BTN Insights started because the AP Poll kept shortchanging Missouri, my favorite team. Too many programs were getting ranked on reputation — who they'd once been — instead of how they were actually playing. Rankings decide too much (kickoff windows, TV placement, in some cases a team's actual fate) to leave to a poll, so I built my own.

It started as DRS — the Drury Ranking System — me hand-tallying results for every team. That turned into a spreadsheet, then the real database this site runs on. I build and run it alone, across six sports (MLB, NBA, CFB, NFL, EPL, MLS), the same way every time: check the real, live data first, then build on top of it.

I run cross country and track, so BTN is mostly a summer project — that's when I add features, fix display bugs, chase down whatever's broken. During the season it's whatever time I can find around a full-time student-athlete schedule.

Sports media is where I actually live: editor-in-chief of my school newspaper, PA announcer for my high school baseball team, color commentator with a local broadcast network, and I run a track and field media company, Kicking For Home. I've always loved the broadcast side of sports — GameDay features, in-game interviews — as much as the games themselves, which is probably what made me notice the ranking bias in the first place.

My teams: Cardinals and Mizzou run in the family — my dad grew up in O'Fallon, Illinois, just across the river from St. Louis, and Kolten Wong, Adam Wainwright, and Yadier Molina are who I grew up watching. St. Louis City SC is my city's team. Liverpool is the outlier — after a World Cup got our family into soccer, we picked one Premier League club to follow together.

This is a tool I built because I wanted it to exist. If I add something and don't like it, it doesn't stay. Found something broken, or have an idea worth building? Get in touch — messages go straight to me, not a support queue.