NFL Play-by-Play Data—Analyzed, Visualized, and Quizzified

blog.statwing.com

45 points·glaugh··5 comments

Fun little quiz but thought some of the questions got more confusing by trying to keep them as simple as possible. For instance, when it's third and short, selecting pass would allow you to rollout and look for a pass and keep the option for the QB to run for the first down if none of the receivers were open. But a run on a pass call isn't accounted for.

I am going to have fun playing with the data visualizations, thanks for putting that together

Thanks for the feedback. The simplicity vs. thoroughness tradeoff was tricky.

To respond to that specific comment, a quarterback scramble was counted as a pass play for the purpose of that analysis. That's not clear from our post, and does nicely highlight your point.

A related, but different project is my own nflgame [1]. Related in that it provides play-by-play data, but different in that it can be used to get it in real time. Also different in that the data only goes back to 2009, so it can't really be used to do the cool kinds of statistical analysis being done in the OP.

The source is JSON data from NFL's GameCenter pages. It contains its fair share of errors, but it is at least structured.

[1] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame

It's worth noting that Statwing is a YC grad (Summer of '12).

This is fun! Great job.

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