Our Journey
If you have ever stayed up too late on something you cared about, and still woke up feeling behind, you already know this story.
It has been a long, tiring road. There were nights we were so beaten down that a lucky guess started to look like the honest answer. Not because we believed in luck. Because the work kept coming up empty, and a guess was the only thing that still felt within reach. We knew that was not a plan. It was what you tell yourself when you are tired of being wrong.
We started in the 2006 NFL season. A regular person, with a regular job, trying to see if the games made more sense on paper than they did on Sunday. Two decades later the algorithm is still changing. For most of those years nobody else could see the mess. The struggle only came into the open in 2025. The year before that, 2024, we almost walked away.
A piece of paper, then a spreadsheet we were embarrassed to open
It started as math on a piece of paper. Then it became an Excel sheet with descriptions we would not show anyone. We were trying to figure out which pieces actually mattered, and we kept twisting the same constants hoping this time they would behave. They almost never did. The file got bigger. Our confidence got smaller.
An hour turned into a week. A week turned into a year, then another. We were the average 8-to-5 worker bee. The job owned the day. This owned whatever was left, which was usually not enough. Time was the opponent we could not scout. Energy drinks got us through the first years. Then herbal mixtures. Then we were combining them just to keep our head clear enough to try one more version before bed.
We thought we would arrive. We didn't.
When we started, we thought there was a finish line. Learn the math, find the pattern, done. That was the part we had wrong. The target moves. Something that looked true for a season can fall apart the next year, and you feel foolish for having trusted it. Basic math was enough to ask the question. It was not enough to live with the answer. The formulas got harder, the research got longer, and a lot of it ended in the trash.
What we were really looking for was a way of working that could hold up, not another hot streak we could not explain. We think we have found that kind of strategy. We are sharing the hard years with you because sports fans know what it is to care about something that does not care back, and to keep showing up anyway. The cards on this site came out of that. Not out of a lucky afternoon.
If you have ever almost quit a thing you loved and then opened the notebook one more time, you have been where we were in 2024.