What do you get when you combine a bunch of intellectual web geeks, journalists, computer-assisted-reporting addicts and bloggers who happen to be football fans?

You get amazing web sites called footballoutsiders.com and sportflashback.com.

Brian, our resident Flash guru, told me about footballoutsiders.com.

Footballoutsiders.com is a mecca of football statistics and analysis. The depth of information is nothing short of amazing and one hit on the web page and you will see why the Outsiders have contracts with ESPN, The New York Times and other newspapers throughout the country.

How did the Outsiders get started?

The site began around 2003 when Aaron Schatz, editor-in-chief started Football Outsiders as an effort to match the degree of statistical sophistication and analysis found in Major League Baseball. Since then, the site has become a source of play-by-play results from every NFL game since 1995. A staff of columnists and web producers have worked for major media outlets like The Boston Globe, SI.com, FOXSports.com, ESPN.com, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal as well as a few web start-up companies.

The in-depth statistical analysis — has been used by FOXSports.com and ESPN.com. The site signed a partnership to work exclusively with ESPN.com since last year.

Sportflashback.com creates three-dimensional animated scenes from sporting events. These animations recreate pivotal in-moments for visual analysis and matchups. Unfortunately, the demos aren’t working on the sportflashback.com site, but you can see its contracted coverage of the NFL playoffs on nytimes.com. The New York Times uses analysis from footballoutsiders.com with sportflashback.com’s animations to create a “show and tell” version of team matchups.

For several years, both FoxSports and ESPN have dipped a toe into the gaming industry, using pro-level video games as set pieces to highlight matchups. Now, both companies are at the forefront of a trend that delivers drill-down content analysis of division, rival, team and individual matchups that makes video-game playing and web-savvy sports fans salivate. While in-studio half-time and post-game analysts use digital game-video to break down plays, they often don’t have armies of crunched-numbered data to backup or refute how and why a play unfolded.

But as more and more partnerships unfold between traditional media, their tech-savvy web divisions and fervent number-crunchers like Football Outsiders, the evolution will be seamless.

I found a couple of good articles about this technology journalism trend: 10,000 words and innovative activity.