Meet the Outsiders

Joseph (J.P.) Acosta is a graduate student in Sports Media at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He began working as a NFL writer in 2020 but has spent most of his life yelling about the Jacksonville Jaguars. His work has been published at SB Nation and their Jaguars affiliate Big Cat Country, as well as the Florida Atlantic University Press, where he wrote until graduating in 2020. Currently J.P. lives in Chicago and contributes to Football Outsiders, Big Cat Country and Sports Illustrated Northwestern.

DAVE BERNREUTHER is known as being long-time reader and snarky commenter, but officially started with FO in 2017 as the database and tech development guru. He is now a contributing staff writer. He was previously a salary cap analyst and author of SalaryCap101.net and more recently has spent time crafting data-first tools for Daily Fantasy Sports pros at DailyRoto. A native New Yorker and former Indianapolis Colts season ticket holder, he now reluctantly calls Miami home.

ZACHARY O. BINNEY has a Ph.D. in epidemiology and wrote his dissertation on NFL injuries. He was born (and still lives) in Atlanta but blames his dad for making him a Miami Dolphins fan. Since he only developed his fandom in the post-Marino era, his happiest football memory involves Cleo Lemon and Greg Camarillo. You know the one. He has channeled his suffering into a passion for studying sports injuries. He has consulted for NFL, NBA, and MLB teams, written for FiveThirtyEight.com, and lost on Jeopardy! to a bus driver. During the days he is a freelance statistics instructor and analytics consultant for sports teams and other organizations.

Cale Clinton has written for Football Outsiders since 2017, mainly compiling This Week in Quotes. Despite living in New York nearly his entire life, Cale was spared the burden of New York sports fandom and was raised a Boston fan. He attended Amherst College as an English major and is currently pursuing his master’s degree in Magazine, News, and Digital Journalism at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communication.

Parker Fleming is an economist moonlighting as a football analyst, who thinks college teams don't pass the ball enough. He hails from Memphis, Tennessee, but now lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He enjoys discussions on advanced statistics, causal inference, and thinking about how we think about college football. Parker is an avid TCU Horned Frogs fan and College Football Playoff Committee skeptic. 

BRIAN FREMEAU contributes the Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) has been analyzing college football drive stats for Football Outsiders since 2006. More of his findings can be found on his own site, bcftoys.com. A lifelong Fighting Irish fan, Brian can be found every home football Saturday in Notre Dame Stadium. He can be found there every day, in fact, due to his campus facility operations responsibilities. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife and two daughters.

TOM GOWER joined the FO writing staff in 2009. He has degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, whose football programs have combined for an Orange Bowl appearance and seven Big Ten Titles but are still trying to find success after Pearl Harbor. His work has also appeared at NBCSports.com, NBC Sports World, ESPN.com, and in ESPN The Magazine. He roots for the Tennessee Titans.

DERRIK KLASSEN is from the Central Valley of California, though he grew up near Tampa Bay, Florida. Covering the NFL draft gave him his start but studying the NFL itself has taken precedent. He has been published at SB Nation and Bleacher Report, and has worked for Optimum Scouting, do- ing charting and scouting reports for their NFL Draft Guide.

BRYAN KNOWLES grew up watching Joe Montana and Steve Young ply their trade at quarterback, so he has somewhat overly-inflated expectations of how quarterbacks should perform. This has certainly done him no favors over the past decade or so of watching the San Francisco 49ers. A graduate of UC Davis and San Jose State University, he has opted to eschew all the useful advice those august institutions have supplied him with and become a sportswriter instead. He’s been published at Bleacher Report and Fansided, and currently lives in Chicago with a wife who for some reason puts up with him.

RIVERS McCOWN has written for ESPN.com, Bleacher Re- port, USA Today, and Deadspin, among other places. He’s edited for Football Outsiders, Rookie Scouting Portfolio, and Pre-Snap Reads Quarterback Catalogue. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife, under the control of two cats and two birds. He wants more jobs, and if you don’t give them to him, he’ll be forced to keep speedrunning video games and helping design randomizer hacks for them.

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. Ben contributes to both Football Outsiders and SB Nation, and currently lives in Dallas.

Preston Pack is a University of Tennessee student and college football analyst with a focus on advanced statistics and retroactive team evaluation. They managed to acquire an appreciation for sports despite being raised as a fan of the Tennessee Volunteers and Atlanta pro sports (and, to make matters worse, adding Oklahoma State and the Mariners). Beyond Football Outsiders, they can be found complaining about G5 underappreciation on Twitter and tweaking TERSE, their college football computer designed to rank teams like a human.

CARL YEDOR was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and his first vivid football memory was "We want the ball, and we're going to score." In spite of that, he has remained a Seahawks fan to this day, which certainly paid off right around the time he began interning with Football Outsiders in February of 2014. As an undergrad at Georgetown University, he worked with the varsity football team (yes, Georgetown does have a football team) to implement football research into their strategy and game planning, drawing on his coursework in statistics and his high school experience as an undersized offensive guard and inside linebacker to make recommendations. He lives in Arlington, Virginia and works as an analytics consultant for IBM.

ROBERT WEINTRAUB bleeds orange, both because of his inexplicable passion for the Cincinnati Bengals (he grew up in suburban New York, not Ohio) and because of his alma mater, Syracuse University. Robert is a regular contributor to The New York Times and writes their college football previews. He also pens a media column for the Columbia Journalism Review, and writes for ESPN/Grantland, Slate, The Guardian, and many others. His is the is the author of the New York Times bestseller No Better Friend: One Man, One Dog, and their Extraordinary Story of Courage, The House That Ruth Built: A New Yankee Stadium, the First Championship, The Victory Season: World War II, The Homecoming, and the Birth of Baseball's Golden Age, and the Redemption of 1923, was published in 2011. He lives with his family in Decatur, Georgia.