Friday, December 19, 2008

Welcome!

I get emails periodically from fellow stat-heads asking me to review some football research. Often they’re professors or statistics students writing an academic paper, or an amateur enthusiast like me. There have also been a number of guys who have started up a website very similar to mine, and have asked for a link to their sites which I’m always happy to do. Very often however, they aren’t able to sustain the effort and the sites go dark after a few weeks.

I thought a good idea would be to provide a place where stat-heads can post their own research. Ideally, this would be a place with an existing readership base that can review and comment. It would be a place where we could exchange ideas and even data. Unlike some other stat-oriented sites, it would become a collaborative open community without “premium” content or “proprietary” black-box stats.

So today I’m announcing the creation of Advanced NFL Stats Community, an adjunct site where stats guys can post their own research, analysis, or even just ‘fact-backed’ opinions.

The call goes out. Everyone is invited, and I won’t filter posts that disagree with my own theories. If you’ve done some of your own research and want to share it or find out what other people think, send me what you’ve got and I’ll be happy to add it. Or if you’re trying to build readership for your own stats site, that’s fine too. Just shoot me an email at the address in the About | Contact page in the menu on my main page. After someone has contributed a good post or two, I’ll hand over the keys to the car, and they can post directly to the site.

To get the ball rolling, I’m going to make two of my primary databases available for anyone to use as a basis for research. Both my team statistic database and my game result database for the 2002 through 2007 seasons are now published. These are the databases I use for my primary efficiency regression models for team rankings and game predictions.

My only request is that if you use the data for other purposes you credit this site. Lots of other data can be found all across the web, at sites such as nfl.com espn.com, and myway.com and can be easily copied into Excel (Copy/Paste Special/Text).

Welcome.

3 comments:

KiranR said...

Brian,

YDM (You Da Man)!

Kiran

Unknown said...

Why did you link myway.com? It looks like a typical search engine/web portal.

Anonymous said...

Brian, Excellent work! I have very much enjoyed reading thru most all the posts.

I downloaded your team stats database and have a question on how you determine OFUM. Using the first line Ari 2002 as an example OFUM is 20, but ARI actually had 26 fumbles according to all the stat sites, so its been manipulated. So it looks as tho OFUM = FFOPP + OUNFFUM (20=16+4). So I assume FFOPP is Forced Fumbles OPPosition and OUFFUM is Offensive UnForced FUMbles. I have been working the past few weeks on my own stats database and am disheartened to not be able to duplicate your results on fumbles. I also see that OUFFUM is negative in some cases, which I assume comes from discrepancies in the NFL gamebooks, if that is in fact where this stat comes from. The only way I can figure it out is to subtract the fumbles forced defensive stat from the total fumbles on the gamebook fumbles section. So it may happen that the gamebook lists more forced fumbles then fumbles and thus a negative number, otherwise you have your positive unforced fumble number.

Am I making this more difficult then it is … do you just get OFUM from some other source? Also curious to why OFUM always equals ORECFUM? So if ARI fumbled 26 times and 16 were forced by the defense and 4 were unforced, what are the other 6?

Thanks for sharing your work,
David

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