About Open Source Football

The creators try to say what they think of this website

What Seb says

At the beginning of 2020 I decided to dive into NFL Analytics and started to follow the big accounts (within the community) on Twitter.

I learned there was this R package nflscrapR and started to learn R and the NFL play-by-play data. Very quickly I got the urge to make some plots with R and post them on Twitter, because I wanted to hear what the people who know about it have to say. The plots were well received and I was getting requests to publish the related code. I did that and got a lot of positive feedback.

At some point one thing led to another and before I knew it I developed nflfastR together with Ben Baldwin. Most of my previously released code didn’t work after that and I had to decide whether to just remove the code or rebuild the whole thing.

This website is the result but with a big improvement: very intelligent people from the community agreed to publish their code as well. And this is the place where I want to centralize all these things.

What Ben says

The existence of open-source packages like nflscrapR and nflfastR along with people’s willingness to share code has made NFL analytics Twitter a great place to learn from each other. However, the nature of Twitter makes it hard to find old posts, and I often have a hard time remembering where I saw something.

The hope is that this will serve as a resource for others.

Contributors

This section has been moved.

Design

This website is built with Distill for R Markdown. It uses a custom Cascading Style Sheet (css) heavily borrowed from Matt Worthington as suggested by the incredible helpful Tom Mock.

The logo was contributed by Jonathan Piech.