Unrelated note, can not believe (yet I absolutely can) how fast this open source football knowledge has blown up. I remember simply hearing Ben Baldwin on a podcast like 2 years ago talking about the nflscrapr package Maksim Horowitz and Ron Yorko created after building the core of it for a school project. They actually scraped NFL box scores by the 100's through the years, noted the game situations, point differential, time, down, distance, where the ball was, timeout, and where able to create a real time win probability figure, that was actually very quickly adopted by ESPN in their gamecast/boxscores. But from there, they kind of built of their scraping codes and put it out for opensource for anyone who wanted to use it. There came the metric, again with those inputs, of your expected points at that situation (20 mins left, 2nd and 8 at your 45 yardline, 2 timouts, your expected points that drive is maybe 2.8 points. Then you get 7 yards, its now 3rd and 1, at that point, your expected points for that drive maybe change to 2.85, thus your expected points change per play was 0.05. Just average that number over every play and you get your expected points added (EPA) per play. Brilliant.
But when I listened to that podcast, I was just amazed, remember sending it to my brother and told him he had to listen to it. No one knew what it was, I just started playing with the data and found it was pretty cool but already saw how far behind I was and was just able to see what I wanted to see on Twitter, but just the depth of access, creativity, quality metrics that have come out are just insane. Since then, Ben Baldwin and Sebastian Carl cleaned up all the code, made it simpler, built in more common calculation and put out a new nflfastr package for R.
Just just crazy how quickly this stuff can be produced and the insight and the quality, and really have the ability to create ourselves with a little know how, effort and creativity.
Fun, just a bunch of nothings are all contributing and adding in great ideas.
Even Nathan is getting into
But anyways, I always had a hunch this could be so amazing. So many sites and people tried making their own proprietary football metrics, like football outsiders and what not, which are cool and all, but when you allow for unlimited creativity and let everyone's ideas contribute, things always just seem to blow up. Always had noticed this starting with like with Nintendo, there were video games out before, but they were the first to really embrace and promote, we are just going to create a platform, everyone else build the games. Also cell phones, blackberry and samsung for years was like, okay, here is your email app, here are a few games, here is your photo editor, the biggest thing Apple did was just say, okay here is a kick ass phone, but we are going to let and any everybody build an app, whoever wants too, blew that up. LIS, happening here now, but set up now so anyone can contribute, and amazing things are happening. But if you want to turn that million dollar idea into a billion dollar idea, don't do the hard work, just create an environment to let people smarter, more diversely educated and more creative do it for you.
/End random thoughts/thread derailing.
