NEW CARICATURES ARE COMING, WE PROMISE.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Compared to Bill James by The New York Times Magazine, AARON SCHATZ is the creator of Football Outsiders and most of the original statistical methods used in NFL analysis on this website, as well as lead writer, editor, and statistician on the book series Football Outsiders Almanac. He also writes for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, and during the 2011 season was a regular panelist on the ESPN2 show Numbers Never* Lie. Before Football Outsiders, Aaron spent five years on the radio at WBRU Providence and WKRO Daytona Beach, and three years as the writer and producer of the Lycos 50, the Internet's foremost authority on the people, places, and things that are searched online. He has written for a number of publications including The New Republic, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, The American Prospect, and the Boston Phoenix. He lives in Framingham, Massachusetts with his wife Kathryn and daughter Mirinae.

ASSISTANT EDITORS

RIVERS McCOWN wants to strongly express that he has no known relation to Randy McCown, Josh McCown, or Luke McCown, though he is thankful that the latter two have made his last name pronounceable in several iterations of Madden. He started charting games for Football Outsiders in 2007 on a lark and soon found himself engrossed in football writing, statistics, and the idea that Phil Simms was often wrong about things. A lifelong Houstonian by choice, he has built up a tolerance to humidity and bad football teams. Prior to joining Football Outsiders, Rivers was Managing Editor for SB Nation Houston; he still contributes sparingly to Battle Red Blog and his personal blog, From Mom's Basement.

One fateful night in January of 1985, a young DANNY TUCCITTO abandoned Dan Marino and his hometown Dolphins, jumping heart-first onto the Walsh-helmed 49ers bandwagon. After his fandom resulted in five Super Bowl championships over a 14-year period -- not to mention four national championships as a Hurricanes fan -- he took his winning-by-proxy talents to Gainesville (decision not televised). Immediately upon his arrival, he rooted home the first national championship for Gators football. After a Jordanesque wearing-all-these-rings-is-exhausting hiatus, he returned to Gainesville for graduate school. Soon thereafter, Florida accomplished the unprecedented feat of holding the football and basketball championship trophies at the same time. His unmatched psychokinetic powers were eventually recognized by UF, who anointed him as "Master of Sport Psychology." Before coming to Football Outsiders, Danny was the resident statistics nerd at SB Nation's 49ers blog, Niners Nation.

STAFF WRITERS

Resident FO scouting expert ANDY BENOIT writes FO's "Film Room" column when he's not writing for the New York Times Fifth Down Blog. He has also contributed to CBS Sports, NBC Sports, USA Today, and a variety of NFL magazines and websites, and he is a frequent panelist on the NFL Network's Top 10 series. He has been writing about the NFL since he began his annual preview book NFL Touchdown as a summer hobby at age 11. Over the years, the project evolved from scrapbook (1997-2002) to self-publication (2003-2004) to national publication (Random House 2005-2006) and eventually to the website NFLTouchdown.com. Andy graduated with a business degree from the College of Idaho and currently resides in Boise.

BILL CONNELLY, author of the college football column "Varsity Numbers," grew up a numbers and sports nerd in western Oklahoma. His favorite teams growing up were, in no particular order, the Missouri Tigers, Miami Dolphins, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Portland Trailblazers. Perhaps he should have taken the hint and given up on sports a decade ago. Instead, he spends his time creating massive Excel files full of NCAA play-by-play and attempting to create the perfect, most all-encompassing football statistic ever. He lives in Missouri with his wife and pets, working for his alma mater. You can find more of his material at his SB Nation blog, Football Study Hall.

J.J. COOPER is a shameless frontrunner. There's no other reason to explain why a Georgia native would become a Pittsburgh Steelers fan in the 1970s, beyond the fact that the Steelers were always on TV and were always winning. But he does point out he was two years old when he developed his Steelers fandom and he's stuck with it for more than 30 years now, including the Cliff Stoudt, Mark Malone and Bubby Brister eras. J.J. graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism and has spent the past 15 years as a sports writer. He is the managing editor for Baseball America, a founding writer at the now defunct AOL FanHouse, and one of the owners of the Steelers Lounge blog.

BRIAN FREMEAU contributes the Fremeau Efficiency Index and other drive-based college football stats to Football Outsiders. Officially created in 2002 in an attempt to quantify momentum, FEI's roots actually extend to an early-90s NCAA hoops tournament forecasting project Brian still hopelessly maintains today. Now working for his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, he spends every home Saturday cheering his beloved Irish from the South end zone, Touchdown Jesus' outstretched arms in the background signaling into the blue-gray sky. Like Charlie Weis and Regis Philbin, Brian never played for Notre Dame, so his eligibility remains intact. He lives in South Bend, Indiana with his wife and daughter, whose birthday falls on Heisman weekend.

TOM GOWER has been a fan of the Tennessee Titans since they were the Oilers and he was growing up in Houston. He has remained a fan of the franchise in subsequent stints in North Dakota, Illinois, Washington, D.C., Japan, Maryland, Ohio, and back to Illinois. With degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago Law School, he currently considers himself the most over-educated member of the FO staff. (Clearly, recent football success was not a priority in school selection.) Tom currently maintains Reading and Thinking Football and contributes to Total Titans and Hoya Prospectus. His contributions to each week's Audibles at the Line should not be considered legal advice.

College football writer MATT HINTON contibutes biweekly college football columns to Football Outsiders and also writes daily for the Eye on College Football blog on CBSSports.com as well as the re-launched Sunday Morning Quarterback blog on SB Nation. Previously, he was the editor of Yahoo! Sports' college football blog, Dr. Saturday, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BCS. He has also written for Lindy's, Maple Street Press and The Baffler. He lives in Austin, Texas, and does not love the BCS.

MIKE KURTZ spent years as a Pittsburgh fan in the vast football wastes of Northeastern Ohio, with only his family as support, before moving to Chicago to heckle Rex Grossman. Deep in his heart a baseball guy among the three sports, he became an obsessive football fan in an attempt to make the hurting stop, with surprising success. Despite a somewhat notorious dislike of college football, Mike attended The Ohio State University. There he studied many things, was handed some paper, and then went to law school in Chicago. When he is not practicing law or editing the NFL content on Football Outsiders, Mike plays trombone in the CBA symphony orchestra and works as a high school football official.

SEAN McCORMICK is the proud owner of the lone Richard Todd jersey still in existence. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. When not teaching high school in Brooklyn, New York, he also indulges his inner masochist as a contributing writer for TheJetsBlog.com.

BEN MUTH was raised in Phoenix, Arizona and had season tickets to both the Cardinals and Sun Devils. As a result, he insists on irrationally defending Jake Plummer as quarterback. He left the state to go to college in California. He played offensive line at Stanford from 2004-08 and was named first team all conference in his final season. He now literally bleeds Cardinal red (for the Arizona Cardinals and Stanford). He was picked up by the San Diego Chargers as an undrafted free agent in 2009 but released later that same year, due to combination of injury and giving up too many sacks in practice. He currently lives in Nashville.

VINCE VERHEI was raised to love football by his father, who explained that the players in blue jerseys were the "good guys" and their opponents were the "bad guys." With every Seahawks game effectively turned into another battle between the Super Friends and the Legion of Doom, with the fate of the world presumably at stake, he was hooked. After Al Gore invented the Internet, Verhei spent a lot of time Googling "football stats," and discovered FO shortly after its birth. He worked his way up the chain from commenter to guest writer to game charter to assistant editor, and now explores the upset of the week in the ESPN column Any Given Sunday. His essay in the Giants chapter of PFP 2008 was cited by Bill Simmons as one of his favorites (though Simmons also noted the math behind the story "made his head explode"). Verhei is also a writer and podcast host for Figure4Online.com, a Web site covering pro wrestling and mixed martial arts.

It is rumored that MATT WALDMAN is not exactly a person, but the product of a top-secret, joint experiment by IBM, the Air Force, and the Vatican in an attempt to clone and robotize a young Mel Kiper. As a child living at the Ninth Gate of Sports Hell (Cleveland), Waldman engineered skip days from elementary school to absorb the lessons of Bronko Nagurski, Gale Sayers, Jim Brown, and Billy "White Shoes" Johnson. Waldman eventually found his way to Athens, Georgia; legend has it that Waldman spotted Terrell Davis at the tail end of his disappointing college career, offered a few timely pointers, and the rest is history. What has been confirmed as fact is that for the past eight years, Waldman has been studying college football players at the offensive skill positions. He presents his analysis, rankings, and play-by-play documentation in a downloadable tome known as The Rookie Scouting Portfolio. Another fact is that Smart Football and Grantland's Chris Brown said via Twitter that the RSP "is a very good read," and "the best pre-draft scouting report on every conceivable [skills position] guy." Waldman also writes for Footballguys.com, contributes to The New York Times Fifth Down Blog, and is an associate editor at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business.

ROBERT WEINTRAUB grew up in suburban New York, and thus has no earthly reason for his lifelong fanaticism for the Cincinnati Bengals, other than conjectured cosmic payback for some transgression in a past life. But he bleeds Bengal Orange, which is appropriate, for he also frequently hemorrhages Orange thanks to his alma mater, Syracuse, and the team's tragicomic attempt at football adequacy. He now lives in Atlanta, the epicenter of college football hyper-allegiance, so maintaining plausible deniability when writing about Georgia and Florida and Alabama is crucial. When not watching games in his ancient Boomer Esiason jersey, Robert contributes regularly to Slate, ESPN.com, and The Guardian. Robert is also a TV producer, so will likely have something to say about the coverage of games on a weekly basis.

FOOTBALL OUTSIDERS ALMANAC ONLY

BRIAN MCINTYRE is from central Massachusetts, but grew up a fan of the Seattle Seahawks. Brian caught the football bug early, passionately following the sport even after having his six-year-old heart broken when the NFL went on strike six days before he was to attend his first NFL game (Seahawks-Patriots at Schaefer Stadium) in 1982. He now covers the league for the league, as part of NFL.com's Around the League blog. Previously, Brian wrote covered the salary cap for Football Outsiders, and covered NFL news at his own site (Mac’s Football Blog), on Scout.com, and for the Tacoma News Tribune.