Hawkflight Studios

Of course my team is the best

^{Example of breaking a loop}In 2007 I stumbled upon a website called BeatPaths.com run by Curt Siffert. On it, he attempted to settle power ranking arguments by only ranking NFL teams above teams that they've beaten. Due to the nature of upsets, sometimes there are circles between teams, and he had a simple way of resolving these inconsistencies. Myself and a few other regular visitors wondered how his graphs would look if some alternate methods were used instead. Unfortunately, he didn't have the time to run these extra simulations and I was looking for a project.

I ended up building some programs to run the extra methods and I would post the extra results in the comments. By the end of the season I was getting tired of running everything manually, and I was starting to wonder how the graphs would look in other sports, but inputting data for the amount of games other sports had was too much. I decided to find a way to automate it all by getting score data from the various Sports Reference sites and build the graphs from there. This made it so I had graphs for all four major US sports leagues and all of them were automatically updated daily.

^{Example of end-of-season graph (NFL 2003)} Unfortunately, after a couple years Curt was unable to continue his work at BeatPaths and I picked up the mantle with my own site, BeatGraphs. In the earlier days of sports analytics, people were looking for new sites that had interesting data. I had a small but regular amount of traffic during the football season, and one season wrote weekly articles for the Patriots blog at SBNation known as Pats Pulpit. Unfortunately, from week to week, there isn't much to say about the graphs so I didn't return for another season.

Over the next decade or so I'd maintain the site and keep an eye out for any possible mentions on the internet. Occasionally I'd be mentioned in the comments of a Reddit or FootballOutsiders article and would answer if I could. Unfortunately, Sports Reference would continually change the way they displayed their data and paying a service for the scores was prohibitively expensive for this hobby project. This lead to a few year lapse in BeatGraphs where the graphs sat idle without being updated. In August of 2022, I built a Windows Form Application to combine the previous programs with some added functionality to make maintainence easier than ever.