Press Row

Cold, Hard Football Facts embodies everything that the new wave of sports media represents.

They have the time and resources to take deeper dives that the “lowest common denominator” newspapers don’t touch. They can post things that have little to do with the game, without worrying about the editor’s wrath. Their excellent writing gets publicity in more “mainstream” pubs, yet the old guard still regards their kind as a type of mercenary, a specialist who answers to no one yet reigns over many.

And, above all, they treasure their brash, free-swinging style of commentary that so many up-and-coming sports websites, like CHFF, have perfected.

CHFF is, for the new generation of football fan, an absolute must-read. It holds a seat at the big boys table, with the likes of Mike Florio (PFT), Aaron Schatz (FO), Michael David Smith (AOL/many others), and the other giants of the sports internet.

I had a chance to check in with Kerry Byrne, the creator of CHFF (and also the food and drinks writer for the Boston Herald) for a Q&A about the site, its history, and some incredible viewpoints on the world of sports journalism. It’s a lengthy (but insightful) read, so enjoy.

1) The obligatory walk-through on how CHFF came to fruition… (for the record, odds this answer begins with “So, this one night at the bar…”: 75%)

Odds that you’ll soon regret asking for a window into the frigid, emotionless soul of the Cold, Hard Football Facts – 99.8 percent.

The earliest genesis of the website – we’re talking single-celled statistical cyano-bacteria forming into stromatolites of data in the simmering stew of the pre-Pangean oceans of pigskin – was back in January 1983 when I sat in my brother’s bunk and tracked all the data from the Raiders and Redskins seasons heading into Super Bowl XVIII.

Then, while the really cool kids at my school played Dungeons & Dragons, I played Strat-O-Matic football against myself on my bedroom floor, while keeping a season’s worth of stats for each team.

And – I shit you not, here – I even kept the standings for my sixth-grade paper-triangle football league. We had six kids playing, and I split them into two conferences. I won one conference with an 8-2 record. Another kid won the other conference with a 9-1 record. We split our two regular-season meetings. But then that kid beat me in the big Merrymount Elementary School sixth-grade paper-triangle football championship game of 1982.

The only other thing I remember about sixth grade is being in love with a girl named Vanessa Rush, whose mother wouldn’t let her date me. So the famous CHFF struggles with football data and with women were on display as early as 1982.

But in between bouts of pubescent love-sickness, I remember thinking that the numbers in our paper-triangle football league formed perfect patterns from which you could gauge likely results. So I guess even back in sixth grade, I was interested in the patterns and storylines that you can pull from nothing more than a simple collection of numbers.

And that’s kind of how the CHFF works: find patterns in a series of football statistics, and then build an entertaining story around it.

I later became a so-called “journalist” and have had some pretty good gigs writing for some nifty publications, mostly as a food and drinks writer. But I wanted to recapture the inner core of the guy who kept Strat-O-Matic and paper-triangle football stats back in sixth grade – while adding in the whole food and beer thing that became a part of my journalistic life.

So in 2004, early in the morning of the first day of the football season, I launched Cold, Hard Football Facts.com. It’s mostly about fun, hard-core football analysis. But we also tout it as the only outlet in the media devoted to the “gridiron lifestyle” of beer, food and football. As for Vanessa, last I heard she was an attorney in Texas.

2) You boast quite a mix of talented writers and just sheer characters. How on earth did such a motley bunch of people come together at CHFF?

Centrifugal force.

Seriously, I haven’t really solicited many of these guys. In most cases, they were guys who had written to me about one thing or another. I found out who they were and liked their work, so brought them on board in various capacities. CHFF has been very lucky in this respect. I think we’ve attracted some talented writers and hard-core football guys and have added a lot to the product. You can read about them here: http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/Category/3_About_Us.html

3) Did CHFF have that one “breakthrough” moment, where the visitors just started flooding in? You’ve had some pretty high-volume appearances (WSJ, America Online).

I really can’t explain the incredible PR we’ve gotten, other than the fact I’ve forced the site upon the traditional sports media all over the country and demanded they take notice or else we’ll crush their opinions like helpless soldiers squashed beneath the tracks of our M1A1 Abrams tank of truth. For the most part, they’ve really responded positively to the threats of physical violence – which also tells me that they have a sense of humor and kind of “get” the CHFF thing.

Just in the last couple weeks alone, CHFF has been in the Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated.com, the Chicago Tribune, ESPN.com, The Atlantic Monthly and FoxSports.com – all A-level media outlets. At a more local level, Chick Ludwig at the Dayton Daily News just named CHFF the top football site on the web, and a few weeks earlier Bill Livingston at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer declared himself a “CHFF-oholic” in one of his columns.

I told Bill to take up drinking instead. Look what it’s done for me.

We’ve also done a lot of local sports radio stations and TV shows over the past couple years and there are a lot of stations around the country that have been really good to us, such as Homer True at ESPN Milwaukee, Gerry V. at WRNO in New Orleans, and the gang at the WEEI powerhouse in Boston, who were probably the first in the mainstream media to pick up on the CHFF thing.

So the traditional media has really been good to us, even as we pretty much built our rep ripping the way the traditional sports media operates. So there’s a little irony there.

But there’s really been no one moment when it all came together. In fact, we’ve really just kind of grown steadily over the few years we’ve been around. So all the great pub, coupled with the most important thing, word of mouth and smart football fans, have just kind of added up to create steady growth. Our readership doubles each year, and may even triple this season, based upon off-season trends.

If we actually knew about things like search-engine optimization, how to send confirmation emails to people who sign up for our forum, and how the whole inter-web thing in general works, we might be the biggest independent football site on the web right now. But I’m sure there are a few out there that are older and bigger. We’ll stand atop the mountain soon enough, though.

4) So, you’re saying that this guy is in charge of suggesting the top food and drink spots in one of the most entertainment-rich cities in the country. How did that come about? And, how do you enjoy the balance of the two different writing lifestyles?

I graduated from Boston College in 1992 without a single marketable skill. Liberal arts major and all, you know. In school, I never really had any ambition to be a writer – never worked for the school paper, for example, and never did the whole newspaper intern thing.

But I was out of school and I needed work. So I figured I’d give writing a shot. They say write about what you know, and I knew about beer and football. So I began writing about beer for local trade publications and landed a two-day-a-week job as the “sports editor” at the local weekly paper in my hometown.

I ended up covering sports for larger newspapers. But by the late 1990s, the sports thing had been pushed aside by my other work.

I eventually parlayed the beer thing into a freelance column at the Boston Herald and some freelancing gigs with publications like Boston Magazine and Esquire. I even briefly wrote the booze column for Penthouse magazine, though I bought Penthouse only for pictures.

I got to visit and write about a lot of great breweries and restaurants around the world, mostly in Europe, so that was pretty neat, and got to see a lot of places I wouldn’t otherwise have seen. I even met my wife because her dad owned a brewery. So beer has been very good to me.

Eventually, a staff job as a food writer opened up at the Herald, and the editor liked my beer stuff enough to hand me the gig. I continue to hold that job today, but it’s only a part-time gig that affords me all the time in the world to run CHFF. I still freelance about beer and food elsewhere from time to time.

But mostly, it’s CHFF 24×7 for me, with the food thing a pleasant little diversion.

In terms of the mechanics of writing, the food & beer vs. CHFF thing could not be more different. The food thing is all about feelings and sensations and trying to get the reader to appreciate your tasting experiences. It could not be more subjective. You want the reader to say, “Wow, that sounds good!”

The CHFF thing is all about shoving the numbers and the objective facts down the throats of your readers with all the sensitivity of blunt head trauma. You want the reader to say, “No mas! I will never doubt you again, oh omnipotent Achilles of the gridiron. Please spare my life!”

5) What do you “classify” CHFF as? Blog? Website? Online magazine? Smorgasboard? Does it even matter?

I’d classify the Cold, Hard Football Facts as the single most important development in the history of the sports media. Or a website. Whatever. It’s definitely not a blog.

Seriously, though, I do believe CHFF is the first outlet to combine the in-your-face bombast of modern sports reporting with an entertaining style and with the cutting-edge analysis, intense research and journalistic integrity that have disappeared in many places from the sports world.

I don’t think there’s anybody in the media combining all these elements into one. We can be just as forceful as some loud-mouthed radio talk show host – but we back it all up with mountains of research. Nobody is doing that.

A lot of blogs and “new media” are just some asshole telling you what he thinks without any of that pesky “journalistic integrity” holding him back. A lot of traditional sports columnists, meanwhile, are just some asshole telling you what he thinks, regardless of the actual facts of the situation, but buoyed by the arrogance of an institution that’s been around for 100 years. Basically, a lot of these “old media” guys think the name of the paper gives them a right to flout basic journalistic practices. In other words, you often find that the bigger the outlet, the less integrity they actually have. It’s institutional arrogance.

At the end of the day, I want readers to feel that CHFF is the single most credible outlet in sports today because – for all the bombast and politically incorrect language – we don’t state anything without the facts to support it.

But whatever you’d call it, I think we got some independent confirmation of our capabilities earlier this year, when the Pro Football Writers of America honored CHFF for the top game story of 2007, beating out folks from all the major media outlets. So I think that is shows we have legitimacy in the sports-media marketplace and can beat the mainstream media at their own game.

6) Say you’re a budding young sports writer, fresh out of college, with a chance to write for a website like CHFF, or to take the typical entry-level writer role for a small local paper. What advice do you give this kid–and why?

Get your MBA at Wharton or Sloan and fight tooth and nail for a gig as an analyst at a major investment firm. Stab your classmates in the back if you have to. Then, once you’ve made your first couple million by age 30, you can start a website, buy publicity and traffic and hit up all your rich financial-world friends for investment dollars and then do whatever the fuck you want with your website and with the rest of your life. And then, as you use that money to buy prominence in the sports world, you can laugh at all the 30-year-olds making $50K a year at some shitty newspaper.

At the end of the day, you’ll be far ahead of someone who’s taken the traditional sports journalist path.

7) Finish this sentence, and explain why: In five years, newspapers will…

Bow down in humble deference to the almighty power of the Cold, Hard Football Facts.

8. Is there any sort of plan for the future of CHFF?

Our plan is to lord over the known football universe like a Gridiron Colossus of Rhodes.

When we develop a few more resources, we’ll do a lot more with college football, and ultimately move into a whole suite of CHFF sites. We already own the domains, for example, for Cold Hard Sports Facts, Basketball Facts, Soccer Facts, etc. So that’s the future of CHFF … we hope.

9) Do you have any “must-reads” in the sports media world?

The only thing in sports I’ve ever read with any kind of consistency is Sports Illustrated. It remains the Rolls-Royce of sports magazines and quality sports writing. All the best things I’ve ever read about sports were in Sports Illustrated, which I started getting at age 10.

For example, the greatest sports story ever written, for my money, appeared in “best sports photographs of the century” issue back in 2000. They picked a totally unknown photo number one. It was a picture inside the locker room before TCU faced Jim Brown and Syracuse in the 1956 or 57 Cotton Bowl. The article was brilliantly written, and just pulled you into this photograph with the stories of what must have been going through the minds of these West Texas farm boys as they prepared to face the great Jim Brown. It also talked about what became of them later in life. I never read a story that touched so deeply on so many levels what is we love about sports, and why it is people compete in sports.

Brilliant, really. One thing that still sticks out with me today is that only one person in the photograph was looking at the camera – the equipment manager. Everyone else competing, all the players and coaches, were lost in their own thoughts, oblivious to the camera in the room. It was a brilliant piece of sports journalism, and SI is the only place you find that type of stuff today.

I also like football history books. “The Best Game Ever” by Mark Bowden is a great new book. Maraniss’s “When Pride Still Mattered” biography of Lombardi is a classic. Last year I read a great book about the Ice Bowl by a game named Ed Gruver that deserves more attention than it ever received. A year or two ago, Allen Barra of the Wall Street Journal (who’s contributed to CHFF in the past) let me borrow a copy of “This was Football” by Pudge Heffelfinger, the 19^th century Yale star and the first pro football player. It’s great as he bitches about the decline in the quality of the game and the toughness of the players back in the 1950s. Some things never change.

Otherwise, I read nothing unless somebody sends me a link. It’s all the same to me. All the major websites are writing the same stories on the same topics each and every day. It’s like they move in lock-step. Seriously, go to any of them on any given day, and they’re all telling you the same story.

The alternative media and blogs, at least, are more creative and more entertaining. There’s some really good stuff out there, though I don’t have time to read many of them. But a lot of the independent sites don’t really give you any information, Much of it’s nothing more than snide remarks about players’ off-field lives, or peddling rumors that just have no interest to me. I actually can’t believe there’s a market for this type of stuff. But there clearly is.

So I just read stuff like the NFL Record & Fact Book and the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia. I study the spread sheets on ProFootballReference.com, and I read the box scores from different games. Then I process all the data in my head, figure out the theme that I draw from it, and try to find an entertaining way to build a story around this data.

That’s why it’s so easy to refute conventional wisdom. When you look only at the numbers, it often becomes quite apparent that the numbers are telling a much different story than conventional wisdom.

At the end of the day, it makes us the most accurate outlet in sports today. All the traditional reporters, for example, get their information from human sources. Well, ask any lawyer and he’ll tell you: humans are the single most unreliable source imaginable. Humans see only what they want to see, and say only what they want to say. Humans have biases and agendas.

The data we use as a source, the Cold, Hard Football Facts, have no biases and no agendas. So it’s only natural that we’re more accurate than every other outlet.

10) Just for kicks: the biggest surprise of the upcoming NFL season will be…

Here are three:

Kurt Warner leads the Cardinals to the third playoff victory in the franchise’s 89-year history

Quarterback-less Vikings go 8-8 again, despite dominant ground game and solid defense.

CHFF becomes the most humble and most sensitive sports site on the web.

Share on Facebook