Just wanted to let everyone know that we have now added ESPN's Total Quarterback Rating (QBR) to our player pages and leaderboards.

In case you forgot what QBR is all about, here's a link describing the methodology behind the rating (they also noted several subsequent tweaks here). The scale is 0-100, with average being 50; the best performers tend to be around 75-80 for a full season (Aaron Rodgers set the record with 86.2 last year), while something like the 11.7 that JaMarcus Russell put up in 2009 would be considered the bottom of the barrel.

A quick note about several updates that we added to SR/College Football this week:

• A navigation bar and uniform numbers to the player pages
• A "medal" denoting Heisman Trophy winners and consensus All-Americans.
• A navigation bar to the school pages.
• Stat summary pages (passing, rushing, etc.) for all players since 2000
• A head-to-head results page for each school
• A consensus All-America page for each school.
• A navigation bar to the school/year pages.
• A navigation bar to the year pages.
• A navigation bar to the conference pages.
• Stat summary pages (passing, rushing, etc.) for all qualified players since 2000
• A consensus All-America page.

I posted this a few weeks ago, to answer the basic question of "When an NFL team starts the season with a given record, what winning percentage do they tend to end the season with?":

Longtime S-R friend Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal asked to see those numbers broken out by the frequency of each final record, so I thought I'd put that together for today:

As you might have noticed, NFL officials have been in the news a bit lately. Because of this, we've just put up NFL officials pages from 2000 through the current season, featuring everyone from the most popular man in Green Bay to a certain workout enthusiast. On each page you'll find season totals which include a breakdown of how his crews tended to call games vs. league averages and below that, complete game logs dating back through the 2000 season.

PFR Draft Finder

As the NFL's refereeing has been under the microscope lately, we've just added penalty tables for the 2000 through 2012 seasons. Each page lists every penalty that was called each week (and not declined or offset by another penalty) in a chart that includes total yards and the average weekly penalty count, so you can see that we've gone from roughly 168 penalties per week in 2008 to nearly 210 per week in 2012 -- more than 4 extra flags per game.

This is a re-posting of an entry I made back in May, but it seems useful to dredge up again now that we're in the early stages of the NFL season. To quote myself:

Tangotiger asked me to do some research for him with regard to predicting end-of-season records from a team's current record. Since it took a little time to put together, I figured I'd post the complete findings here.

The table below is based on every NFL season from 1988-2011 -- it lists every "season start" that a team had over that span (i.e., 4-1 through 5 games, etc.), and the average end-of-season winning percentage (counting ties as half-wins) for teams that started that way. I also showed the number of wins per 16 games to make it a little more understandable than a raw winning percentage.

As an added bonus this time around, I also included the number of instances of each record to start a season since 1988. Many of these will have more predictive power than others, since the sample sizes for some of the more unique late-season combinations can be quite small.

PFR Player Name Linker / Add your Site to our Player Newsfeeds

As you may have seen, we have newsfeeds on the PFR player pages, showing the latest player news from KFFL, injury reports and links to relevant PFR blog posts. If you have a blog or website with an RSS feed you can add your site to relevant player pages as well. Our Player Linker Tool will take your blog posts as you've written them and run them through a program and add links to PFR player pages where appropriate. So while you don't have the resource to create your own player pages for your site, you can treat us as your site's statistics partner, linking Eli Manning's name to our stats or any player all the way back to Y.A. Tittle and Otto Graham.

If the links then appear in your rss feed and you let us know to look for them, we'll pull them out of your feed and then link back to you from Eli's page, or Otto Graham's or whomever you link to.

If you help your users find our great content, we'll help our users find yours. And best of all it is all automated except for one click of an easy-to-install bookmarklet. Check the Player Newsfeeds page for details. This link share will also work for tables you share using the SHARE tooltip found above every stats table on the site.

First, let me say the buck stops here and we apologize for the very annoying ads that have been running on some parts of the site over the last 4-5 days. The pages load and then a minute or two later you are blasted with audio that can't be muted. Very annoying. We've taken all of the steps we can to get them taken down short of foregoing all ad revenue. If you want to understand why this happens, please continue reading.

In case you haven't seen this feature yet, we list Expanded Polls for every year. These pages contain the Associated Press Top 25 and BCS Standings for every week of the season in which they were released, so you can look at the progression of the polls as the season goes on (this is especially useful to track with historical seasons).