About Massive Report Data

Massive Report Data is part of the Massive Report family of sites, which is in turn part of the SBNation network. Massive Report is dedicated to providing the highest quality coverage of the Columbus Crew. This site is not intended to provide information about current events or the latest games; fans are encouraged to visit the parent site for timely coverage of the Crew and Major League Soccer.

This site is designed and curated by Matthew Bernhardt, statistician and historian for Massive Report. It is built upon a database of information covering the entire history of the Columbus Crew, from their first game on April 13, 1996 through the present day.

Beyond the simple facts, this site also attempts to analyze trends lying within the numbers. There are a great number of companies that perform similar analyses, and do so very well. This site follows a different strategy by considering only a minimum of source information: players, games, substitutions, and goals. Even from this limited data, however, it is possible to learn a great deal.

To illustrate these conclusions, and facilitate research by others, this site provides a variety of tools to visualize the source data. Drawing from a number of javascript libraries, visitors can see information displayed in a number of formats, with more being added on a regular basis.

Technology

This site is delivered in HTML5 format, with extensive use of CSS styling and a number of Javascript libraries. Credit is given for each library on the page on which it is used. I am particularly in the debt of Mike Bostock, author of the Protovis and D3 libraries, whose discovery started me on the path that led to the creation of this site.