Football Outsiders is a website started in 2003 that analyzes football teams and players using a statistical analysis formula called defense-adjusted value over average, or DVOA. Aaron Schatz, who created the DVOA formula, is the site's founder and editor. He and a staff of regular writers and editors run a series of weekly columns and rankings during the NFL season.

The 2004-2005 season saw a great increase in traffic to the site. The Outsiders benefitted from their popularity and have since published Pro Football Prospectus, a book of essays and mathematical player and team evaluations that was inspired by and in published in conjunction with the orginal Baseball Prospectus. Midway through the 2005-2006 season, the site partnered with FOXsports.com, which now cross-publishes many of the Outsiders' regular features, and uses a "weighted" version of DVOA for its weekly power rankings.

Football Outsiders Message Board Curse

After FO began providing weekly power rankings to FOXsports.com, a number of individuals visited FO for the first time in response to what they believed to be unfair or biased ratings for their favorite teams. They quickly began flooding the comment threads for many of the weekly ratings summaries with angry trolling comments. Most notably, a large group of Atlanta Falcons fans flooded the rankings for the tenth week of the 2005 season, to the point where Schatz created a second, "Atlanta-free" version of the article.

Inevitably, the team in question would lose soon and often after its fans invaded the site, demonstrating that FO's rankings were indeed more accurate than the commenters' opinions. This phenomenon was dubbed the Football Outsiders Message Board Curse, or FOMBC for short.

In response to the remarkably similar insulting comments posted by new readers offended by FO's weekly power ratings, regular user zlionsfan came up with the following "angry troll hatred" template for trolls to use when posting their disagreements. Since Dec. 6, 2005, it has been included in the weekly DVOA ranking article - originally as a warning to trolls not to post comments of this type, but later as a time-saving guideline for irate fans.

<team> is clearly ranked <too high/too low> because <reason unrelated to DVOA>. <subjective ranking system> is way better than this. <unrelated team-supporting or -denigrating comment, preferably with poor spelling and/or chat-acceptable spelling>

External Links

• Official Website