Since the start of the year, Sports Reference has promoted three team members into director roles.

Jaclyn Mahoney, Director of Operations and Strategic Planning, leads our work on internal operations including our policies, procedures and our strategic planning. She started with SR as a data developer in early 2018.

Adam Darowski, Product Director, will lead Sports Reference's product development and product team. Adam was previously our Head of User Experience joining SR in late 2020.

Mike Lynch, Data Director, will lead Sports Reference's data work. He will lead both our internal data team and also independent contractors and our data vendors. Mike was previously our Stathead product manager. He joined SR in 2014.

Thanks to the research of John Turney, we have made a big addition in our coverage of historical awards given to the NFL's top players. With this addition, more context can be given to which players were considered the best in various categories. Here follows a list of the latest additions we have made:

• Associated Press (AP) NFL Comeback Player of the Year vote breakdowns (1963-1966, 1998-present)
• United Press International (UPI) NFL Most Valuable Player vote breakdowns (1951-1969)
• UPI AFL Player of the Year vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• UPI NFL Rookie of the Year winners (1954-1969 NFL, 1970-1996 NFC/AFC) and vote breakdowns (1954-1969)
• UPI AFL Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• AP AFL Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1961-1966)
• AP AFL Offensive Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1967-1969)
• AP AFL Defensive Rookie of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1967-1969)
• AP AFL Coach of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1961-1969)
• UPI AFL Coach of the Year winners and vote breakdowns (1960-1969)
• AP Assistant Coach of the Year (2014-present)
• NFLPA Alan Page Community Award (formerly known as the Whizzer White Man of the Year) (1966-present)
• AAFC Most Valuable Player (1946-1948)
• Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA) Offensive Player of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Defensive Player of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Most Improved Player (2000-present)
• PFWA Rookie of the Year (1966, 1975-1991, 2013-present)
• PFWA Offensive Rookie of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Defensive Rookie of the Year (1992-present)
• PFWA Coach of the Year (1966-present)
• PFWA Assistant Coach of the Year (1993-present)
• PFWA Executive of the Year (1993-present)
• Sporting News (SN) Player of the Year (1954-2008)
• SN Offensive Player of the Year (2008-present)
• SN Defensive Player of the Year (2008-present)
• SN Rookie of the Year (1955-present)
• SN Coach of the Year (1947-present)
• UPI NFL Coach of the Year (1953-1969 NFL, 1970-1996 NFC/AFC)
• UPI Offensive Player of the Year (1983-1996 NFC/AFC)
• UPI Defensive Player of the Year (1975-1996 NFC/AFC)
• Pro Football Weekly's Player of the Week (1976-2012)

Again, a big thanks to John Turney for collecting and providing this data. Turney's name may be familiar as we have also credited him in our addition of AP award voting breakdown data as well as pre-1982 sacks. If you have any suggestions or feedback, feel free to contact us directly via our feedback form.

As we did with Hockey Stathead a couple weeks ago, our team has rolled out some improvements to the Player Season Finder on Football Stathead. Whereas before, there were three search types, we've now doubled the number of options available to six!

The original options are still there on the top, allowing you to search for single season stats, multiple season or career stats, and players who achieved the search criteria in multiple seasons. However, there's also three new options

Find most players in a season matching criteria

This option shows the number of players in a given season who match the criteria you're searching. So, for example, say you're looking up players who threw for 4,000 passing yards in a season. With this criteria, you could see which season had the most players posting 4,000 or more yards.

Find most players on a team in a season matching criteria

This option will allow you to search for teams that had multiple players accomplish the same statistical feat in a single season. For example, this will let you see the seven teams that had multiple 1,000 yard rushers in the same season. Or you could utilize our historic sack data to see all the teams since 1960 with multiple 10-sack players in a season.

Find most players for a team in combined seasons or careers matching criteria

The final new option gives you the ability to look up which franchises had the most players achieve your given statistical thresholds. Unlike the other two new searches, which involve single seasons, this searches a span of years, whether you want that to encompass the entirety of NFL history or just a decade or era. For example, the Packers had the most 50-TD scorers of any NFL franchise with 15, while the Ravens have had the most Pro Bowlers since 2010, with 32.

If you're not a Stathead Football subscriber, you can have access these new improvements and all the other amazing tools for a month totally free by signing up for a free trial! Or check out our All Sports package to see the great tools available for Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey as well.

Rajeev Lekhwar, SEO Specialist, joined Sports Reference this week. Having worked for almost 2.5 years in the SEO Industry with brands like VWO, he moved to Sports Reference with a goal of keeping the upward trend moving. He is an avid cricket fan. You can find him on Twitter at @panditrajeev22.

With the season concluded, we're pleased to report that we've added 2021 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.

Update: All-Pro teams have since been announced so 2021 Approximate Value has since been finalized.

Josh Allen leads 2021 players with 19 AV, and Justin Herbert, Patrick Mahomes, Cooper Kupp and Micah Parsons close behind at 18. You can see all of the top players in this Stathead.com Player Season Finder search.

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.

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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