Need help with an unsual request...

[TheRexorcist]

Hey guys,

I never registered eversince the migration from JI, but I've been a long-timer lurker over here. I have a very unsual request, and I thought you might help me out, as some of you seem to be football fans in general and not just Jets fans.

Although it's the off-season, I don't want to steal any more of your time than absolutely necessary. So it's enough if you read the bolded part. If anyone of you could point me in the right direction, I'd be very thankful. My question is this: Do you know any resource on the internet where I can acquire...

• the 50 most popular players for each NFL team of all time?
• the 5 most popular coaches and coordinators for each NFL team of all time?

I'm a software developer, and I'm working on an NFL-themed card-game application in my spare time. The game mechanics aren't at 100% yet, but soon it'll be time to populate the database to get a prototype going. Generating random names and data is not a problem, but it stinks, it takes away all the immersion and doesn't feel the way I want it to feel.

Of course I could write a script to parse http://www.nfl.com, http://www.pro-football-reference.com, and similar other sites. But I don't see a solution for filtering "the most popular" coaches, coordinators and players based on the data these sites provide. I'm a one-man-show, and all my friends can do is play-testing, which is kind enough, but they know as much about the NFL as most of you probably know (or don't know) about European soccer, we're not Americans.

If there's no site providing that data, can you think of a metric to achieve my goal? I thought about accumulating games started for each player and the teams they played for during their career, but that might be error-prone and in the end I'll probably have to do a lot of stuff manually, which is very time-consuming. I could do that for the coaches and coordinators, sure, but not for all the players.

So, if anybody could give me a little hint... great, I'd really be very thankful.

Have a good one!

[pointman]

[rex-n-effect]

What kind of magic spells can I cast with a Rex Ryan-Tony Sporano-Mark Sanchez-Tim Tebow combination?

[PFSIKH]

47 minutes ago, rex-n-effect said:

What kind of magic spells can I cast with a Rex Ryan-Tony Sporano-Mark Sanchez-Tim Tebow combination?

[greenwichjetfan]

1 hour ago, TheRexorcist said:

If there's no site providing that data, can you think of a metric to achieve my goal? I thought about accumulating games started for each player and the teams they played for during their career, but that might be error-prone and in the end I'll probably have to do a lot of stuff manually, which is very time-consuming. I could do that for the coaches and coordinators, sure, but not for all the players.

So, if anybody could give me a little hint... great, I'd really be very thankful.

Have a good one!

Probably a little intensive, but how about breaking it up by position and then using intuition for the final tally. Something like:

Total # of wins while playing for the team divided by the total number of wins for the team historically. 
Total # of TDs thrown (or ran or caught for QB, RB, WR respectively) by player while on team divided by total TDs by that position for the team historically.
Total yards thrown (or ran or caught for QB, RB, WR respectively) by player while on team divided by total yards by that position for the team historically.

This could give you a baseline for each player's relevancy to the rest of their team's history. Then you could do any number of things with those percentages, such as multiply the three together to come up with a singular number for the highest achieving players per team by position. Generally, the most popular players are the ones who have achieved the most. 

So for example, you could do something like:

(Total # of wins for Namath as a Jet/aggregate Jets QB wins)*(Total TDs for Namath as a Jet/aggregate Jets QB TDs)*(Total yards for Namath as a Jet/aggregate Jets QB yards).

Do that for each player by position. Shouldn't be too difficult, I don't think. Probably would be able to come up with a relatively simple Excel model to capture these percentages from data extracted from pro football reference. 

[Mike135]

Can't think of any place that would have all that data.  If you even consider popularity to be data in the first place.  Tons of stats everywhere, but as you can see with Fitz, stats don't equate to popularity.  Not to mention the game has changed drastically over the decades, so stats are not a good barometer.

Build yourself a quick website (mobile friendly).  That lists all players that could potentially be popular for each team.  Then post on all fan boards asking fans to vote.  By doing so, they'll get a free copy of the game once ready.

Then you'll have yourself a db of actual fan polling that ya could tie into in real-time with a web service for the game.  Or just occasionally update the game/app as new data comes in.

[Il Mostro]

Search for articles/polls by team.  You may not get to 50 for each team but you should easily find 10-25 players.  You can probably fill in 26-50 without much difficulty. 

[BklynJetsFan85]

6 hours ago, TheRexorcist said:

Hey guys,

I never registered eversince the migration from JI, but I've been a long-timer lurker over here. I have a very unsual request, and I thought you might help me out, as some of you seem to be football fans in general and not just Jets fans.

Although it's the off-season, I don't want to steal any more of your time than absolutely necessary. So it's enough if you read the bolded part. If anyone of you could point me in the right direction, I'd be very thankful. My question is this: Do you know any resource on the internet where I can acquire...

• the 50 most popular players for each NFL team of all time?
• the 5 most popular coaches and coordinators for each NFL team of all time?

Google each team, and there will be multiple lists by fans and sports reporters... for the jets i can name u mine - Joe Namath, Curtis Martin, Wayne Chrebet... but if i were u i would combine sources and look for similar names that keep coming up and order it as such. People will always have different opinions, but as long as you're relatively close on the list, you should be fine

[PatsFanTX]

Just go to profootballreference.com and search by individual team.

They list all HOF, All-Pro and Pro Bowl players and have their career stats for the team.

Top HC's will be easy to get right there.

[flgreen]

Over the years there's been many threads about the Best/Worst players, coaches, fans posters.

if you good with a search you can find out most that info here.

[TheRexorcist]

Thanks a lot for your input! I really appreciate it.

I put some more thought into it last night, and it's true, in the end I will probably not get anywhere just by looking at stats. Building a web service is overkill in my opinion, at least for now, but the idea behind it is probably the best: Asking the fans who their favorite players are.

I wanted to automate as much as possible, but either way I slice it, I'm gonna need manual work afterwards anyway (see below). So what I'll be doing next is browsing the various message boards for threads that fit my needs, and if that doesn't help, I'm gonna start some polls.

Then I'll feed the data gathered during that process into my extraction scripts to acquire all the statistical data I want to display in my game and handle all the borderline cases, stuff like Brett Favre being a Packer, not a Jet, even if some Jets fans would name Favre as their favorite QB (just as an example).

Again, THANK YOU.

[Fishooked]

12 hours ago, PatsFanTX said:

 

Just go to profootballreference.com and search by individual team.

 

They list all HOF, All-Pro and Pro Bowl players and have their career stats for the team.

 

Top HC's will be easy to get right there.

Pretty much this, its like a bible.