Sunday, September 4, 2011

Where do I find stats?

I knew this would be difficult, and was mainly the problem behind my failure to getting anything up and going before my drafts.  I looked on the NFL, Yahoo, and ESPN sites to see what I could get.  I tried the method of cut and paste tables into Excel, but this turned out to be very tedious and not very robust.  Further scouring of the inter-webs led me to www.advancednflstats.com.  This site is very informative on the role of stats, and most importantly contains play-by-play data from 2000-2010 in a CSV file. This seemed promising until a discovered how hard it would be to automatically extract what happened in each play (was it a pass, who intercepted the ball, how many rushing yards did the player get on the rush?).  I tried to learn Regular Expressions, but not sure that would get me all the way.  Plus I didn't have a player list and what position they played.  After some searching for a player list, I hit the jackpot of stats data at http://www.armchairanalysis.com/.  This site has all the data from 2000-2010, in fact it has more data than you will ever need.  Although, to get live 2011 data you have to pay approximately $600!  Wow, I guess it would make since if your company would benefit from live stats and you didn't want to pay anyone to extract the play-by-play data yourself.  Clearly something I wouldn't put my money in.  But for past data, I have all I need.  Next is to read the data into SQL via Python (yes, I know I don't have to do this, but it falls into goals 1 and 2) above.

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