Football Frontier Blog

Welcome to the Football Frontier Blog.

Unfortunately, the old Frontier Blog was lost when our ISP was doing maintenance and deleted the database. While they advertised heavily that they did regular backups of web content, it turns out they don’t.

I was able to find some of the old content in web archives, but only about 20% of the blog. Not enough to restore it in its old form. Many of the entries were more a quick take of then-current events. Those that were the meat of the Blog – the original analysis – could stand to be redone. I have years of new data to work with, and I’m trying to expand and improve my data sets.

The focus of this blog is whatever I see in football that interests me. Primarily, that’s the NFL. But I delve into college football as well. I’ve been ranking college football teams every year since 1997.

As far as pro football goes, I have a much more detailed set of data on games. Play-by-play going back to 1996, though it’s not in any consistent form. One of my projects, should I find the time, is to put these files into a consistent form and draw new analysis.

I also focus a lot on quarterback performance. This database goes back to 1974. I often use 1974 as the beginning of studies because that was the year the NFL opened up the modern passing game by restricting contact with receivers. In 1978, the NFL further restricted contact, and went to a 16-game schedule. Now that we have 37 seasons worth of fairly detailed modern quarterback data, there’s a lot to say about the players who run the show.

This blog has never generated many comments, so I’ve turned off commentary (the spam bots would hit it 100 times a day otherwise). But posts are echoed over at Front Office Football Central and I would encourage (and sometimes join) discussion there.