Advanced NFL Stats: Play-by-Play Data

I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready.

The resulting database comprises nearly all non-preseason games from the 2002 through [edit: 2012] seasons. I have not performed any analysis on the data, so what you'll get are the only basics--time, down, distance, yard line, play description, and score. It's almost exactly what I started with. I'll leave any analysis up to you.

I can see where this might become a community effort, where one person might add a column for yardage gained or lost. Another contributor might add a column for whether or not the current series leads to a first down. Someone else might add a column for drive result, and so on.

I'll share a little trick right now. Say you want to identify the plays that were interceptions. The play descriptions are in column J in the data I provided, and they will contain the word "INTERCEPTED" if there was an interception on the play. In a new column you would type "ISNUMBER(SEARCH("INTERCEPTED",J2)). The cell will say TRUE or FALSE according to whether the text "INTERCEPTED" was found.  Excel can only take you so far, however. To do more advanced analysis, you may need a scripting language.

I hope this data is put to good use. With many more minds testing theories, there's no telling what interesting things we'll learn. Happy crunching.