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).

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With the NFL Draft kicking off Thursday night, now might be a good time to point out all the draft resources we have available at Pro Football Reference. You can check out:

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While the NBA Playoffs, MLB season, and Stanley Cup Playoffs may be in full swing, football never sleeps. This weekend, the country's most popular sport will take center stage as the NFL Draft descends on Philadelphia.

Last year's draft showed how a smart team can use the draft to turn their fortunes around at warp speed, as the Dallas Cowboys, who went 4-12 in 2015, took Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott with two of their first five picks and then watched as that duo led the team to a 13-3 record and the #1 seed in the NFC. While it may be too much to ask for a team to replicate the feat of finding two franchise-changing, All-Pro skill players in the same draft, Dallas' experience shows that it's not impossible.

Are any teams out there poised to pull off the same feat as Dallas and go from their division's cellar to its throne by shrewd drafting? Is there another Dak Prescott out there, waiting for the right team? Let's dig into those questions and more, with our preview of the 2017 NFL Draft. Read the rest of this entry

We're pleased to announce the newest video in our series showing how to get the most out of our websites. Today's video is all about the stat tables themselves. We've programmed several ways for the site to reorganize and add up stats on the tables for you, just by clicking a button or two. However, many users don't realize these hacks exist. Hopefully, this video will save you some time and also illustrate how to answer questions like "What was Bryce Harper's OPS over his last 10 games" Read the rest of this entry

If you're viewing this site on Internet Explorer 11, chances are you're having a frustrating experience. In recent weeks, we've received voluminous feedback about our sites not loading properly. The common denominator to this feedback is that the users are almost all part of the small portion of our traffic from users on IE11. It seems that IE11 is unable to render many of our pages, probably due to some ad code. Nothing we have tried so far to resolve this seems to have worked. To fix this issue, we may try removing ads on IE11 to see if performance improves. As we're dependent on advertising to keep our sites afloat, this isn't a decision we relish.

Until we figure out what the issue is, we highly recommend user a superior (and free!) browser such as Google Chrome or Firefox.

Please let us know if you have any questions.