StatSheet’s founder Robbie Allen announced that he is working on the development of automated sports content at StatSheet. He plans to publish all of this information in the form of blogs.

This is definitely one of those ideas that is hard to swallow at first, but not completely crazy. Of course, if someone said that 20 years ago that hundreds of millions of people would engage in not stop writing online in the form of email, status updates, twittering, and blogging, most people would have laughed at you. But that is the world we live now. Are you going to get deep insightful witty prose that is going to make you tear up? Probably not. Could you possibly have an automated article that gives you a run down of the major events in a game, what the turning points were? Probably. How much would you actually care that a computer put that all together? Not much. Of course, if you look around at StatSheet’s network of sites and realize that was all built by one guy and a lot of automation, maybe this idea is not so pie in the sky.

The immediate response from the media is that he is trying replace sportswriters. I do not see it that way. What StatSheet is proposing is not going to replace the great sportswriters of our times. In fact, I think it will give those writers more time to write those creative and inspiring pieces that they for which they are so well revered. It will give them more time to spend talking to players and picking up rumors in the locker room. In other words, real sportswriters will be able to spend more of their time researching and creating the content that we really like. It can make sportswriting even better.

I think Allen’s goal that of 90% of the population thinking the version 1.0 content was written by a real live sports writer as a fairly high standard, but that is probably the standard that it needs to be at to succeed. I am very interested to read some of the content that comes off of StatSheet’s automated presses.