

Show HN: Critique my pro football (NFL) data webapp - wtn
http://www.statsblitz.com/

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LargeWu
Looks cool. Just out of curiosity, do you have permission to use team logos? I
know the NFL is super protective of their trademarks.

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Kudose
Probably not since there doesn't seem to be any attribution to the NFL on the
site.

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phereford
You can't use the logos of any NFL team without their consent. Stats are
fine...logos are not.

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macdonald
The amount of data you have is really impressive, and it's displayed well. I
liked being able to compare teams/players from the previous seasons, rather
than just current trends.

It would be nice if you could compare players based on their career stats,
rather than on a per-season basis. Some kind of text search would be good so
that I could, for example, compare each of Aaron Rodgers' seasons against each
other.

What's the target audience of the app? I watch the NFL each week but don't
think I have any use for it (other than a general interest these kind of
stats).

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middlegeek
What is your data source? Will it update live if a game is on at the time you
are viewing the app?

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poincare
What's your data source? Any plans for college football?

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nkassis
I second this. I was looking at the ncaa website and it seems that grabbing
the stats from there would be trivial. I'm not sure if they have any kind of
licensing terms for that data but I could find it while doing a quick look.

I was planning on playing with those stats to see if I could beat the BCS at
rankings ;p

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wtn
There's tons of variance in wins and losses, so any ratings system comparison
should consider results over the long term.

If you're interested and have the statistical background, you should
definitely give it a shot. For related ideas, check out Brian Burke's
excellent Advanced NFL Stats blog: <http://www.advancednflstats.com/>

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dogofthunder
I like it quite a bit. I play fantasy football, but would probably just use
this for fun.

A "clear" button would be really useful, to revert the sliders to default
without refreshing the page.

minor point: make the labels on the left more in line with common football
terminology. as in, "down 3rd percentage" could be "3rd down conversion rate"
or at least "3rd down percentage"

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nirmal
I sent a link to my friends who play fantasy football to see if the stats were
of use to them.

One thing I can say is that I love the attention to detail you put in the
slider thumb labels. Especially for those where the labels would collide and
you merge them into a single label showing an interval.

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thisisblurry
I love the way that you're displaying all of this data. It's a very clean and
understandable interface.

I do have one suggestion though: generate URLs based on where the sliders are
at. It'll make sharing much easier. I know it's a daunting task, but I think
it'd really help your site grow.

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gmichnikov
all player stats: games column is empty

passing: yards/attempt and yards/completion could both be included, right now
it looks like avg. represents yds/attempt

postseason: would be cool to see player stats aggregated by individual post-
seasons (right now you can see post-season games, and season totals, but not
post-season totals)

agree with another comment that it would be useful to be able to select
multiple player-years (maybe the same player across years, maybe different
players the same year or across years) to compare

similarly, would be interesting to create user-defined groups of teams or
players that could be sorted on different dimensions (compare 2007 pats, 2004
colts, 2000 rams, 1998 vikings, etc.)

fumbles as both an offensive stat and defensive stat is a bit unintuitive to
me, also some of the players who show up have zeros in every fumble category;
fumbles recovered could be part of defense (along with ff)

overall it is very smooth, but i am not sure what i would user it for (and i
am a huge sports fan, watch multiple nfl games every week, etc.). i agree with
other comments that a fantasy angle could be helpful (e.g. input your league's
scoring system, sort each position's players by points/week, season).

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cgp
it would be nice if there were a number (a rank of sorts) along each result

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wtn
The default order is to sort by time (week or year), so the concept of rank
doesn't apply consistently. So I omitted it.

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wtn
Thanks to everyone for your feedback!

There are still a bunch of data points on the site that are null but which
should not be null, a few rows that didn't get updated last week, and aspects
of the presentation interface that can be tuned for clarity and simplicity.

I hope to get most of the inconsistencies fixed soon. I plan to add more
features as well. This project competes for time with my job search, so it
might be a few weeks before much gets done.

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banders
Looks Great! Just a few comments:

1\. Sign up - Whats the motivation to sign up?

2\. Search - Maybe I missed it, but I would like to search for specific
teams/players. I really think this is a must.

Overall, it really looks great, I'm just not sure when I would use it. I think
an NCAA version might be used more, you could use it to compare Heisman
candidates, or compare your mid-majors (like Boise St.) to majors (like
Nebraska), etc.

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wtn
Search--yes, I plan to add player search with the full text search
capabilities in PostgreSQL.

Data file export is only enabled for logged in users. Try the CSV export
button on the top right--you'll get a notice that you must be logged in.

No plans for me to add a NCAA version, but it would be fun to use as there are
numerically so many more players to filter and compare in the college game.

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nck4222
Not sure where you're planning to take this (stat browsing, fantasy focus),
but it'd be cool if i could click on a game, and it would bring up a boxscore
and a recap/blog posts about the game.

Not sure how you'd get the recap/posts, maybe start with only new games going
forward, see if it's a feature people want. If it's popular fill in the
previous ones later.

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wtn
Absolutely--I need to add pages with summary game reports, as well as player
and team pages.

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keeptrying
Great app. I was thinking about uses for this and I really think if it could
answer questions like "Which team most always loses after its bye week?" in an
user friendly way that would be killer. Espeically for football bloggers and
reporters.

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wtn
Thanks! I do think functionality that answers those kinds of queries would be
engaging and fun to use. I structured my database with support for concepts
like weeks of the football season, conferences, divisions, franchises, etc.
with the idea that people easily make queries for things like Kansas City's
home win/loss/tie record in December, or a QB's playoff performances as a
starter.

Will take a bit of backend and frontend implementation to add some of those
concepts to the live site.

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keeptrying
If your serious about this app, I could have a few journalists look at this
app. Email me.

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phereford
Its not really of use to anyone playing fantasy football, but it is definitely
beautiful.

While the app is somewhat limited in functionality, the UI is awesome and the
usability is cool. Good job

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wtn
Thanks. I hope to drop in some Protovis charting functionality to make it more
visually interesting. It will be a bit of a UI challenge to figure out how to
adjust the controls, though.

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phereford
Yea I agree. Have you check out sportsdatahub.com ?

While their UI is not as great as yours, you might be able to generate some
ideas for visualization from their platform.

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dedward
Does this plan to compete with something like statfox or other services that
give detailed analysis of league statistics for handicapping & analysis?

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jst
Very nice! How about exposing an OData feed?

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mccutchen
Seconded. A feed and/or an API would be super useful.

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wtn
Sure, XML and JSON feeds would be easy to implement--might be a while before I
get to it, though.

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look_lookatme
Neat. I'd like to see By Career stats, too.

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mgkimsal
Clickable: <http://statsblitz.com>

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duck
It is already clickable.

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mgkimsal
D'oh!

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pitdesi
I like it a lot, though I'm unclear on the intended use. You should be able to
get all the information from <http://www.pro-football-reference.com/> in,
which will just provide an awesome UI to a site with great information.

