2024 Update: The state of public facing NFL analytics

It’s been just over 18 months since I wrote the original version of this piece. I got a lot of good feedback from old friends and new, which was encouraging and the piece reached far further than I ever thought it would. It was simply written for basically myself and the few people I know that are interested in the fairly niche topic of public facing NFL data. But, I underestimated the amount of people that were interested in that topic. That’s on me. So now, 18 months later, where do we stand?

Well, as Erlich Bachman would say “shit has pivoted". New datahubs from existing sites, new sites altogether, and some drastic changes and turnover for some of the “legacy” sites. There have been some major shifts in the landscape since the original post, and that’s what has prompted this new post. I always intended this Substack to just be written on an as-needed basis, with the cadence being just whenever I felt like I wanted to write about something. I think there’s been enough movement that it warrants an update.

Despite all the advancements, a gap still exists for lack of a better word, the minutia. Want to watch a particular offensive tackle vs defense end matchup? Sorry, no can do. Want to see what a good run fit looks like? Maybe sometime in the future. Want to see tight coverage on a play where the receiver wasn’t targeted? Sorry, the defender should have done a little worse job so the receiver was targeted, then you could watch.

We’ve got some more information and ability since the original piece, but given that most of the public data is fantasy focused and only a few sickos have linemen and corners as part of fantasy, there is a gap there. There are of course private solutions (like PFF Ultimate being able to jump right to specific one-on-one matchups) or the occasional public update (think about Pass Block Win Rates but they are only available in small batches and at the season level).

I’m personally probably 70% stats/30% film guy right now, but that ratio is an involuntary one. The problem is that I don’t know what good pass blocking from a center looks like. Sure, people post clips on Twitter, but it’s impossible for me to apply that over 1,000 snaps on other players. Okay, let’s say I become an expert on pass blocking, then I’ve still got linebacker play, cornerback play, wide receiver route running, etc. Everyone can tell you what a good QB play is for the most part. They can probably tell you too “that’s a nice catch by the receiver.” And of course, anyone can tell you the bad. Even the most casual fan can tell you on a play where the offensive tackle gets beaten instantly or the corner blows a coverage.

But sports live in the middle of the highs and lows. Tom Brady threw 12,000 passes for his career (and many more dropbacks) but “only” 649 of those attempts were touchdowns (5.5%) and 212 were interceptions (2%). That leaves another ~92.5% of his attempts as the middle of highs and lows, great and bad. How is the average fan, or even the above average fan, supposed to identify those in-between shades?

There’s are solutions (such PFF Ultimate) but they’re private. You can sorta scrape the data, but connecting it to the film is impossible, and the data is more focused on fantasy.

With NFL Pro, you can now see every play when a player is on the field, but the filters are a bit limited (but surely will get better over time). So if I wanted to watch every pressure from Myles Garret I can, but if I wanted to watch every blown block by a particular offensive lineman, I cannot. I can view every time that offensive lineman is on the field, but not their pluses and minuses.

And there is basically no special teams data. If the minutia is a gap, then special teams is the grand canyon. I don’t even think in NFL Pro you can look at kicker/punter snaps besides just all of them (so if you want to look at Justin Tucker field goals, you have to include kickoffs and XPs too).

The goal of analytics is to better explain what is going on, to give more insights and uncover things we didn’t think we knew, couldn’t know without the data, or didn’t think we could know. It’s also to help those whose know the film understand the film. But the inverse is important too. Football is best enjoyed when you understand it, and you can’t understand it without the film side. You can learn the data side I think easily-ish. You certainly cannot learn the film side easily-ish. Even if you wanted to watch 1,000 snaps of good offensive line play…where could you do that? You couldn’t. You need to watch 1,000 snaps and just try to figure out what is good, what is bad, and what is the in-between.

PFF

We’ll start with the big one, arguably the Apple or Microsoft of the public data space. They’ve long had some of the best writers, best data folks, their data was the best, and it was easily available in a nice looking format.

That might no longer be the case, and I use “might” as a qualifier here because I’m giving them some benefit of the doubt and holding back a “probably”. As Arif Hasan covered in his long piece just a few weeks ago, there has been significant turnover at the company. Not only has some upper level staff left (including founder Neil Hornsby) but some of the more public facing staff have departed as well. This includes faces that I know I have been watching and seeing ever since I get into following the public space (people like Eric Eager, Sam and Steve, Kevin Cole, Brad Spielberger). Some left on their own accord, but it’s hard to read Arif’s piece and not think they maybe if things were different, all those folks would still be there.

As far as the site itself, if you want an update on their data offering…just go read the original piece. Seriously. Nothing has changed. It’s the same site (Premium Stats 2.0) with not a single change I can find. All the good and the bad still exist on their portal. While other sites are making improvements, PFF’s Premium Stats 2.0 has remained stagnant for 3-4 years at this point. The last update I believe was in April of 2022 and that was mostly just a UI change with some added ability to split stats for different time periods (but not multiple time periods mind you…one of my biggest complaints). The last true major update was March of 2021.

I say this with all respect for the site and the people that built it: it feels like they’ve abandoned their public product. Their Facebook groups are a ghost town, they functionally deleted their discord server, Stats 2.0 hasn’t been updated in years, and they are losing both hosts of their most public facing NFL show (Sam and Steve are leaving for 33rd Team in a few days from now as of writing this).

Maybe PFF is no longer Microsoft or Apple…maybe they are now IBM. Once the leaders of a growing industry, they are now behind and trying to play catch up.

The thing is with PFF, the public product was never the money maker. It was once the core business because it was basically all they had. But once PFF Ultimate (and now also PFF IQ) really started to take shape (thanks in part to people like the now departed Steve Palazzolo), the real money came from teams and the services to them. And that’s fine! Landscapes change and PFF skated to where the puck was going (maybe the better metaphor is threw the ball to where the receiver was going to be). But because the revenue mix changed drastically (the public product can probably just be lumped into the same bucket as their revenue from YouTube and Twitter…), the support changed too. The allure and needs of being integrated (and pretty deeply I would imagine) with all 32 NFL teams, the league office, media networks, every FBS school, and many FCS schools weigh far more than the needs of supporting the $80 a year that Joe Sixpack from Pacoima is paying them.

Premium Stats 2.0 is an $80 product, so PFF is only giving $80 worth of features. It was once the place to get data, now it’s fallen behind.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. IBM found their way back at one point, and it’s reasonable that PFF can too. I’ve half-joked that the NFL should just buy PFF at this point, and I think there could be some actual benefit to that (teams already pay a lot of money to PFF annually). But that’s unlikely (more on this later) and it’s more of a fun speculative idea than a potential reality.

What PFF needs to do is one of two things:

1) Make their Stats 2.0 a better offering (PFF I have thoughts on this if someone from the company somehow reads this). This includes some real ground-moving work but also simple things like I’ve mentioned continuously like being able to look at multiple years of stats. Some of these things are just layups they are intentionally choosing not to attempt. They already have all these features available in PFF Ultimate. And many of these features are available elsewhere. There’s no excuse for Stats 2.0 to be as stagnant as it has been other than PFF just simply not caring for the product anymore and just taking the money they know they can keep getting.

2) Make a public PFF Ultimate-like product. I will give PFF a lot of credit here: there is simply no football product, public or private, that is better than Ultimate. It does everything, it’s UI is user friendly, and it is snappy. They could surely launch a slimmed down version of PFF Ultimate and charge users 5-6x what they are paying for PFF+ (let’s call it PFF Advanced). The market is there and similar companies like SIS are charging $800 for a similar public product. One of the best things about PFF Ultimate is you can jump directly to the video of the plays you have filtered for, as well as getting the charting of the play and the NGS-like dots. They won’t do this for PFF Advanced given the licensing rules (and now that NextGen/NFL have a version of this), but it’s just a point in how great Ultimate is. PFF Advanced could give many of the same features as Ultimate (minus the charting, dots, and film), but do so in a way that maintains Ultimate as their core and best product (alongside PFF IQ). They can pull forward PFF+ without pushing down PFF Ultimate. Teams aren’t going to abandon PFF Ultimate (and the money that comes with it for PFF) because PFF let public users look at turnover-worthy throw rates for multiple years instead of just on a single year basis (something you cannot do today). There is ground that can be closed between PFF+ and PFF Ultimate without taking away business from the team product, while increasing business from the public product. It’s a win-win, but PFF doesn’t seem to either realize that or care. And I want to be clear: PFF Ultimate is not exclusively a team product. It’s not like they are reserving this solely for NFL/FBS/FCS teams. Ultimate is also available to media outlets (for instance The Ringer has access to it) and sports agencies. Could they be at risk of losing some business from media/agencies as PFF Advanced cannibalizes some of those users downgrading from Ultimate to Advanced? Sure. But I would imagine the revenue would be made up and more from users upgrading from PFF+ to PFF Advanced.

If you think of the public wallet as a finite amount of money, which gets budgeted between datasites, PFF was once the majority (even the sole) of the spend. But with new products elsewhere being launched, the wallet size likely hasn’t grown, and PFF is getting a smaller piece of the pie.

And it’s worth pointing out, that team wallets have now been re-allocated. PFF is no longer alone in offering a team product. For instance, StatsBomb has been rolling out a NFL product that matches and even exceeds PFF Ultimate in some matters. Teams also have the raw NGS data of course, so they can build in-house their own player tracking and metrics instead of relying on PFF to do it (either via hand charting or their player tracking models).

NFL Pro

It’s not a coincidence that I put these two sites in order, at the start of this piece. The ground that PFF had lost up until last week to other providers was real but not a crazy amount. But as of last week, they have now lost maybe a crazy amount of ground with the launch of NFL Pro. It’s not a mortal wound that PFF has suffered, but it is a real gutshot and if they don’t stop the bleeding, it could turn fatal or at least a period of agonizing pain.

NFL Pro is now public. And it’s really great.

As mentioned earlier, one thing PFF Ultimate has that is maybe the product defining feature is the ability to do mass filtering and then instantly watch and cutup all the clips of those plays. NFL Pro now gives the public that availability.

If I wanted to see how Brock Purdy performed when blitzed in 2023 and see all those plays, I can do that right from the leaderboard.

If I wanted to see how wide receivers did in tight window throws, I simply add the filter.

You want to see how many times Marlon Humphrey was targeted in press covered? Okay. Done.

I mentioned this specific idea in my original piece because the MLB was already giving the public the ability to do this with their Statcast/Baseball Savant product. Now, we know the NFL is a bit tighter with their film rights, so while Savant is 100% free, NFL Pro does come at a price ($15 a month or $99 a year). But it’s such a small cost compared to the overall product, that it is worth it. And remember, this is the launch product. It’s only going to get better and from what I understand, the team behind it is going to work busily on adding new features, functions, and tools. I wouldn’t be surprised if NFL Pro becomes the highest share of the public user data wallet. This is the closest thing for now that the public will get to something like PFF Ultimate.

I’ve seen some people talk about how this product spells doom for PFF and I disagree. NFL Pro, as it currently stands, is a public facing tool (I haven’t seen any hint or evidence there is a team facing one available). PFF Ultimate is a team facing tool (and media/sports agencies). There is little to no overlap between the two. We know PFF Ultimate is the main revenue driver of PFF, and there will surely not be any teams that are going to rush to cancel their PFF Ultimate subscription and sign up for NFL Pro. Even the cost difference savings of what would be hundreds of thousands for PFF Ultimate vs maybe a few thousand for the entire front staff having individual NFL Pro subscriptions isn’t worth the downgrade.

As things are right now, NFL Pro will likely be the premier public facing tool since it offers something no other public tool can: video. As far as I am aware, NFL Pro is the only place you can jump right to clips from or view any All-22 film. And that makes sense, given that NFL is the rightsholder. There are a few private products that allow for film integration (PFF Ultimate, SIS Datahub, etc) but 1) you have to work out additional licenses and 2) from what I understand the NFL is pretty particular with the video you can show. There doesn’t appear to be any restrictions on the face of things with NFL Pro and video sharing (ie: you can share All-22 clips from NFL Pro).

StatsBomb

This piece is meant to really look at just public facing analytics, but I think I need to write quick blurb about StatsBomb.

They are the biggest challenger to the private side for PFF and already work with NFL and college teams (I don’t know to what capacity or numbers but I’d assume it’s most the NFL and dozens of FBS teams). Having said that, they have no public facing tool. I have no idea if they are close to launching one or will ever. StatsBomb first made a name for themselves in European soccer around 11-12 years ago and there isn’t currently even a public tool for that.

StatsBomb has released some NFL data as part of a salute to Tom Brady’s career but that’s really about it outside of their few times a week tweets on their Twitter account.

They are the leader in soccer data on the team side, and could be the leader in the NFL on the team side too. Could they be the leader on the public side? Sure, if they wanted to. It doesn’t seem like they want to though (not a knock on them, like PFF knows, the money is on the team side).

FTN StatsHub

The newest entry (sorta) into the space. I didn’t have them in my original piece, because, well, they didn’t really exist at that time. I did have Football Outsiders (RIP) listed but after a confusing year and change for the website (including ownership not honoring contracts and pay), FO is gone. The website is completely gone, as is the entire archive and history.

BUT! Football Outsiders lives on in a more concentrated capacity over at FTN (in case you wanted to know what FTN stands for it is “For the Numbers”). Most importantly, DVOA and the DVOA database found a good home and that lives on, even if all of Aaron and his crews’ great weekly pieces and recaps now live on only in our memories.

The major strength of FTN (DVOA is great still of course) is that in July, they released their StatsHub. A portal that allows you to do numerous filters, and deep one too.

Want to know which QB had the highest total EPA on throwing to post route in tight coverage vs cover four? It’s CJ Stroud.

Which running back had the best success rate on outside zone runs into stacked boxes? Add the filters.

Are you curious which receiver had the most targets on early downs on go routes with tight or one step coverage in rainy weather? You are clearly sick in the head and should seek help, but hey, who am I to judge and you can filter for it.

And FTN will let you view not just at the player level, but the often missed out team level that some providers don’t have. The filters are pretty inclusive (including having the coverage scheme available, which is really important) as well as charting data. And I’ve been told that FTN does their charting in-house rather than license it, meaning they control their own data and can improve it rather than rely on a provider. Always a benefit.

And as a bonus, since FTN is now the source for DVOA data, you can do your own filters for DVOA at various player and team levels, as well as have access to the overall DVOA database with the same subscription.

FTN StatsHub is still pretty new, so I can’t give a pound the desk type endorsement, but it’s a good product and the team at FTN is dedicated to making it a best in class solution (plus they have a good staff there from some of the people I’ve interacted with), so I’m optimistic. Also to be honest, it’s not that expensive? I guess cost is relative to budget, but as far as alternate solutions, it’s probably the best value right now.

33rd Team

I mentioned 33rd Team in the original post and not a ton on the site itself seems to have changed necessarily. The Edge is still a nice tool, even if it is limited a bit in filters and it's still geared towards fantasy.

Unfortunately it looks like they somewhat de-integrated with SIS? For instance, in a prior iteration of the site, when you clicked on a team roster, you could view advanced stats of every player on the roster or position, including some really detailed stuff you couldn’t get on a SIS Datahub subscription.

Now, that’s all gone?

The stats page seems to have been removed at the team level, you can’t click on any of the player names/photos to take you to the player page, and on the player pages it shows very simple stats (though in a nice format!).

This player page used to allow you to dive deep into a players performance with some pretty detailed metrics like __ over expected and whatnot. Now it just shows things like passer rating and passing yards per game by depth of throw? Don’t think I’ve ever even seen that stat before. What is the use case of knowing Mac Jones averaged 127 yards per game on throws of 1-15 yards? Especially when you can’t compare it to another player?

Also The Edge tool doesn’t even appear to be accessible as a button on the site anymore? You have to navigate directly to it via the URL.

But this all ties into what I want to get at: they seem to be in some sort of a transition. Obviously, hiring Sam Monson and Steve Palazzolo from PFF wasn’t done flippantly or because they needed a podcast host. And it’s doubly as interesting because 33rd Team hired both at the same time. You’d imagine Sam and Steve spoke to each other about this and the timing wasn’t a coincidence.

With SIS integration seemingly either going away or being revamped and the hiring of some talented folks like Same and Steve (and others you can find on the masthead), I wonder if what Steve (and Sam) did for in building out PFF, they are trying to do with 33rd Team? Sure, those two may have joined 33rd Team solely for a media role but that is a waste of their talents. Not that they aren’t good at the media stuff (they are great) but they are also good at the football product stuff. I know their intro presser talks solely about the Check the Mic podcast, but their bios then call out how fundamental they were to the growth of PFF.

Again, I could be very wrong here and Sam and Steve are solely in a media role capacity, but I can’t help but think they are going to be asked to do more at the site than some writing and a 3 podcasts a week. They did those exact same things at PFF but also found time on the product side still. Could they be working on SIS integration in a similar capacity as PFF and PFF Ultimate? Maybe but those dots might be hard to connect. SIS is their own thing and has been around forever.

33rd Team was founded by former NFL exec Mike Tannenbaum (he’s also the current CEO) and 33rd Team describes themselves as a football think tank. A think tank classically, well, thinks about their subject (football in this case) by hiring experts who create policy, rules, and do research for companies in the industry. That could be the Sam/Steve connection, as they use their years of knowledge gathered over a decade plus at PFF. They both certainly count as experts at the macro level of the game and how to think about it from both a team and consumer basis.

Not long ago 33rd Team and Infinite Athlete paired up. For those unfamiliar with Infinite Athlete, they are a technology company not dissimilar to StatsBomb, using technology, video, and player tracking information to quantify their respective sports. If you are a European soccer fan, you might recall the name of the company because it’s currently plastered on the front of Chelsea kits.

You can learn a bit more about them here and apparently the 49ers, NFL, and NFLPA are already connected in various capacities to IA and it’s subsidiaries (Biocore and Tempus Ex Machina).

So my purely speculatory grand plan with Same/Steve and 33rd Team is they are going to build a PFF/StatsBomb like product at 33rd Team. PFF is hand charted (though they do have access to The Dots) and StatsBomb is a mix of both both leans to being a tech company using video tracking. So likely 33rd Team is going to be closer to StatsBomb than PFF.

Will there ever be a public tool from them? Who knows, but it’s worth watching to see how things play out there.

Fantasy Points/Fantasy Points Data

Another new entry into the universe (a good thing!), Fantasy Points Data (or FPD from now on in this piece) started by fantasy guru (his nickname) John Hansen, which includes several former PFF charters/analysts as well as staffers from FTN with similar roles too. Safe to say, both FDP and FTN staff have taken what they learned in the grading and charting experience and are applying it now at their respective sites.

FDP is cool. It’s similar to FTN’s StatsHub, but a little more fantasy focused (given the name). But it also has more filters than FTN StatsHub (which on the face is good but it doesn’t mean it is better).

And interesting thing that FDP is doing with their data is some qualitative stats. They have things like accurate and off-target throws, as well as hero and turnover-worthy throws. That might sound familiar, as it’s the equivalent to a big time throw and turnover-worthy throw that PFF has been doing for years (FTN also has a similar stat). I think there is a small difference. PFF’s big time throw was just on the throw itself I believe, whereas the Hero stat describes the overall play itself. This seems closer to PFF giving the QB a +1-2 grade rather than a big time throw. And also, PFF is turnover-worthy play, not throw like at FDP. So a fumble would be included in TWP at PFF but not in TWT at FPD. They also have sack avoidance and sack fault, which is a stat PFF has tracked forever as well.

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Much like FTN, the filters really are the killer feature of the overall product and I think it does filters better than FTN. You can arrange columns:

Set minimum values for any stat instead of just playing time filters (FTN allows this too)

And honestly probably the deepest level of charting you can get outside of PFF Ultimate. It includes different ways to dice the data, has a lot of charting based filters, can be grouped at the team level (offense or defense), and even has the ability to do splits (which I don’t think exists anywhere else).

So if you wanted to know which Patriots receivers in October through December had the most targets when lined up out wide, in an empty backfield, against cover four and six, with motion before the snap, in shotgun, when the quarterback was out of the pocket, and he left the pocket due to pressure, when the QB was on the move, it was a catchable pass, that was contested, while the receiver was being double-teamed, the defense blitzed two defenders, and the defense was running a stunt, while the team was down by 10 in the 3rd or 4th quarter…you can do it! There are no results to show because that didn’t happen, but if it did, then you could get the information.

The combinations and way to split things out really is incredible. Now easily you can see how a QB has performed by things like coverage type, without having to add/subtract a filter one at a time. You can just do it by the split feature (this is super common in baseball but never seems to have taken hold in football stats).

And best of all, it’s exportable and in custom exportable formats.

This is the closest product to PFF Ultimate, just without the video and some of the visualization features that Ultimate has. But the tradeoff there: it doesn’t cost a tens of thousands of dollars and you don’t have to be a team or media member.

Very good product, and the $200 they are asking for it is reasonable when you consider all the hands and levers it takes to run the product.

NFL Pro

Feels like I am burying the lede here a little, as the big dog has entered the kennel (workshopping this phrase still). I teased this a bit back in the original piece and it is fully out now. I mentioned earlier that I got some very gracious feedback and reaching out when I published the original piece, and someone was able to get me access to the beta (very thankful for you!)

I’ve been messing with it for a bit now pre-launch and even more when it was publicly launched because I wanted to hype it up a bit on Twitter. It’s not the complete thread that connects film nerds and data nerds, but it is a strand. For the first time, the public user can immediately jump to highlights and cutups of specific plays in All-22.

So if you want to know about every snap of Sam Howell using play action, when the defense is in dime, blitzes, and Howell is pressured, you get more than just the data, you get the film too (and the players on the field too).

Or the times the Bears defense faced shotgun, and had four linemen, press coverage, and blitzed last year.

And it’s not just a product for the film grinders either, because now users get real access to NextGenStats and leaderboards.

The little yellow boxes on some of the cells? You can click them and it jumps right to video. One thing I am excited about using more for some positions is the ability to have more insight into top speeds. If you click on the yellow cell, you can view all the runs where for example Breece Hall eclipsed 20 or more miles per hour

Individual player pages are available too

Okay, I guess this is the closest thing to PFF Ultimate because it includes the video element. But it doesn’t quite have the human charting element that PFF/FTN/FDP/SIS has, as it’s based off NextGenStats tracking data.

Big props to the NFL and NextGen teams for getting this out. I know from the film side there were a lot of calls for this video capacity, being able to slice and dice and just literally filter plays better. And obviously, the nerds were wanting more NextGen data too, with now the added benefit of being able to jump to the film (and I’m sure the tape grinders will love the data too and being able to make quick jumps).

NFL Pro is only going to get better too. This is just the day one/week one launch product. The crew in charge of the product has already gotten some feedback on Twitter that I’ve seen and most importantly, they are willing to listen and eager to evolve and enhance the product as it ages.

SumerSports

I’m somewhat surprised they didn’t make it in the original piece, but I can’t recall if they were around then or not. But any case, they deserve a mention here.

Sumer was launched by billionaire Paul Tudor Jones (who made his fortune from his eponymous hedge fund Tudor Investments) and includes current/former staffers from all walks of like (ex-PFF employees, ex-NFL employees, even a former NFL GM in Thomas Dimitroff).

Where the majority of the time in this piece I’ve been yattering about PFF Ultimate, SumerSports (the name refers to the earliest known civilization) is more closely aligned with a different product at PFF, called PFF IQ. Whereas PFF Ultimate is maybe more for the coaches and scheme side, PFF IQ is meant for the front office and decision making staff. PFF IQ is where PFF houses all their more roster analysis related metrics, including things like their WAR/WAA models, player projections, depth charts, contract data and similarities, transfer portal, and some of the draft prospect and percentile data you may have seen. It’s the obvious fit for them, they got the on field stuff quantified and qualified, you can then convert that to roster building and transactions.

Sumer is trying to crack into that space, one that really only PFF is the main player and Sumer might be the only potential disrupter. They are already plugged into several NFL teams and have an NCAA tool available for those teams. Sumer is trying to do the ultimate idea: define a player to a specific number (based off skill, cost, chemistry, etc.) and figure out how and if they can fit into your roster. But it’s not just “does this player fill a hole and keep us under the cap” but also how the specific player fits the roster. This is something similar to how the Rams scouted draft prospects in the recent draft. Not just saying “we need an edge rusher” but how that edge rusher specifically fits on the roster and compliments other players. Turns the position group into a force multiplier.

But that analysis isn’t what we are here for in this specific piece. They have a public tool! It gives your basis stats, but also some more advanced ones that look deeper at the skill the player brings to the field. Things like yards created (which adjusts a ball carriers performance based on situation and pre-snap look) and personnel adjusted yards per route run (which adjusts Y/RR based on the difference between actual and expected yards per route run accounting for personnel, route, distance, and down). Also they provide some nice defensive stats that include things like success rate and EPA when a player is on/off the field .

They still feel a bit quiet overall, but it’s not some major pod shop looking to take the space by storm. They are building out their product, hiring good analysts, and navigating a space that hasn’t been navigated deeply.

ESPN

This is sorta a general one, but ESPN has recently launched an analytics hub not just for football projects, but other sports. Still, you’ve got their 4th down decision tool as well as receiver tracking metrics (RTM) based off their partnership with the NFL for GPS data.

I really like RTM because it’s easy to access and manipulate, and it is something you cannot get anywhere else.

Also it passes the sniff test in that generally the receivers that RTM says are good are also usually thought of being good too.

Joseph Hefner

I’m going to give a shoutout to a local guy and online friend of mine, who has a few Shiny apps he created for things like draft trade calculator based off several models, formation data, pillbox charts for snaps, and play by play data.

Final note…

That’s it. I think we are in pretty good shape right now as public consumers, with several impressive tools recently launched of various forms. Certainly take a step forward from where we were 18 months ago when I made the original post.

I’m hopeful that things will keep getting better, as the thirst for public facing analytics is never quenched.

If I missed a site or something you think should have been covered and want to let others know, reach out to me on Twitter, replying in the comments, or emailing me.