"You know the numbers. Do you know the player?"
Sports fans know players. They know names, faces, teams, and highlights. What they do not know — what no one has ever properly tested — is whether they actually understand the numbers. Any fan can recognize LeBron James. Far fewer can look at a career stat line and correctly identify who it belongs to within three guesses.
This gap between perceived sports knowledge and actual sports knowledge has gone unmeasured for too long. Fantasy leagues measure roster management. Trivia apps measure name recognition. Nothing measures the core skill: reading a stat line and knowing who played it.
WhoStat is a daily sports stats guessing game. Each day, players receive three puzzles — one NFL, one NBA, one MLB — each presenting a career stat line with no name, no photo, and no team. The user has three guesses to identify the player. Each wrong guess unlocks a new hint, narrowing the window without giving the answer away.
The puzzle resets daily. The format is familiar to anyone who has played Wordle, but the subject matter rewards actual sports knowledge rather than vocabulary. You either know your stat lines or you don't. WhoStat will tell you which one you are.
The current build covers 750 players, all active from approximately 2015 to present — recent enough to be recognizable, varied enough to be challenging. The site is fully static with no backend. New puzzles go out daily. CT built and maintains the full puzzle pipeline, player database, and hint logic.
The three-sport format is intentional. NFL, NBA, and MLB each attract distinct fan segments with minimal overlap. A user who breezes through the NFL puzzle may have no idea on the MLB one. This is by design. Humility is a feature.
Wordle reached 300,000 daily players before the New York Times acquired it for a reported seven figures. The NYT Games suite now has over 1 million subscribers. The daily puzzle format has demonstrated clear product-market fit for a specific type of person: someone who wants a small, completable challenge as part of a daily routine.
WhoStat targets the subset of that audience who also follows sports — a group that represents tens of millions of people in the United States alone. The three-sport structure triples the addressable audience relative to a single-sport competitor, while the shared daily format creates a single destination for sports puzzle fans across all three leagues.
CT — Founder, Developer, Head of Puzzle Curation. Built and shipped WhoStat as a static site with no backend, which is either a technical achievement or a constraint depending on how you look at it. Personally verified the accuracy of all 750 player stat lines. Has strong opinions about which stats are too easy and which are genuinely hard. These opinions inform the difficulty curve.