Why?
knowtheplayers.com was created to fill a gap. There are sites that focus on player scoring stats, for example "number of points scored in a season", and they are well established and do that very well. Other sites have player details (similar to knowtheplayers), but only for a particular team, and often not all of the details you want. The vision behind knowtheplayers was to have "all" of the player details for all teams in one place, starting with Rugby, then moving on to other sports
Really? But why?
This is no small vision, as you can discover for yourself if you attempt to find out which school a particular Tongan player attended, or other such detail. But it is for this exact reason knowtheplayers.com is attempting to gather that level of detail, for all teams: To become the ultimate Player Reference, and then to turn that data into useful, interesting information.
Ok good. Is it done?
knowtheplayers.com is still officially in beta... The idea and the inital rush was to be ready for World Cup 2007, and to use it as a testing ground, as well as to get the info we do already have out there for people to see! As such, it's not quite finished, although it almost has all Rugby World Cup 2007 Rugby Players captured, at least to some degree. The teams and players not yet captured will be soon. After that, different sports will be tackled, one at a time, with Soccer (Football) next.
BFI is a knowtheplayers.com invention. It stands for Big Fellow Index, or Big <noun of your choice> Index. It is currently most applicable to Rugby, because it attempts to quantify a player's overall size in a single number. It's easier to remember than his weight and height, and makes comparing two players simpler. Think of BFI as how much it would hurt you if a particular player ran into you, with more being worse! For interest sake, BFI is calculated using various factors, but based on weight and height. This is important because those figures are readily available, while things like Body Fat are generally not.
The following images relate to the Home page and Random Players/Stats. More will follow shortly elaborating on the Browse functionality.
