Let me let you in on a little something I've gleaned from my extensive months of experience as the co-founder of a sports website: This game isn't as easy as it seems. Not just anyone can walk in off the street and build a functioning website beloved (hopefully) by thousands. Not even Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
Rodgers is the co-founder of something called Online Sports Database, which launched Tuesday with the explicit goal of becoming the sports version of IMDB. Rodgers and co-founder Ryan Rottman got $2.5 million in investment money and have hired eight full-time employees, six of whom will be researchers presumably responsible for googling things like "tyrese haliburton agent who is he" and then using their computer's copy and paste functions. Rottman told Sports Business Journal about the site's creation myth: At a dinner, "I said, 'Hey, as an athlete is this something you think you would use?’ And he just stopped me right there and he's like, ‘Who have you told? … Tell no one else. We're making this.'" Cool, cool cool cool.
"Online Sports Database," says a blog entitled OSDB: The future of digital sports in the present, "is a digital sports platform with the most extensive sports information ever available in one place." What that probably means is that ODSB will be sports Wikipedia with more business bullshit attached to it, which its owners can monetize with paywalls. In practice, at least in the present, the site has a bunch of information quite literally ported over from Wikipedia and, until quite recently, also a bunch of blogs from other sports websites that appear to have been—let's be generous here—automatically syndicated. There is also a search function, which doesn't work. Right now, the site claims to have information (again, from Wikipedia) on NBA, MLB, and NFL athletes "with plans to add NHL, soccer, UFC, WNBA, golf, cricket, and esports sections in the coming months." Hopefully those new sections will also include players from the past, unlike the existing ones.
Some free advice: If you need to crib biographical information for the Overwatch League section, they keep it over at Liquipedia, not regular Wikipedia.
