As a programmer and a fantasy football addict, I am embarassed by the meansthrough which we must expend ourselves to get data in a machine readable form.This lack of open source software cripples the community with sub-standardtools, and most importantly, detracts from some really cool and fun things thatcould be done with easily available statistics. Many tools are either out-datedor broken, or if they work, they are closed source and often cost money.
- PhpFFL - Fantasy Football League Manager to run in Windows online over Linux online. EzStats3 for WoT and WoWP to run in Windows online over Linux online.
- # Compiled by RSnake Mostly from milw0rm osvdb.org and elsewhere. # Change XXpathXX to the path of your backdoor. Note that you may need to.
Yet Another Injury Mod. Most work was done by zHarris, I just managed to implement it in a 'normal' phpffl installation and decided to make it available to the phpffl community. Stores player injury info in a mySQL database; allowing it to be view in a 'thickbox' window when clicked. Find it in the filez section. Phpffl Joined: 2005-04-26 23:44:16 Projects OpenFLM: The Open-Source Fantasy League Last Updated: 2019-08-29 phpFFL - Fantasy Football League Manager.
Yesterday I started work on a new library package that I hope will start toimprove this sorry state of affairs.
nflgame is a Pythonpackage that provides convenient accessto NFL statistics. This includes games that are currently being played, orgames as far back as the 2009 season.
nflgame works by reading a JSONfeedthat powers NFL.com’s liveGameCenter.
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Since game statistics never change after a game has beenplayed,the JSON data is automatically cached and saved to disk if the game is nolonger being played. The next time statistics for that game are queried, thedata will be read from disk. (nflgame comes preloaded with data from every gamein the pre- and regular season since 2009.)
The API for nflgame is small andhopefully easy to use—even for those without much or any experienceprogramming.
Teaser
Let’s start off with a quick teaser to showcase some of nflgame’s power.
Who lead the league in rushing between weeks 10 and 14 of the 2010 regularseason?
I won’t make you hunt down the answer. Here’s five lines of code that lists thetop ten rushers in weeks 10-14 of the 2009 season:
Back to basics
If you are a beginning programmer (or don’t have any experience programming), Istrongly urge you to read my Tutorial for non programmers: Installationandexamples.What follows is a condensed version of the tutorial that might be abit too confusing for those without programming experience.
nflgame is designed around three core concepts: games, players and lists ofplayers (that are implemented as Python generators). Games can be selectedbased on season, week and team. Players in each game can then be accessed byname, statistical categories (i.e., passing, rushing, defense, etc.), or evenstatistical values—such as finding all players in a list with at leastone receiving touchdown.
Games can be selected one at a time:
Or in bulk (every game in the 2009 season):
Each game comes with its own players attribute that holds player statisticsfor every player that participated in the game. Additionally, games haveattributes like winner, home, away, score_home, score_away andclock that report meta-information about the game itself.
So to get every player with at least one passing statistic in a game:
And the same thing can be done with rushing, receiving, defense, kicking, etc.,by simply replacing passing with one of the aforementioned.
Each player comes with his own grouping of statistics. To extend upon theprevious example, consider printing out some passing statistics associated witheach passer in the game:
Filtering, sorting and combining—oh my!
No data API would be complete without a means of filtering the data accordingto its values.
To find all players on the home team of the current game:
In this case, New England is the home team, so only players on the Patriots arereturned.
A more advanced use of filter is to use predicates to determine whether aparticular stat should be filtered or not. For example, here we look at everyplayer in the game on the home team with at least one interception:
Any player list can be sorted according to a statistical field. For example, wemight want to see a list of rushing leaders in the game by yards:
Player statistics for the same player from different games can be combined torepresent statistics from multiple games. Additionally, player generators canbe concatenated. This combination allows one to construct searchable playergenerators of any makeup: from only games in a certain week, to all gamesin a season (or multiple seasons!).
For example, to find the top ten rushing leaders from week 2 of the 2009season, we simply select all games from that week, combine the games into asingle player list, and use our familiar searching methods exemplified above toget our answer:
What if you wanted to see who passed for the most touchdowns in the first fiveweeks of the 2011 season?
Or how about the receiving leaders for the entire 2009 season?
Finally, with any of the above examples, you can export the statistics to aCSV file that can be read by Excel. For example, to export the entire 2011season in just a single line:
What’s next?
For the short-term, I’d really like to come up with an easy and elegant way ofproviding alerts (emails and texts) for your fantasy football team. Forexample, whenever a player on your team—or your opponent’steam—scores a lot of points like a touchdown or a field goal. I didsomething like this last year using a cobbled together hack-job that I’mashamed of, and it was a lot of fun. (I did screen scraping on the ESPN fantasyweb site for all the statistics.)
The real problem here is keeping your roster up to date. It’s pretty easy ifyou’re using Yahoo because of their Fantasy SportsAPI, but I don’t think anyother league web site offers such amenities.
In the long-term, nflgame could certainly be the statistical back-bone forfantasy football league software. But I don’t think that’s on my personal radarany time soon.
I am aware of phpFFL, which purportsto be open source fantasy football league software—but development seemsto have stalled. (It also looks like they are screen scraping CBS Sports forstatistics, which I really want to avoid.) Plus, I vowed a long time ago neverto take up another serious project in PHP again. I value my mental health toohighly.
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