columns and articles, as well as guest contributions.

Confessions of a Football Junkie is a regular column published by Russell Levine on Mondays during the football season. It provides non-stat based analysis of a given weekend's football action, covering both NFL and NCAA play.

Any Given Sunday analyzes the biggest upset of the weekend using Football Outsiders stats. It is written by Ned Macey and runs on Mondays.

DVOA Rankings and Analysis is Tuesday's in-season regular column. The column is written around the DVOA rankings, with these providing a basis. The rankings are combined with commentary and analysis, based around the various teams' DVOA.

Every Play Counts is published on Wednesdays by Michael David Smith. This colmumn analyzes a specific area of a single game, using film analysis to attempt to provide a detailed and impartial analysis. Common themes are individual matchups between players, the performance of a particular unit or group of players, or plays frequently run by a particular team.

Scramble for the Ball, is another non-stat based piece, published on Thursdays. The colmumn consisted of Al Bogdan and Vivek Ramgopal's discussions and analysis of the past weeks' games, opinions about future matchups, and fantasy football tips and advice. The column will continue in 2006 with new writer Ian Dembsky and a greater focus on fantasy football.

Seventh Day Adventure is the other regular Thursday column, consisting of Russell Levine and Vinny Gauri's discussion of the next weekend's NCAA games.

Too Deep Zone is a catch-all column on NFL history or strategy written on Fridays by Mike Tanier.

Extra Points are links to various football news reports, with discussion threads, allowing fans to discuss the latest developments in football, and providing links to articles of interest which fans might not otherwise find.

A weekly comic, topical to the NFL, often featuring Gil Thorp. It is drawn by Jason Beattie.

KUBIAK

This is a proprietary fantasy football projection algorithm created for the 2005 season and introduced in Pro Football Prospectus 2005. The name is derived from the current head coach of the Houston Texans, Gary Kubiak. The name is an homage to PECOTA, the player rating system developed by Baseball Prospectus. His name was chosen because he was a relatively obscure backup quarterback for the Denver Broncos, similar to the role that MLB player Bill Pecota had.

The system provided some accurate predictions about the decline of several players including Ahman Green and Tony Gonzalez. Currently it is remembered mostly for projecting Detroit Lions running back, Kevin Jones as the leading rusher for 2005 leading to many fantasy football players drafting him early in the first round only to see him have a below average year for a running back.

Football Outsiders Message Board Curse

After FO began providing weekly power rankings to FOXsports.com, a number of individuals visited FO for the first time in response to what they believed to be unfair or biased ratings for their favorite teams. They quickly began flooding the comment threads for many of the weekly ratings summaries with angry trolling comments. Most notably, a large group of Atlanta Falcons fans flooded the rankings for the tenth week of the 2005 season, to the point where Schatz created a second, "Atlanta-free" version of the article.

Inevitably, the team in question would lose soon and often after its fans invaded the site, demonstrating that FO's rankings were indeed more accurate than the commenters' opinions. This phenomenon was dubbed the Football Outsiders Message Board Curse, or FOMBC for short.

In response to the remarkably similar insulting comments posted by new readers offended by FO's weekly power ratings, regular user zlionsfan came up with the following "angry troll hatred" template for trolls to use when posting their disagreements. Since Dec. 6, 2005, it has been included in the weekly DVOA ranking article - originally as a warning to trolls not to post comments of this type, but later as a time-saving guideline for irate fans.

<team> is clearly ranked <too high/too low> because <reason unrelated to DVOA>. <subjective ranking system> is way better than this. <unrelated team-supporting or -denigrating comment, preferably with poor spelling and/or chat-acceptable spelling>

ROBO-PUNTER

ROBO-PUNTER is a term used to describe a theoretical robot (or possibly cyborg) punter whose punts -- through a combination of power, precision, and exaggerated hangtime - are downed at the opposing team's one-yard line every time.

The genesis of the ROBO-PUNTER concept came during an off-season draft-related discussion.[1] It was proposed that no punter, not even one as skilled as the one described above, could ever be worth the first pick in the draft or the multi-million-dollar salary such a pick would command. The theoretical player was quickly seized upon by other posters, with various contributors assigning the moniker of ROBO-PUNTER, further describing its abilities, and speculating on the potential salary-cap structure and overall strategy of a team with ROBO-PUNTER on its roster.

It is not clear whether ROBO-PUNTER was originally intended to be a machine, but the ROBO name and its various other fantastic abilities have made it strictly superhuman. Many ROBO-PUNTER comments revolve around improvements and upgrades to ROBO-PUNTER's technology or adjustments to its programming. New applications of football robotics have also been proposed (e.g. ROBO-KICKER, ROBO-BELICHECK), but none have achieved the popularity of ROBO-PUNTER.

External links

• Official Website
• ROBO-PUNTER discussion thread