Math Teacher's Surprising Pastime Wednesday, May 09, 2012 By Meleana Moore [ArticleImageHyperLink] Advertising      Have you ever thought of teachers having lives outside of school? Most students don’t like to think about it.      Math teacher Scott Allen has one of the more interesting “hobbies” outside of school. Allen runs Spotrac.com, “The Spot for Sports Contracts.” The website is designed to provide readers with information about contracts and salaries for the four major sports, MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL.      Allen created the website with his cousins.      “[We] realized that there weren’t any good websites that provided all contract/salary information for the four major sports all in one place,” Allen explained. “So we developed a website to do so.”      The site includes lists of the top salaries, free agents, draft information, and trade histories.      Allen explained, “If you want to know how much Peyton Manning makes, you can search for him and see his current contract, as well as his previous contracts that he has had.”      The website features a search box at the home page, where one can search a player, team, or position.      He also added, “We get all the data from news releases, articles, and other media feeds that have or report contract and salary information.”      Allen and his cousins have been keeping up the site for about 5 years.      “We started building it in 2007,” Allen said. “It really started taking off and being followed in early 2011, but we had an extreme jump once the NFL lockout was over.”      Some may wonder how a profit is made to maintain the site.      “The site makes money from the ads projected on the pages,” Allen said.      Allen explained how interesting it is to see how the media trends with specific players are reflected on the site.      He gave an example, “Sam Hurd, of the Chicago Bears, was arrested on drug charges and selling drugs, his page was viewed 5,700 times in two days from people looking for how much he made.”      On Hurd’s profile on the site, his status is now posted as “inactive.”      While Jeremy Lin of the NY Knicks has been of major popularity and talk lately, under Spotrac’s “Popular Players” on March 30, Lin is number one, followed by Derek Fisher of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Russell Westbrook of the Thunder, and Kobe Bryant of the Lakers.       “The top 5 players are the top 5 players viewed across the whole site in that one day,” Allen explained. “This is to show the trending that is happening on that particular day for people to get interested in or might be interested in seeing what the hype about the players is.”      Allen said that the top 5 of that day included a majority of Oklahoma City players because they had just won a game against the Lakers the night before, so many were interested.      Football has always been the all-time favorite sport of the U.S.      “The NFL is by far our biggest following, it has no comparison to the others,” Allen explained. “The NBA is in a far distant second, followed by the MLB and NHL.”      Allen’s site has proved to be a major success. “We are projected to have 2.28 million visitors this year, based on 3 months worth of visitors. (Jan 1 to present),” Allen concluded. That transfers to approximately 10 million pages viewed for this year.

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