Speaking from experience, Pro-Football-Reference has been a godsend to fans of the National Football League who want to investigate and sift through its near-century of history. For that reason, small additions to fill out the league's history are always appreciated, and today we've added in third-team All-Pro selections by The Green Bay Press-Gazette and Collyers Eye Magazine, where available, from 1923 to 1935. In an era where we don't have many of the statistics we can use to evaluate modern players, honors like All-Pro selections become all the more useful to help us understand how good a player was viewed by contemporaries.

Some interesting notes that come from this addition:

1. We get to fill out some additional honors for Pro Football Hall of Famers such as Johnny "Blood" McNally, Joe Guyon and Cal Hubbard. 
2. Cub Buck (aren't names from 100 years ago fun?) gets three consecutive third-team selections added to his ledger. That includes his 1924 season where he not only scored eight extra points and three field goals, but also threw a touchdown to Curly Lambeau. His reign as heaviest player to throw a TD was unrivaled until the likes of Daunte Culpepper and JaMarcus Russell emerged in the 2000s. 
3. Milt Romney was a third-team selection at wingback for his rookie season in 1923. If that name sounds familiar to you, he is indeed a first cousin once removed of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

So if you're a fan of the NFL's history, then dig into our All-Pro and other Awards and Honors pages and see what other new names and personalities from an era long gone you can discover.

I'm pleased to welcome Alex Bonilla to Sports Reference as a User Affairs Coordinator. He'll be answering user questions, working on our new Stathead.com newsletter and much more. He's on twitter at @AlexChacon_OVA. This hire brings us to ten full-time employees.

In other news, Mike Lynch has been promoted from Users Affairs Coordinator and is now Product Manager for Sports Reference.

To enhance our coverage of NFL Players of the Week, we have also added an NFL Player of the Week leaderboard. As you can see, Tom Brady is the all-time leader in this honor, which dates back to 1984.

I'm pleased to welcome Jaclyn Mahoney and Jay Hutchinson to Sports Reference in the roles of Data Developer. They'll be working behind the scenes to make sure our data is accurate and updated in a timely manner. Their main focus, for now, will be helping us push FBref.com out the door this spring.

I've written a bit about them on our About Page.

With last week's announcement of the 2017 All-Pro teams, we're pleased to report that we've added 2017 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 Pro Bowl rosters are finalized. However, there's already some interesting preliminary information to dig through.

As of right now, Tom Brady and Todd Gurley are co-AV leaders at 19. For Brady, this represents the best season in NFL history by a player in his 40s. Gurley, meanwhile, is the youngest RB to hit that mark since Steven Jackson in 2006.

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. For this year's full AV leaderboard, go here.

Sports Reference LLC is searching for a data developer to join our current group of seven employees for work on our group of sites: Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Hockey-Reference.com, and Sports-Reference College Football, College Basketball, and (someday) FBref.com.

If you are advertising the position, please use this url: https://www.sports-reference.com/data_dev.html

View the Job Ad: Data Developer Job at Sports Reference

We have added a new section to the Awards page at Pro Football Reference. We're happy to announce we have added the NFL Network's yearly list of the Top 100 NFL Players, as voted by their fellow players every offseason. These rankings go back to 2011, and feature the statistics each of the players went on to post that season. These rankings can also be found in the Awards section of player pages. We hope you enjoy this addition and please let us know if you have any questions.

Heavy Play Index users, especially those who try to share their findings, may have noticed that the URLs for Play Index queries tend to be very long and unwieldy. Here, for example, is the URL for a simple query of most HRs in a season:

As many an infomercial host has suggested, there simply has to be a better way. Fortunately, there is! Every Play Index tool has a button in the top right that says "Make Tiny URL" Read the rest of this entry

On Friday, we moved all of the sites over to secure http (or https, more simply). Here's the Wikipedia explainer. Basically, this just means that the data between your computer and our browser is now encrypted, rather than plain text. You should now see "secure" and/or a lock in the address bar when you are on the site. We have never stored credit card information and still don't. All payments were always encrypted and handled by third parties, Paypal and Stripe.

We have not seen any issues surface in this switch, but if you do find something, we'd greatly appreciate you letting us know.

We have rolled out an update to our search function on Baseball Reference, Basketball Reference, Pro Football Reference and Hockey Reference. If you type "random" or "zz" into our search forms on those sites, you will be taken to a random page. We have also added a random page tool to the frivolities menus on those four sites (Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey).

Read the rest of this entry