NFL Elo Repository

This repo contains data on all NFL games from 1920 to present. Most of the data is from pro-football-reference.com in conjunction with fivethirtyeight. Details on the files are below.

data

• data/nfl_results_1920-1969.csv contains data on NFL games pre-merger (era 1).

• data/nfl_results_1970-2001.csv contains data on NFL games post-merger but pre-today's NFL (era 2).

• data/nfl_results_2002-today.csv contains data on NFL games from the modern (post-expansion) NFL (era 3).

Note that this has one game not reported by fivethirtyeight. In addition, several dates of games have been changed.

Each file looks something like this:

• era (integer): The era of football as defined above.

• date (Date): The date of the game.

• season (integer): The season (year) of the game.

• week (integer): The week of the season in which the game was played.

• neutral (integer): An indicator variable for whether the game was played at a netural site (used for home-field advantage calculations).

• playoff (integer): An indicator variable for whether the game was a playoff game.

• visitor (character): The visiting team name.

• visitor.abbr (character): An abbreviation of the visiting team name, but consistent for when teams move to a new city.

• home (character): The home team name.

• home.abbr (character): The home-team version of visitor.abbr.

• visitor.score (integer): The score of the visiting team.

• v.offense (integer): An approximation of how many points the offense scored. In general, this corresponds to plays of the following types: "rush", "pass", "offensive fumble recovery", "on a lateral", "field goal".

• v.defense (integer): An approximation of how many points the defense/special teams scored. In general, this correponds to all other plays.

• home.score (integer): The score of the home team.

• h.offense (integer): The home-team version of v.offense.

• h.defense (integer): The home-team version of v.defense.

• margin (integer): abs(home.score - visitor.score).

• home.wins (numeric): 1 if the home team won, 0.5 if the game ended in a tie, and 0 else.

• visitor.elo.538 (numeric): The visiting team's Elo score as produced by fivethirtyeight.

• home.elo.538 (numeric): The home team's Elo score as produced by fivethirtyeight.

• home.prob.538 (numeric): The probability of the home team winning, as predicted by fivethirtyeight.

In addition, the games from era 3 have a few additional columns:

• visitor.qb (character): The visiting team's starting quarterback.

• home.qb (character): The home team's starting quarterback.

• vegas.line (character): The Vegas line.

• home.line (numeric): The line relative to the home team: negative means the home team is favored, zero means the game is a "pick", and positive means the home team is not favored.

• overunder (numeric): The over/under for the game.

• roof (character): The kind of dome the game was played in.

scripts

• R/validate_data.R is a script to validate the datasets, ensuring that proper columns add up correctly.