We've created a page to describe our hiring process.

We post our jobs through our page on breezy. Visit https://sports-reference-llc.breezy.hr/ to apply.

• Test Engineer
• Engineering Support Coordinator
• SEO Specialist
• Digital Marketing Manager
• Customer Success Coordinator, Reference
• Social Media Coordinator

We will be starting the phone interview process October 25th through November 12th.

Sports Reference is pleased to announce the hiring of three web developers, Zoe Surma, Frankie Ottomanelli, and Chris Wong.

Zoe is a recent graduate of Notre Dame with a degree in computer engineering. She is a Cubs, Fighting Irish and Formula One fan.

Frankie joins Sports Reference from Rockstar Games. He was the creator of the sunsetted Baseball Reference Alexa app. He is a Mets, Jets, and Knicks fan.

Chris is a recent graduate from Brown University with multiple degrees in computer science. He is a St. Louis native and a Blues and Cardinals fan.

Ryan Passmore has joined Sports Reference as VP of Engineering. Ryan was previously the Sr. Director of Product Development at Cleo. He will manage the engineering team at Sports Reference. A Chicago-area native Ryan cheers for the Cubs, Bulls and Bears.

One important piece to interpreting a sport's history is looking at who the media of the time selected as the top players to award, but you can also get some important context by looking at the other players who were in serious consideration for those awards. With that in mind, we're happy to announce the addition of voting breakdown data for the Associated Press' Most Valuable Player, Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year, Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year and Coach of the Year awards. You can find this information in the Football Award Voting Summaries section of our Awards index. Just taking a random example of 1982, you can see Mark Moseley's narrow win over Dan Fouts in the MVP race, as well as Marcus Allen's unanimous OROY win and the runners-up to Lawrence Taylor in the DPOY race.

Having this data also allows us to calculate career Award Shares. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is the sum of the percentage of maximum votes they received over the course of their career. For example, a unanimous MVP like Lamar Jackson in 2019 gets 1.0 Award Share for that award, while 2016 Matt Ryan got 25 out of the possible 50 votes, so that's 0.5 Award Shares for that win. We have links to the career MVP, OPOY and DPOY award shares leaderboards on our Leaders index. Award shares and rank for each season they received votes will also be available in the Awards and Honors table on player pages, so you can more quickly see that in addition to Aaron Donald's 3 DPOY awards so far, he's also received at least a vote in every DPOY ballot since his sophomore season.

Some coverage notes:

• MVP voting breakdowns available since 1957. 100% complete back to 1986. 1961 and 1975 MVP vote totals still missing. AP did not give out awards in 1960.
• OPOY voting breakdowns available since 1972. 100% complete back to 1986. 1975 and 1985 OPOY vote totals still missing.
• DPOY voting breakdowns available since 1971. 100% complete back to 1988. 1985 DPOY vote totals still missing.

We want to give a big thanks to John Turney who compiled this historical voting data. Turney was also a contributor on the pre-1982 sacks data we announced recently.

If you have any questions, suggestions or even a lead on some of the still-waiting-to-be-discovered vote totals, feel free to contact us via our feedback form.

The NFL has only officially counted player sacks since 1982, which means sack records and leaderboards present an incomplete history of pass rushing. In many cases we accept these holes in the official record and move on. After all, we don't know how many rushing yards Jim Thorpe had, passing yards Paddy Driscoll had or even how many blocked shots Wilt Chamberlain had. Heck, we don't even "officially" know how many tackles anyone had in 2020 (or any other season). However, thanks to Official Gamebooks, 'unofficial' tackle totals get published in many places (including here). In the case of sacks, thanks to decades of research by John Turney and Nick Webster, we have a very thorough accounting of the statistic all the way back to 1960. Given that accounting for these 'unofficial' statistics allows us to paint a richer picture of the history of the game, we think it is a no-brainer to present them on Pro Football Reference, allowing fans to gain a deeper appreciation of some of football's biggest stars in the 1960s and 1970s. This isn't terribly different from presenting RBI totals for baseball players from before 1920 (the first season the statistic was "official"). These additions allow us to print year-by-year and career sacks totals for not just legends such as Deacon Jones (173.5), Jack Youngblood (151.5), Alan Page (148.5), Carl Eller (133.5) and Joe Greene (77.5), but also for less recognized stars like Coy Bacon (130.5), Cedrick Hardman (122.5) and Jack Gregory (106.0) whose greatness and impact can now be more readily quantified.
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On Baseball-Reference.com we have begun the process of evaluating the identifying names and nicknames for historical players. The genesis of this process is the long overdue reckoning on our part with a substantial number of the names we use to identify players (identifying names). In many cases, they are based on a player's real or perceived ethnicity, a player's disability, or a trait the media decided to call attention to.

As a first step, we are discontinuing the use of nicknames that are racially or ethnically influenced, such as "Chief," "Jap," or "Darkie," and names based upon a player's disability, such as "Dummy." They will no longer appear as identifying names, page titles, on team pages, or on leaderboards across the site, but will be noted for completeness of records on the player’s main page. This figures most prominently for baseball, but we will likely have some changes on our other sites as well.

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February 25, 2021

Sports Reference LLC is pleased to announce that they have purchased the historical, statistical databases of Pete Palmer, Ken Pullis and Gary Gillette. This includes full historical databases for

Major League Baseball,
the National Basketball Association,
the National Hockey League, and
the National Football League.

Since their launch in 2000, the Sports Reference sites have presented and relied upon the groundbreaking and painstaking work of Palmer, Pullis and Gillette. Palmer’s pioneering work in baseball statistics has made his database the gold standard in the field, and his work with John Thorn on the Hidden Game of Baseball and Total Baseball is legendary. Pullis’s award-winning work in the field of pro football statistics formed the basis for the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia--the last pro football encyclopedia ever printed. Gillette created and edited the ESPN Baseball and Pro Football Encyclopedias and compiled a set of unique MLB databases for subjects like the Disabled/Injured List that previously had never been covered.

We are excited that we will now be the stewards of these databases. We intend to build upon Ken, Pete and Gary's extraordinary work. At Sports Reference, our purpose is to answer questions, so our users can grow their appreciation, understanding, and love of the game. Owning these databases will allow us to continue doing that, but also open up potential new opportunities such as making free databases available for researchers and publishing new products incorporating these datasets.

We are honored that Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis will continue the work on their databases as consultants to Sports Reference and look forward to expanding the scope of what is known about the history of North American sports. We will also be working with Gary Gillette on several special baseball projects in the future.

Sports Reference LLC is based in Philadelphia, PA and serves millions of users a month through its websites: Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Hockey-Reference.com and others.

Pete Palmer is a titan in the field of baseball research and history and has been one of the foremost chroniclers of the National Pastime for the past five decades. He has edited or contributed to virtually every baseball encyclopedia that has been published in the last 50 years. Along with John Thorn, Palmer served as co-editor for seven editions of Total Baseball. Along with Gary Gillette, Palmer served as co-editor for five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. Palmer was also the co-author with Thorn of the seminal 1984 analytics book The Hidden Game of Baseball—a landmark work republished by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. Along with Gillette and Pullis, he served as co-editor of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia. Palmer is also known as co-author of The Hidden Game of Pro Football and as a contributor to Total Football. He lives in Hollis, New Hampshire.

Gary Gillette is the founder and current chair of the Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium, a nonprofit that is working to restore the former Negro League ballpark near his home in Detroit. Gillette also served for a decade on the Tiger Stadium Conservancy’s board of directors. He has four decades of baseball research, writing, and editing experience, beginning with his work with Bill James and Project Scoresheet in the mid-1980s. A contributor to six editions of Total Baseball, Gillette later designed and co-edited with Pete Palmer the five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. Gillette also designed the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia and served as executive editor for both editions of that reference work. A former member of the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR) board of directors, Gillette is a past co-chair of two of SABR’s major research committees—the Business of Baseball Committee and the Ballparks Committee. He was the founder and president of SABR’s Detroit Chapter and is now the chair of SABR’s new Southern Michigan Chapter.

Ken Pullis is a retired air traffic controller and former US Air Force pilot. He has had a lifelong interest in pro football statistics and began doing original research in the late 1980s. Pullis is the 2002 PFRA Ralph Hay Award winner for Pro Football Research and Historiography and was co-editor with Gillette and Palmer of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia, volumes 1 and 2. He currently resides in Vermilion, Ohio.

Following the introduction of the Team Split Finder last November, we are now proud to announce the addition of another new tool for Stathead Football subscribers: the Player Split Finder.

This powerful tool allows users to search through our splits database to compare players across various situations, with most stats going back to the 1994 season. Here's a quick look at the different splits available and some examples to help you get started.

QUARTER: Most 4th Quarter TD Passes Thrown This Season

LOCATION: Highest Passer Rating on the Road in a Single Season (min. 100 attempts)

DOWN: Most Times Sacked on Third Down This Season

YARDS TO GO: Most Rushing First Downs on Plays with 10+ Yards To Go This Season

DOWN & YARDS TO GO: Best Completion Percentage on 3rd Down and 10+ Yards to Go in 2017

FIELD POSITION: Most Red Zone Targets This Season

SCORE DIFFERENTIAL: Most Pass Attempts When Trailing in 2019

GAME SITUATION: Most Passes Intercepted While Tied with Less Than 4 Minutes Remaining Since 1994

SNAP TYPE & HUDDLE (since 1998): Most Passes Completed Under Center This Season

PASS RUSH TYPE (since 2018): Best Passer Rating Against the Blitz This Season

We hope you enjoy this addition to Stathead. If you're interested in a subscription to the service, you can sign up for a free trial here. We built this tool thanks to feedback from users like you. Should you have any questions or other feedback, please reach out to us.

With the season concluded, we're pleased to report that we've added 2020 Approximate Value (AV) numbers to the site for all NFL players. Note that these numbers are just provisional right now; the final numbers will be released after the All-Pro teams are announced.

As of now, Josh Allen, Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson are tied for the league AV lead at 18, with Derrick Henry and Aaron Donald the two non-QBs to make the top 10. You can see the top players in this Stathead.com Player Season Finder search. Washington rookie Chase Young had an especially strong year, finishing at 13 AV. Only Ndamukong Suh and Jevon Kearse had as high an AV among rookie defensive linemen in the post-merger era.

Not sure what AV is? To learn more about PFR's attempt to put a single number on each player-season since 1960 (for the purposes of comparing players across position and era), check out this link. Feel free to send us feedback via our site's form.

Katie Sharp has joined Sports Reference and will be working both on social media and customer success for our Stathead subscription service. Katie spent seven years as a researcher with ESPN's Stats and Info Group, and since then has worked as a writer, editor and researcher on dozens of articles and books. Most recently, she has been a recurring guest on Jomboy Media's Talkin' Yanks podcast. Katie graduated from Williams College and also has an MBA from the University of Oregon. She's on twitter at @ktsharp.