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Sports History is an independent publication launched in November 2025 by writer and historian Brad Oremland. By subscribing, you can get full access to the website as well as weekly email newsletters about new content. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows Sports History to continue to exist. Thank you!

Hi! I'm Brad Oremland, a sports historian currently based on the East Coast of the United States. I was a columnist for Sports Central for 16 years, and an occasional guest writer for Football Perspective and FanGraphs. This newsletter will focus on the history of North American professional sports, mostly (but not exclusively) the NFL and NBA.[1]

I don't think you need to be an athlete to understand or write about sports, but I've always been around athletics. I played pretty much everything when I was a kid, I was an all-conference hurdler in high school, and I played Division III NCAA football. I've also been a high school football coach and professional sportswriter. As a writer, I covered a wide range of sports, but my focus was the NFL (from September to February) and major league sports history (from the Super Bowl until the start of the next NFL season). The latter is what this newsletter is about. If you used to enjoy my NFL power rankings, I'm glad, but that's not what I'll be doing here. To the extent I write about current events, it will mostly be either to preserve interesting stats for posterity or to place recent events and accomplishments in historical context.

I'm going to publish a lot here: 2-3 articles per week, about 10 per month. Most of these posts will be research-intensive, and some of them will be very long. My goal as a writer of sports history is that each piece will fulfill one or more of these goals:

⦁ A valuable resource. I do research so you don't have to, and publish concise results that make it easy for you to better understand the history of the sports you love.
⦁ Compelling narratives. As a historian, I do a lot of research, but I think of myself first and foremost as a writer. I hope you'll find my writing easy to follow and digest, making history fun to read about.
⦁ Provocative ideas and opinions. I don't do hot takes on purpose. In 2014, when I ranked Doug Flutie as the #31 quarterback in history, ahead of Kurt Warner and Ken Stabler, I was sincere in my evaluation, not trying to be controversial. But some of my sincere evaluations end up being controversial — or better yet, eye-opening — anyway. A lot of people seem to have found my take on Flutie persuasive, which for me is enormously gratifying. I'm not Skip Bayless, trolling for clicks. But I will be honest in my assessments even when they clash with conventional wisdom.

Here's a partial sample of my previous work, if you'd like to get a sense for how I approach writing about sports history:

These next two articles were written for FanGraphs, which has a sabermetric-attuned audience, so there's some analytics jargon, but I think both pieces uncover things that are interesting to anyone who loves baseball.

  • Leadoff Rating (2014) — Introducing a formula to find the optimal leadoff hitter, and applying it both to the present (2014) and to history
  • Is Nolan Ryan Overrated by FIP? (2014) — I examined Ryan's career based on the differences between ERA and FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching). This is one of my favorite pieces I've ever written.

I also have five new articles available for free:

NFL: All-Loser Team vs. The 1985 Bears
If you made a team out of players who missed the NFL postseason in 1985, could they beat the greatest team of all time?

NBA: NBA Finals MVPs Before 1969
The NBA Finals MVP Award didn't exist until 1969, missing the NBA's first 20 years. If the award had existed before that, who would have won?

ATP: Was Andy Murray Better Than Pete Sampras?
Every GOAT list for men's tennis ranks Pete Sampras comfortably ahead of Andy Murray. Could they all be wrong?

MLB: 2025 Bill James Awards
Unconventional awards for the 2025 MLB season.

NFL: 2026 Pro Football Hall of Fame Nominees
Who are this year's most (and least) qualified nominees for the PFHOF?

  1. I don't follow soccer, so when I mention football I'm talking about American gridiron football. ↩︎

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  • You can get our free newsletter. This is a weekly newsletter with links to all new articles, as well as some (usually brief) thoughts from me. You'll have access to all our non-NFL and non-NBA content, though football and basketball articles are reserved for paid subscribers. Stay up to date with new content sent straight to your inbox! No more worrying about whether you missed something because of a skewed algorithm or news feed.
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  • Best Value: our full newsletter includes access to everything on the site, and you can comment on both new and archived posts. Comments are restricted to full subscribers, so at this level you'll be able to interact with a community of fans who share your passion for sports and your interest in understanding the great players, coaches, and teams of the past. A full subscription is only $7.99/mo. That $7.99 goes a long way: you'll get 10 well-researched, well-written articles about a subject you love. I know "fun and educational" is a pitch for kids' games, but it really applies here.
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Why Sports History?

I think my love for sports history started with my grandfather, whom I always called Pop. When I was growing up, Pop had season tickets for the Washington football team, and he would take me to games at RFK Stadium. He would sneak in a bag of peanuts in the shell (you didn't get frisked in those days — hell, the guy who sat in front of us would bring a flask of rum, buy a big cup of Coke, and mix them right there in his seat), and he'd buy me a program. I started going to the stadium with Pop when I was in elementary school, so a three-hour game couldn't hold my attention the whole time, and I would read the program. Some of the program was rather opaque to a child, but there was one section that always commanded my attention: at the back was a page listing all the team records. And those names — Sammy Baugh, Larry Brown, Charley Taylor — piqued my interest. I knew they were great, and I wanted to know more about why. Similarly, my eyes would wander to the names in the Ring of Honor. Turk Edwards. Gene Brito. Bobby Mitchell. What had these players done to earn such immortality?

Some time very shortly after I learned to read and write, I wrote a book about the Super Bowl. My mom bought me a thick clothbound book with blank lined pages, and I filled the whole thing up with Super Bowl facts. This was early enough in my education that I spelled the name of Minnesota's football team "Vickings."

I suspect this book still exists somewhere at my parents' house. It has a blue-green cover with horizontal stripes. Also, speaking of my education, I learned to multiply by 7 before I learned to multiply by 6. I knew 14 points meant two touchdowns, 21 meant three, and so on up to about 49. Beyond that I had to count on my fingers.

All of this might have faded away were it not for Sports Illustrated. One year when my dad renewed his subscription, they sent us a VHS tape titled NFL's Greatest Hits. I still have this tape, though my VCR finally died earlier this year. The video is about 45 minutes long.[1] It featured two B-actors and a talking computer named Felix. This video showed highlights of Dan Marino and Lawrence Taylor and other 1980s stars, but it also paid homage to Johnny Unitas and Deacon Jones, so I grew up understanding that these heroes of the past were the standard by which to judge the present. The best part of the video, which has moved me to tears, is the section on running backs. As Felix shows the B-actors highlights of Walter Payton and Gale Sayers and Earl Campbell, he (I'm calling Felix "he") points out their most outstanding attributes, like "Payton's intensity and sheer power," "the razor-sharp cutting ability of Gale Sayers," and "a pinch of power from Earl Campbell." Then he prompts the B-actors, "Imagine the running back you'd have if you could, in fact, blend the varied skills of the very best." The B-actors look at each other, then back at Felix's computer screen, and say in unison, "He'd be ... Superman!" And Felix, in his emotionally neutral computer voice, solemnly replies, "No. He'd be ... Jim Brown."[2]

I already had a collection of game programs by the time I saw NFL's Greatest Hits, and I'd already written the Super Bowl book, so the video didn't ignite my interest in sports history, but it reinforced it. The other thing that did this was birthday parties. Maybe you did this too, when you were growing up: when it was your birthday your parents would treat your friends to a party at mini golf or whatever, and the friends would bring you gifts. Some of those gifts would be books, and often they would be about sports. I read those books over and over and over. I still have The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories and The Baseball Hall of Shame 4 and Dave Heeren's 1989 Basketball Abstract on my shelf. I must have read them all at least a dozen times each.

As I grew older, I encountered more and more best-of-all-time discussions. I don't know any sports fan who doesn't like those. But most people just say whatever comes to mind, and I wanted to really know what I was talking about, to be able to explain why I ranked players and coaches and teams where I did, and to have confidence that my contentions had merit and would withstand scrutiny. There's a difference between knowing Joe Namath was great and knowing where he rates relative to Bob Griese or Dan Fouts.

I'm sure that all of this makes me a little weird. But hopefully it also helps me to write about sports history with rare knowledge and understanding. But I don't think of myself as first and foremost a historian. I am a historian, but really I think of myself as a writer, and I hope I'm able to tell some interesting stories in these historical deep dives. I also try really hard to communicate clearly, for my writing to be easy to read, so that learning about sports history is fun, not a chore you undertake in the name of knowledge.

This newsletter is a product of my love for writing and my passion for sports history. I'm planning to produce a lot of content, and if you love sports history, too, I think you'll find this newsletter valuable. Please consider subscribing if you haven't already. You can also leave me a tip to support this work.

  1. As perhaps you can tell from the link in the previous sentence, I found the video online. It's closer to 50 minutes. Thank you, funkydunkelman. I'm sorry about "Vickings." ↩︎

  2. Then we see highlights of Jim Brown, with a really well-chosen score — NFL Films, man — and as it's wrapping up Felix says something like, "Yet any runner can be a miracle maker, be it for a season, a game, or even a single play." And then they show some of the most incredible individual plays you could ask for. There are some stars in there, like Marcus Allen and Payton, and some really good players, like the Bengals' James Brooks, but also some dudes no one has thought about since 1987. And for that one play, they fully realized their potential: each of them was the best in the world, just for that moment. This is the part of the video that sometimes makes my eyes well up. ↩︎