Pro Football Reference

The future of pro-football-reference.com The web has changed a lot since December 2000, but pro-football-reference.com really hasn’t. The fact that its general philosophy and its look have remained essentially the same is part of its charm to many, including me. But the business model — one guy with a demanding real-life job and a family, working on it whenever he can carve out some spare time — isn’t tenable. Since my family and my job aren’t going to be changing (nor do I want them to), something else must. I used to joke that the great thing about p-f-r was that I could drop dead and users of the site wouldn’t even notice. I used to tell myself that I didn’t care if someone came along and created a much better historical football stat site. After all, my initial goal was to get the data out there; if someone else did it, the goal still would have been accomplished. But I have to admit now that I don’t want that. I want p-f-r to be the place where everyone goes for football data new and old. I want it to be the first result in all search engines whether you type in Barry Sanders or Bobby Riley. And I wasn’t making progress toward those goals. And, more importantly, I didn’t have the resources — time being the most crucial resource — necessary to make progress toward those goals at any point in the foreseeable future. So, when Sean approached Justin and I about merging baseball-reference, pro-football-reference, and basketball-reference into a single entity, it was an easy decision for me. So pro-football-reference is no longer owned by me. Rather than being its own thing, it’s now a branch of sports-reference. Rather than being one man’s hobby, which it always has been, it’s now a part of an honest-to-goodness business. But here’s the important part: it’s not part of SuperGlobalHyperMegaNet Corp. It’s part of a business that is owned, managed, and run by a very small number of people who love sports data just as much as you do. And that’s who the “we” is: besides me, it’s Sean Forman and Justin Kubatko, both of whom work full time for sports-reference. Although I did a lot of the preliminary prep work to get the data organized, it’s Sean and Justin who have actually been creating the new p-f-r pages you’ve been enjoying. So what does all this mean for you? It means that p-f-r can start leveraging the economies of scale and scope that come from being part of a bigger entity. I hope that you can already see some big benefits coming from this merger. And I hope you’ll believe that there are many more to come. From my standpoint, the best part is that p-f-r can still, for the most part, be “my site.” I’ll still blog right here. I’ll still answer emails from people whose uncles lied to them about having been NFL players. And if I am moved to add a bit of data, or to create a new set of pages, I’ll still be able to do that, just as I always have. But if I don’t have time to get it done, I’ll have someone who can help me do it. In other words, the site will be just like it always has been, but better. And that’s because its ownership will be just like it always has been, but better. so you can jump around easily.