![]() ![]() The original nflfastR package is now part of the larger nflverse of packages that drive the NFL analytics community on Twitter and beyond. Because of the “open source” nature of R and R packages, a laundry list of companion packages quickly developed alongside nflfastR. Thankfully, he and Carl did not keep the creation to themselves and released nflfastR to the public. Yurko officially marked the end of the nflscrapR era and the beginning of the nflfastR era with a tweet on September 14, 2020: 1Īs a reply to his first tweet about the nflfastR project, Baldwin explained that he created the original function to scrape NFL data for the creation of his NFL analytics website. At this point, Ben Baldwin and Sebastian Carl had already built upon the nflscrapR project’s foundations to create nflfastR. json feed used to gather NFL data changed. The trio’s work on nflscrapR led to a peer-reviewed paper titled “ nflWAR: A Reproducible Method for Offensive Player Evaluation in Football.” Ultimately, the nflscrapR project came to an end when the specific. After Horowitz graduated - and got hired by the Atlanta Hawks - the nflscrapR package was taken over by fellow CMU student Ron Yurko (who would go on to receive his Ph.D. from the Statistics and Data Science program and, at the time of this book’s writing, is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at CMU). ![]() The nflverse as we know it today was initially birthed from the nflscrapR project, which was started by the Carnegie Mellon University student and professor duo of Maksim Horowitz and Sam Ventura. That said, and without getting too far into the weeds of the history, the above-mentioned people are responsible in some shape or form for the current status of the nflverse, which is a superb collection of data and R-based packages that allows anybody the ability to access deeply robust NFL data as far back as the 1999 season. Thanks to the work of multiple people ( and … to name just a few), the process of getting started with analytics using NFL data is now easier than ever. On April 27, 2020, Ben Baldwin hit send on a Tweet that announced the birth of nflfastR, an R package designed to scrape NFL play-by-play data, allowing the end-user to access it at speeds quicker than similar predecessors (hence the name). In the same vein, Dr. Anne Carroll - the Dean of the College of Business at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania - provided financial assistance above and beyond what I had in my professional development account to fund the creation of the book’s illustration. The football illustration on the cover of the book was created by Corinne Deichmeister, a Spring 2023 graduate of Kutztown University’s Communication Design program. Because of this, I’ll argue that Introduction to NFL Analytics with R was created, in part, in the same open-source vision as the nflverse and, more broadly, the R programming language. As well, many members of the nflverse Discord graciously took the time to submit issues to the book’s repository highlighting issues in both spelling/grammar and coding/data. This book is a testament to their hard work, vision, and ability. Ben, along with Tan Ho and Sebastian Carl, have done more for the NFL analytics movement than they are ever willing to admit. Moreover, the nflverse family of packages are obviously a major part of this project and, without them, the end result would not be nearly as robust. ![]() First and foremost is Ben Baldwin, who provided the necessary “this book is a great idea, you should do it!” push to get me started on the project. Several members of the nflverse family also played a significant role in the creation of this book. The same can be said for Sherry Thomas, a Senior Editorial Assistant, who assisted in getting the book prepared for production. His guidance during the process of writing, receiving reviews, editing, and moving the book into production has been phenomenal. Ultimately, this book would not have been possible if not for Rob Calver, a Senior Publisher with Chapman & Hall/CRC, instantly believing in the slightly disjointed vision and idea of a random person (me!) e-mailing him out of the blue back in June of 2022.
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