In the middle of football season, it seems as if everyone is the ultimate fan. Lunch table talk is dominated by which teams have the toughest matchup or whose quarterback has the best stats. Twitter feeds have clever, 140-character game summations. Facebook posts give the fan a platform for widespread trash talking.Each person weighs in with an opinion, a criticism, a projection, or just banter. Some fans have passion for their team. Others are very knowledgeable about their sport. Still others have great spires of influence among the fan base. But who has all of these? The rare combination of passion plus knowledge plus influence is the winning combination when measuring a fan’s credibility.One of Jasper’s own, former Walker graduate Landon Howell, is working with a team of fellow entrepreneurs to connect sports fans from across the globe on a new level and actually measure each fan’s credibility.Fancred, a sports-dedicated social media site, was launched this past spring and has experienced a strong following among individual fans and sports teams. The name stands for Fan Credibility and the site offers social media addicts a place where sports are the only topic on the agenda.Howell and the members of the Fancred start-up team are based in Boston, but the site was launched in stages, with Boston and Birmingham being the two hotbeds of users in the beginning. Since that time, Fancred has spread to include devotees from Mississippi to Southern Cal and Oregon, and is quickly spreading across the country.Take a moment to browse the site and you will find breaking news, highlights, commentary, and insights from intense sports fans. Like other social media sites, these users have created a quick profile, but unlike other sites, the Fancred app assigns each one a number that represents their numeric level of fan credibility.A Fancred number floats at the lower right corner of each users profile picture. Fancred scores range from 1-100, and are calculated by a closely guarded algorithm that gives a measure of each fans Passion, Knowledge and Influence. Currently the top Fancred score is a 73 (belonging to Howell), but that number is very fluid and changes daily, based on each individual’s interactions on the site. The actions of each individual user are weighted and tied into the complex algorithm. Scores can go up or down as the user posts, shares, likes, or follows.The CEO and founder of Fancred, Hossein Razzaghi, first developed the idea of a social media site devoted to sports fans in 2011. As he crafted the framework for the site, he began to assemble his launch team. In February of 2012, Landon Howell got the call. At that time, Landon was working for a software company in Birmingham, primarily in product development and sales. Razzaghi idea was a tough sell at first, but once the mockups were created and the blueprint was fully developed, Howell was convinced. Within a few weeks, Razzaghi secured funding, Howell quit his job, moved the family to Boston and joined the five-man Fancred team.“In our few months of existence, we have seen unexpected growth. Our team is encouraged by the way people are using the app. They stay on twice as long, come back three times as much, proving that it is relevant and truly embraced by the sports loving community,” says Howell.The app is not only being adopted by sports fans, but also by sports organizations themselves. Teams are now hosting their own Fancred communities for their most loyal fans. From the Boston Red Sox to Mississippi State University, organizations are now realizing that their fans are using Fancred and they are appealing to that use with dedicated Fancred pages.Howell and his wife, Chelsea, are enjoying their time in Boston. Boston is truly a hotbed of sports action, not unlike Jasper. “Spending my childhood and teenage years in Jasper was special. This town is obsessed with sports. We did not call the seasons ‘fall, winter, spring’ but rather ‘football season, basketball season and baseball season’. In Jasper, it did not matter is you were rich or poor, black or white – everyone played together on all of our teams and that togetherness and familiarity made Jasper a tight community, then and now.”Howell played several sports, from little league, to park and rec, to suiting up for the Walker Vikings on Friday nights. “I loved playing football for Walker! The whole town would come out to see the games and you could really feel the pride of the town on our sideline. It was so satisfying to be a part of something big.”The Fancred founders just may be on top of the next ‘something big’. The Fancred team is growing and working daily to create a compelling product that is spreading across the nation. This Jasper native is living his dream of turning his favorite hobby into a career. 78