Dataset: Ten Years of NFL Plays Analyzed, Visualized, Quizzified

If you&#x27;re willing to limit yourself to the last five years, you can avoid the pain of parsing those free-form text descriptions with nflgame[1] or nfldb[2]. Disclaimer: I am the author of those tools. We&#x27;ve been slowly building up a small community of people using it. In fact, I&#x27;m currently in a small fantasy playoff league that&#x27;s running off nflgame.<p>They also include live updates while games are playing.<p>I&#x27;d be curious to see if you get any substantially different results using structured data (nflgame gets it from NFL.com&#x27;s JSON feed) as opposed to parsing the text descriptions.<p>[1] - <a href="https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BurntSushi&#x2F;nflgame</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BurntSushi&#x2F;nfldb</a>

The 4th and 2 on the 2 argument bothers me every time someone brings it up. To me it feels like its an incorrect use of statistics. EV isn&#x27;t the end all - kicking the field goal has way lower variance. If your goal is winning consistently then giving up high variance high EV plays for low variance slightly lower EV plays is often the right choice, as a football season is made up of a very low number of discrete events.<p>About 45% of all games finish with a spread of 7 or less according to a quick search. Making a play that has a close to 50% chance of making you be down 3 points is costing you a lot of the margin if you think you are a close favorite.<p>You can&#x27;t win more in football but you can lose a sure win, so if you believe you are say a 3-4 point favorite then the right play is to take the field goal every time - giving up the safe points means you take half the games and make them a crap shoot.

This sounds really good and NFL teams would definitely want something like this, but even coaches would wary about using mostly data.<p>For example, let&#x27;s say you are the coach of the Patriots and you have been running the ball very successfully the past few games, even winning games because of your running game.<p>And it&#x27;s 4th down and 2 yards to go against the Broncos.<p>The data says, run the ball. Especially since you have done it well in the past. However, you forgot to take into account the stud defensive tackle that has just started playing really well for the Broncos. So, you try to run the ball and you lose the game.<p>This is just one example of the inability of data to deal with match-ups and schemes.<p>As both a person who likes data and coached football, I would love the integration of the two, but football has too many variables.<p>If you have all this data, you are actually going to make the wrong decision because the matchup is bad for your team.<p>Matchups and schemes trump data.

I am going to a group discussion tomorrow about first-refusal rights in the NFL and happened to do a brief naive analysis of extra point vs 2 point conversions earlier today. In brief, the EV of a 2 point conversion was .91 while an extra point was .99. That said, for every 19 extra point attempts there was only one two point conversion attempt. Frankly, I am all for variance so I am rooting for the more ambitious two-point attempt.

&quot;You got 2 out of 5 answers correct. When you try this quiz with a sorry quiz-taker like you, that’s the result you’re going to get.&quot;<p>Sassy. Jesus Christ.

I think there may be a problem with this kind of analysis - it seems to me that the &quot;riskier&quot; plays (2 point conversion, going for it, etc.) - are more likely attempted when coaches think they will work - not randomly. To really do a fair analysis of expectancy you would need trials where the play selection is chosen randomly. Anyone else agree with me?

Hey guys, I did this a few months ago. At least attempted to organize the data from the descriptions on Advanced NFL Stats. (<a href="https://github.com/jackschultz/nfl-data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jackschultz&#x2F;nfl-data</a>). Turns out there were tons of special cases. Just curious as to how you decided to organize the data.

Do coaches have access to real-time data on the field or in the cooridnator&#x27;s box? If so, if they followed the datasets exactly, would the results reverse themselves over time due to adjustments by offense or vice versa?

Fun stuff!<p>You might want to make it clear you want the decisions most likely to succeed, not the decision most common among professional coaches (who are presumably optimizing some other form of career-stability-against-criticism).

5&#x2F;5. Looks like I choose the right thing to do each time... except... <i>which</i> run should I be calling :)

Numberfire (www.numberfire.com) may have this data, if not more, for their fantasy football tool.