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Pro Football Prospectus was an annual book series published from 2002 to 2008. It reviewed the previous NFL season and previewed the upcoming season. Its brand of statistical analysis set it apart from the annual magazines that covered the same territory, and it became increasingly popular with fantasy football players.
The series was a spinoff of the popular Baseball Prospectus brand. The PFP series was created by Sean Lahman in 2002, and with his co-author Todd Greanier they produced the first three editions. Aaron Schatz and his Football Outsiders took over the series in 2005.
In 2009 the publisher of the various Prospectus books, Plume, decided to not publish any of the non-baseball prospectuses, so the Pro Football Prospectus in 2009 was renamed the Football Outsiders Almanac.
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Sabermetrics is the original or blanket term for sports analytics, the empirical analysis of baseball, especially the development of advanced metrics based on baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the movement's progenitors, members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), founded in 1971, and was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
George William James is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books about baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he named sabermetrics after the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose.
Pythagorean expectation is a sports analytics formula devised by Bill James to estimate the percentage of games a baseball team "should" have won based on the number of runs they scored and allowed. Comparing a team's actual and Pythagorean winning percentage can be used to make predictions and evaluate which teams are over-performing and under-performing. The name comes from the formula's resemblance to the Pythagorean theorem.
The Professional Football Researchers Association (PFRA) is an organization of researchers whose mission is to preserve and, in some cases, reconstruct professional American football history. It was founded on June 22, 1979 in Canton, Ohio by writer/historian Bob Carroll and six other football researchers and is currently headed by an executive committee led by its president, George Bozeka, and executive director Leon Elder. Membership in the organization includes some of professional football's foremost historians and authors. The organization is based in Guilford, New York.
The Dowd Report is the document describing the transgressions of baseball player and manager Pete Rose in betting on baseball, which precipitated his agreement to a permanent ban from the sport in the United States. The 225-page report was prepared by Special Counsel to the Commissioner John M. Dowd and was submitted to Commissioner Bart Giamatti in May 1989. The report, published in June 1989, was accompanied by seven volumes of exhibits, which included bank and telephone records, alleged betting records, expert reports, and transcripts of interviews with Rose and other witnesses.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a book by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. It describes the team's sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team on a small budget. It was adapted into the 2011 film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.
Pete Palmer is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, Palmer's book The Hidden Game of Baseball is often referred to as providing the foundation upon which the field of sabermetrics was built.
Baseball Prospectus (BP) is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well as player and team performance projections on the site. Since 1996 the BP staff has also published a Baseball Prospectus annual as well as several other books devoted to baseball analysis and history.
Football Outsiders (FO) was a website started in July 2003 which focused on advanced statistical analysis of the National Football League (NFL). The site was run by a staff of regular writers, who produced a series of weekly columns using both the site's in-house statistics and their personal analyses of NFL games.
In sabermetrics and basketball analytics, similarity scores are a method of comparing baseball and basketball players to other players, with the intent of discovering who the most similar historical players are to a certain player.
Sean Lahman is an author and journalist. He is currently a reporter for the USA Today Network and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and frequently makes public appearances to speak about database journalism, data mining and open-source databases.
Murray Chass is an American baseball blogger. He previously wrote for The New York Times and before that the Associated Press on baseball and sports legal and labor relations. In 2003 the Baseball Writers' Association of America honored him with the J. G. Taylor Spink Award. He took a buyout from the Times, along with Supreme Court writer Linda Greenhouse and dozens of others, in April 2008.
Jameel Antwon Cook Sr. is a former American football fullback who played in the National Football League (NFL). He was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the sixth round of the 2001 NFL draft, playing nine seasons with the Buccaneers and Houston Texans. He played college football at Illinois.
PECOTA, an acronym for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is a sabermetric system for forecasting Major League Baseball player performance. The word is a backronym based on the name of journeyman major league player Bill Pecota, who, with a lifetime batting average of .249, is perhaps representative of the typical PECOTA entry. PECOTA was developed by Nate Silver in 2002–2003 and introduced to the public in the book Baseball Prospectus 2003. Baseball Prospectus (BP) has owned PECOTA since 2003; Silver managed PECOTA from 2003 to 2009. Beginning in Spring 2009, BP assumed responsibility for producing the annual forecasts, making 2010 the first baseball season for which Silver played no role in producing PECOTA projections.
Joseph S. Sheehan was born in New York City on February 26, 1971, and attended Regis High School. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1994 with a degree in journalism. Sheehan lives in the New York City area. He is one of the founders and was a co-editor of the first annual book of sabermetric baseball forecasts and analyses by Baseball Prospectus in 1996 as well as several later volumes.
Baseball Reference is a website providing baseball statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history. The site is often used by major media organizations and baseball broadcasters as a source for statistics. It offers a variety of advanced baseball sabermetrics in addition to traditional baseball "counting stats".
Will Carroll is an American sportswriter who specializes in the coverage of medical issues, including injuries and performance-enhancing drugs. Carroll's "Under the Knife" column appeared on Baseball Prospectus for eight years during his stint there as a senior writer, and he also contributed to the site's radio efforts as well as the Puck Prospectus spin-off site. He is the author of two books on sports-related medical topics..
Gary Gillette is a baseball writer, author, and editor. He is co-editor of both the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia and the ESPN Football Encyclopedia. For both series of books, he partnered with noted statistician Pete Palmer, as well as writers Sean Lahman and Matt Silverman.
The Hidden Game of Football: A Revolutionary Approach to the Game and Its Statistics is a book on American football statistics published in 1988 and written by Bob Carroll, John Thorn, and Pete Palmer. It was the first systematic statistical approach to analyzing American football in a book.
Sports analytics are collections of relevant historical statistics that can provide a competitive advantage to a team or individual by helping to inform players, coaches and other staff and help facilitate decision-making both during and prior to sporting events. The term "sports analytics" was popularized in mainstream sports culture following the release of the 2011 film Moneyball. In this film, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane relies heavily on the use of baseball analytics to build a competitive team on a minimal budget, building upon and extending the established practice of Sabermetrics.