Welcome to Our New Contributors!

First up is Dave Collins, who will be hosting the Advanced NFL Stats podcast. This will be a fun new feature that I'm really excited about. The podcast will come in weekly installments and will include a different guest from week to week. The first episode is already in the can and ready. Look for it shortly.

Dave hosts The Opening Play Podcast where he covers sports and comedy "in an intelligent way." His first summer job was as a tour guide for the Red Sox, and since then his love of sports, statistics and corny jokes about the Green Monstah has never waned. He graduated from Northwestern University with degrees in communications and economics and spent the 2009 football season interning with the Chicago Bears. Now in California, he works at StubHub.com and produces the Bay Area Sports and Tech Meetup . Dave can also be found performing improv comedy throughout San Francisco. Though he currently resides in the Bay Area, he remains a die-hard Patriots fan.

Next up is Sterling Xie. He's going to be doing the weekly write-up for the team efficiency rankings. Sterling is the type of devoted stats guy that makes former players and coaches roll their eyes while gushing spiel about the good ol' days.  Sterling is currently enrolled in Hamilton College, working towards a degree in English.  His work is featured on Bleacher Report and its partner websites, where he writes about all things Boston sports.  He's a sucker for a good third-down back, and greatly misses rooting for Danny Woodhead.

Rob Hendryx will be handling the playoff projections this season. Rob is an engineering graduate student slave at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been researching sports statistics for a few years, mostly in the search of evidence that Tony Romo is not cursed. (Results are still inconclusive.) Recently he has posted his own research to reddit.com/r/NFLstatheads under the username kloverr, and moderated the small community there as well.

Andrew Carroll will be doing some general analysis. Andrew is a contributor at NinersNation.com and considers himself a 49ers/Chiefs fan. Less of a statistician and more of a wide-eyed, data wonking glutton, Carroll enjoys spreadsheets, numbers, stats, and otherwise-trivial data that provide a different perspective to the NFL landscape.

The new guys will join Jack and Keith who are returning for 2013.

Lastly, a very sincere thank you goes to all the guys who applied to be contributors at ANS this season. The response to the call for writers was overwhelming. This season I received three times as many submissions than I did for the last open call two years ago. I wish there was a way for everyone to have their football research read...which is why I created the ANS Community site. It never took off the way I envisioned, but it's still ready and waiting for interesting research and analysis.