Re-Launch: Community 2.0

About a year and a half ago, I launched Advanced NFL Stats Community, a site where anyone could contribute a post. It received a few dozen submissions, some more interesting than others, and it was a great start. Unfortunately, the time I devoted to reformatting the articles and their tables of data took away time I wanted to spend on other projects. I decided to gradually let the site fade into the background.

But one of my goals continues to be helping building a collaborative community of football stat heads without “premium” content or “proprietary” black-box stats, and I’d like to offer readers a platform for sharing ideas and analysis. In the recent off-season, I completed a long-standing goal of building an open NFL play-by-play database suitable for research and making available to everyone. Immediately, readers started parsing the data, adding fields for various things, and  sharing their insights in the comments section of the post.

So I think the time is right to re-launch community.advancednflstats.com. With the help of long-time reader Ed Antosz, it’s now officially re-open for contributions. Ed will edit and maintain the site, and I am grateful for his assistance.

Anyone is welcome. There’s no filter, no requirement that you use my stats, and feel free to disagree with my own take on things. There is a mountain of data available to use, from the advanced individual player stats to conventional team stats, to the play-by-play data I’ve provided. I plan to update the play-by-play data several times throughout the 2010 season as well. And if you’ve done a research project or paper for school, we’d love to post it there.

Contributions should be in the form of a text file or any file that can be easily extracted of its text, such as Word or Google Docs. If you want features like bolding or italics, please use simple HTML tags. Tables can be difficult to format, so please use simple tables in the form of HTML. I suggest using this site to convert spreadsheet tables into HTML.

If you would like to link back to your own site, please feel free.

If you would like to post a research paper that’s in pdf format, send the pdf as an attachment.

Email all submissions to stats.community@gmail.com with the word 'submission' in the subject line.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has to offer.