Show HN: Critique my pro football (NFL) data webapp | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Critique my pro football (NFL) data webapp

statsblitz.com

29 pointswtn36 comments

Looks cool. Just out of curiosity, do you have permission to use team logos? I know the NFL is super protective of their trademarks.

This is a big one - can't stress it enough. Expect a takedown notice from the NFL any time now - and their ground is pretty solid. I'd come up with a strategy to deal with that before you're up against a legal wall.

Probably not since there doesn't seem to be any attribution to the NFL on the site.

You can't use the logos of any NFL team without their consent. Stats are fine...logos are not.

The amount of data you have is really impressive, and it's displayed well. I liked being able to compare teams/players from the previous seasons, rather than just current trends.

It would be nice if you could compare players based on their career stats, rather than on a per-season basis. Some kind of text search would be good so that I could, for example, compare each of Aaron Rodgers' seasons against each other.

What's the target audience of the app? I watch the NFL each week but don't think I have any use for it (other than a general interest these kind of stats).

What is your data source? Will it update live if a game is on at the time you are viewing the app?

What's your data source? Any plans for college football?

I second this. I was looking at the ncaa website and it seems that grabbing the stats from there would be trivial. I'm not sure if they have any kind of licensing terms for that data but I could find it while doing a quick look.

I was planning on playing with those stats to see if I could beat the BCS at rankings ;p

There's tons of variance in wins and losses, so any ratings system comparison should consider results over the long term.

If you're interested and have the statistical background, you should definitely give it a shot. For related ideas, check out Brian Burke's excellent Advanced NFL Stats blog: http://www.advancednflstats.com/

I like it quite a bit. I play fantasy football, but would probably just use this for fun.

A "clear" button would be really useful, to revert the sliders to default without refreshing the page.

minor point: make the labels on the left more in line with common football terminology. as in, "down 3rd percentage" could be "3rd down conversion rate" or at least "3rd down percentage"

I sent a link to my friends who play fantasy football to see if the stats were of use to them.

One thing I can say is that I love the attention to detail you put in the slider thumb labels. Especially for those where the labels would collide and you merge them into a single label showing an interval.

I love the way that you're displaying all of this data. It's a very clean and understandable interface.

I do have one suggestion though: generate URLs based on where the sliders are at. It'll make sharing much easier. I know it's a daunting task, but I think it'd really help your site grow.

all player stats: games column is empty

passing: yards/attempt and yards/completion could both be included, right now it looks like avg. represents yds/attempt

postseason: would be cool to see player stats aggregated by individual post-seasons (right now you can see post-season games, and season totals, but not post-season totals)

agree with another comment that it would be useful to be able to select multiple player-years (maybe the same player across years, maybe different players the same year or across years) to compare

similarly, would be interesting to create user-defined groups of teams or players that could be sorted on different dimensions (compare 2007 pats, 2004 colts, 2000 rams, 1998 vikings, etc.)

fumbles as both an offensive stat and defensive stat is a bit unintuitive to me, also some of the players who show up have zeros in every fumble category; fumbles recovered could be part of defense (along with ff)

overall it is very smooth, but i am not sure what i would user it for (and i am a huge sports fan, watch multiple nfl games every week, etc.). i agree with other comments that a fantasy angle could be helpful (e.g. input your league's scoring system, sort each position's players by points/week, season).

Thanks for the user-defined groups idea. I probably won't get to it for a while (in favor of adding simpler functionality), but it could be really useful for frequent users or in conjunction with user-generated Protovis charts.

I probably need to rework the fumbles page, both because the page is presently showing incomplete data and because the presentation could be more intuitive.

I thought it was easiest to have all of that data on one page rather than to have separate pages for fumbles and fumble recoveries. Fumbles fall under a weird special teams / misc category of stats; offensive players often recover, plus there are weird cases where defenders recover the ball and then fumble themselves.

The postseason data is in the todo list. I just need to add the relevant control to the search filter form.

it would be nice if there were a number (a rank of sorts) along each result

The default order is to sort by time (week or year), so the concept of rank doesn't apply consistently. So I omitted it.

Thanks to everyone for your feedback!

There are still a bunch of data points on the site that are null but which should not be null, a few rows that didn't get updated last week, and aspects of the presentation interface that can be tuned for clarity and simplicity.

I hope to get most of the inconsistencies fixed soon. I plan to add more features as well. This project competes for time with my job search, so it might be a few weeks before much gets done.

Looks Great! Just a few comments:

1. Sign up - Whats the motivation to sign up?

2. Search - Maybe I missed it, but I would like to search for specific teams/players. I really think this is a must.

Overall, it really looks great, I'm just not sure when I would use it. I think an NCAA version might be used more, you could use it to compare Heisman candidates, or compare your mid-majors (like Boise St.) to majors (like Nebraska), etc.

Search--yes, I plan to add player search with the full text search capabilities in PostgreSQL.

Data file export is only enabled for logged in users. Try the CSV export button on the top right--you'll get a notice that you must be logged in.

No plans for me to add a NCAA version, but it would be fun to use as there are numerically so many more players to filter and compare in the college game.

Not sure where you're planning to take this (stat browsing, fantasy focus), but it'd be cool if i could click on a game, and it would bring up a boxscore and a recap/blog posts about the game.

Not sure how you'd get the recap/posts, maybe start with only new games going forward, see if it's a feature people want. If it's popular fill in the previous ones later.

Absolutely--I need to add pages with summary game reports, as well as player and team pages.

Great app. I was thinking about uses for this and I really think if it could answer questions like "Which team most always loses after its bye week?" in an user friendly way that would be killer. Espeically for football bloggers and reporters.

Thanks! I do think functionality that answers those kinds of queries would be engaging and fun to use. I structured my database with support for concepts like weeks of the football season, conferences, divisions, franchises, etc. with the idea that people easily make queries for things like Kansas City's home win/loss/tie record in December, or a QB's playoff performances as a starter.

Will take a bit of backend and frontend implementation to add some of those concepts to the live site.

If your serious about this app, I could have a few journalists look at this app. Email me.

Its not really of use to anyone playing fantasy football, but it is definitely beautiful.

While the app is somewhat limited in functionality, the UI is awesome and the usability is cool. Good job

Thanks. I hope to drop in some Protovis charting functionality to make it more visually interesting. It will be a bit of a UI challenge to figure out how to adjust the controls, though.

Yea I agree. Have you check out sportsdatahub.com ?

While their UI is not as great as yours, you might be able to generate some ideas for visualization from their platform.

Does this plan to compete with something like statfox or other services that give detailed analysis of league statistics for handicapping & analysis?

Very nice! How about exposing an OData feed?

Seconded. A feed and/or an API would be super useful.

Sure, XML and JSON feeds would be easy to implement--might be a while before I get to it, though.

Neat. I'd like to see By Career stats, too.

Clickable: http://statsblitz.com

It is already clickable.

D'oh!

I like it a lot, though I'm unclear on the intended use. You should be able to get all the information from http://www.pro-football-reference.com/ in, which will just provide an awesome UI to a site with great information.

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