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Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

advancednflstats.com

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Re: Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

#51
There's a FAQ for this data that is on the site's main nav:

http://www.advancednflstats.com/2007/02/contact.html

Of particular interest:

Where did you get your data?

Most of my team data comes from open online sources such as espn.com, nfl.com, myway.com, and yahoo.com. It's easy for anyone to grab whatever they're interested in from those sites.

My play-by-play data comes from a source that's not publicly available, and at this time I regret that I cannot share it. However, I am working hard to develop a way to spread the wealth. One of my biggest goals is to help create a larger, more open, and more collaborative community for football research.

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There's no real terms of service so I'm curious as to the constraints in using this for commercial purposes. I most definitely want to use this for teaching purposes (how to text-mine, how to build a web app from data, etc) but want to know what terms the data can be redistributed.

Re: Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

#54
post #37
post #9

From Line 42536 of the 2008 CSV file: 20090201_PIT@ARI,2,30,18,ARI,PIT,1,1,1,(:18) (Shotgun) K.Warner pass short middle intended for A.Boldin INTERCEPTED by J.Harrison at PIT 0. J.Harrison for 100 yards TOUCHDOWN. Super Bowl Record longest interception return yards. Penalty on ARZ-E.Brown Face Mask (15 Yards) declined. The Replay Assistant challenged the runner broke the plane ruling and the play was Upheld.,7,10,200…

It looks like a lot of the work you are hoping to do has already been done on http://statsheet.com/nfl Though perhaps not as open...

See also, http://www.pro-football-reference.com/, but I'd love to see something on github.

Re: Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

#55
post #17

How many of you are thinking right now: I'm going to generate an HTML page for every game and throw ads on it? Be Honest!

Is anyone going to try a 'moneyball' style Fix_Your_Fantasy_League_LineUp site with ads?

I might try to use the data to create mock drafts.

Re: Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

#56
post #8
post #5

I'm frankly surprised that this information is allowed to be distributed. I spent awhile in the financial services industry, and while it was really easy to obtain "public" information like stock quote data, I recall that we weren't allowed to simply scrape data from public sites... we had to pay a license fee to get a feed of the data if we were planning on repackaging & distributing it. It seems to me that the NFL…

The NFL is not near as strict as MLB (note how you never see an MLB highlight on youtube?) yet MLB allows http://retrosheet.org/ to exist. I don't believe it's technically "dissemination". Edit: I should note that even http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ contents are governed by http://gdx.mlb.com/components/copyright.txt which doesn't allow commercial use.

MLB are extremely strict, but it's an exaggeration to say "you never see highlights on youtube", I've watched them there many times. Likely either before they got taken down or because they were to small to care about, but there'll still be plenty on there. 5 second search brought up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZW7448mh94 right away as a very quick example.

Re: Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work like that in practice. Football is very dependent on matchups. Coaches will vary gameplans from week-to-week to exploit weaknesses they see on film.

It could still be useful for finding tendencies, though.

Visualization of rushing tendencies using this very data http://labs.juiceanalytics.com/spider/index.html

Re: Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

#59
post #5

I'm frankly surprised that this information is allowed to be distributed. I spent awhile in the financial services industry, and while it was really easy to obtain "public" information like stock quote data, I recall that we weren't allowed to simply scrape data from public sites... we had to pay a license fee to get a feed of the data if we were planning on repackaging & distributing it. It seems to me that the NFL…

I'd love to believe that this data falls underneath the "Facts are not copyrightable" decision: http://chart.copyrightdata.com/c16B.html

Re: Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

#60
This seems like as good a time as any to share something I've been working on which uses the same source data, even though it's pretty rough at the moment (slow, bad data, only currently goes through week 8 of 2012, etc.):

http://nfl-query.herokuapp.com/

The basic syntax is [stats] [conditions] : [row] / [column].

There's some autocompletion to try to make it possible to discover what is accepted.

Examples:

passing yards : team / season

first downs / first down attempts : down / distance

rushing yards min 100 rushing yards : player, game, quarter

rushing yards / carries min 200 carries : player

One of the biggest problems is that it's currently way too easy to shoot yourself in the foot by making a really slow query.

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