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Meet the Trolls
What's Wrong With These People?
Cold, Hard Football Facts for June 16, 2005
The "pundits" get some things right. Here's what they say about the Cold, Hard Football Facts:
CHFF dominates the mainstream media at the Pro Football Writers of America annual writing awards in both 2009 and again in 2010. Our moms are so proud!
"Brilliant sports journalism" – Ben Maller, Fox Sports Radio Network
"Guys like (CHFF publisher Kerry J. Byrne) are smart about football and they think about football." – Peter King, Sports Illustrated
"A potty-mouthed new media trailblazer" – David Scott, Boston Sports Review
"We get a lot of ideas from CHFF" – Steve Sabol, NFL Films
"The most amusing thing I've read about sports ... in the 21st century" – King Kaufman, Salon.com
"The Cold, Hard Football Facts is an addiction" – Gerry V., WRNO, New Orleans
"Stout-hearted geniuses" – Dan Shanoff of "Daily Quickie" fame and DanShanoff.com
"Cutting-edge analysis" – Allen Barra, The Wall Street Journal
"(The Cold, Hard Football Facts are) hard working and harder drinking" – Rich Garven, Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette
"Refreshingly intelligent football analysis" – John Gonzalez, Boston Magazine
 "An awesome site" – Chick Ludwig, Dayton Daily News
"Your site and your people do a great job" – Adam Schefter (left), ESPN
"Whack jobs!" – Tom Curran, NBC Sports.com
"The best NFL site in the world" – DarkPartyReview.com
"An awesome website!" – Homer True, ESPN Milwaukee
See the CHFF-Esquire magazine tailgate here
See our beloved Bonzo the Idiot Monkey in the Wall Street Journal and our most recent Wall Street Journal interview (April 26, 2008) here.
Also read some nifty interviews with Potentate of Pigskin Kerry J. Byrne here and here for some behind-the-scenes info on the evolution of CHFF.
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The Cold, Hard Football Facts are an omniscient, all-powerful gridiron guru and emotionless arbiter of all things pigskin. We planted our flag on Planet Pigskin in September 2004 and since then we have rumbled over hacks, "pundits" and opinions with reckless, unrelenting and fact-filled impunity in our M1A1 Abrams Tank of Truth.
Cold, Hard Football Facts writers have no shame. We make up for it by having no pride, either.
YOUR CHFF TROLLS:
Our Potentate of Pigskin created the revolutionary Cold, Hard Football Facts concept and is the nation's foremost authority on the "gridiron lifestyle" of beer, food & football. He's also food and drinks writer for The Boston Herald and has spent much of his "career" traveling around the beer-making capitals of the U.S. and Europe while writing for Esquire, Yankee Magazine, Penthouse (yes, that Penthouse), America Online, Epicurious.com, Boston Magazine, All About Beer and many other newspapers and magazines, most of them highly disreputable.
He's also a two-time winner of the Quincy Hi Sckool Spelin' B (1986 and 1987).
When he's not ruthlessly crushing misguided gridiron opinions, he marches around the ColdHardFootballFacts.com cardboard-box world headquarters singing the Notre Dame fight song, creates exciting new tailgate recipes and cleans his Ruger 30.06. His hobbies include crying at the end of "Rudy," admiring the stats he kept from his 1984 Strat-O-Matic football season and driving around Harvard Square blasting Toby Keith CDs from the speakers of the PIGSKIN Ford pick-up.
JONATHAN COMEY
This small-town scribe squandered his shot at the NFL by watching the game endlessly from his couch, wasting his intriguing mix of size and speed in the process. Comey made another stellar career choice when he dropped out of college to start a band. He then worked his way up the newspaper ladder in his spare time, rising from backup high school volleyball writer to sports editor for the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass. After completing that challenge, he made another smart career move when he left the paper to take a shot at freelance writing. The road beckoned, as did the lure of the legalized gambling circuit. The result is his book, "The Poker Trip," available on his aptly named website www.jonathancomey.com. Jonathan pledges to amuse and inform you, with the Cold, Hard Football Facts as his only weapon.
LUIS DeLOUREIRO
Luis was a Hall of Fame running back for the Cleveland Browns after breaking every football and lacrosse record at Syracuse University. He is widely considered the greatest running back of all time ... No, wait, that was Jim Brown. Our bad.
In real life, Luis is a geeky schlep who analyzes and writes about NFL statistics to work his way through his first midlife crisis. A pharmaceutical consultant by day, Luis is a regular contributor to Cold, Hard Football Facts and to the New York Times Fifth Down Blog. It should be noted that Luis mentions his affiliation with the Times every chance he gets – vainly trying to impress those around him. It should also be noted that Luis rarely if ever mentions Cold, Hard Football Facts in public, also in a vain effort to impress those around him.
Luis lives in Dunstable, Mass. with his wife, Kate, two kids, two dogs and a bad-ass rabbit named Mr. Noodles. He loves his family, but also considers them to be an anchor weighing him down and preventing him from achieving any of his real goals. Luis is a Gemini. Thank God he's not a twin.
TODD C. DEVRIES
Our Potentate of Pigskin discovered DeVries last fall during the annual CHFF road trip to Penn State. Amidst a tailgate of equal parts 1) Yuengling Lager-slugging and 2) co-ed gawking, this diehard Nittany Lion grad convinced the Chief Troll it was time his mighty Cold, Hard Football Facts tackle the college game. A true college football geek, DeVries founded a website of the same name in 2008 ( CollegeFootballGeek.com).
Via this platform, he blazed a trail as the pioneer of on-line college fantasy football strategy and advice. Showing no bias in covering all 120 FBS schools, DeVries can proudly rattle off the two-deep of Utah State just as easily as Ohio State – a feat both impressive and incredibly pathetic. He currently resides in Central Pennsylvania with his Nittany Lion wife, who won him over back in '95 after getting into a bar brawl with a "Michigan Man" over a spilled beer. His 7-year old twins are destined to attend PSU in 2023 ... with Joseph Vincent Paterno still roaming the sidelines at age 96.
JEFF GOLDBERG
Some kids in the 1970s wanted to grow up to be Roger Staubach or Walter Payton. Goldberg wanted to be Steve Sabol. Or maybe John Facenda. His obsession with NFL Films, Super Bowl highlight shows and Game of the Week became legendary. Stumped on long division in third grade, he would shout out in class, "They're killing me, Whitey! They're KILLING me!"
Goldberg eventually channeled his inner-Tom Brookshier and became a sportswriter at the Hartford Courant, where we worked for 23 years. Although his claim to fame at the Courant included covering the Red Sox and the UConn women's basketball team – including his recently-released book, " Bird at the Buzzer" – Jeff's love and study off football, past and present, continues unabated (to the quarterback). Jeff now covers the Red Sox and Bruins for Boston Metro and lives in Quincy with his wife Susan, whom he married in no small measure because she plays Fantasy Football and watches all seven hours of Red Zone with him every Sunday.
FRANKIE C.
CHFF bon vivant Frankie C. is a former U.S. Marine turned cubicle-bound corporate worker ant who re-captures the thrill of amphivious invasions of Third-World sh*thholes through the thrill of competitive karaoke. His greatest accomplishments include an honorable mention in the 1981 Quincy Public Schools art show and a victory in the 2002 Red Parrot pub karaoke championship. Frankie wants everyone to like him not for his achievements, but for his marginal looks and borderline song and dance skills. His "Frankie Five" feature was recently named one of the 10 million most influential internet colums of the past 25 years. And, for the record, Frankie C. has never participated in an amphibious invasion of anything more daunting than his bathtub.
TONY COCCO
One of the oldest and fattest of the Trolls, Cocco's claim to fame is that he lived in South Florida in the 1990s, where he survived Hurricane Andrew. But he lived only because he fled his Coral Gables home like a coward and headed for the nearest shelter he could find: a cardboard box under the local Metro Rail station. He liked the cardboard-box experience so much that a gig with the Cold, Hard Football Facts was a natural career regression. Tony has a journalism degree from the State University of New York and has written for several publications, covering both sports and politics. Like most Trolls, he remains unmarried and unappealing to women, but someday he hopes to have enough money to purchase a lovely young Russian bride and bring her to live with him in his cardboard-box kingdom.
WILLIAM BERRY
Better known as castlelong1 to the CHFF Forum crowd, Berry occasionally shoots us the wonderful videos and links to other sites you see here on our crappy little site. Often accused of being racist because he's such a douche, Berry wants you all to know that he's not a racist and that he hates everyone equally regardless of race, color, or creed. He hopes you are f'in happy. He's also our token ADA contributor. He suffers from a rare degenerative disease, which explains his sometimes misspelled rants in the CHFF Forum. He says, "If an idiot like you cares, I live in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I'm 42. Now go and be a good little moron and bother somebody else."
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