Sports Reference Blog

Added Turnover Type to Game Play Finder

Posted by Mike on December 17, 2013

It's a frequent question - who throws the most interceptions returned for touchdowns? Chase blogged about it here a few years ago, but in an effort to help find who's the king of the pick six I've added the ability to filter by type of touchdown to the game play finder tool. Setting the turnover type to interceptions only and searching for most pick sixes thrown since 1999 shows us Peyton Manning tied with Brett Favre and Carson Palmer as the leaders with 21 apiece, with 810 total thrown over that span.

Note that this does pick up a couple of instances where a pass was intercepted, fumbled, and subsequently returned for a touchdown by the offensive team, so subtract one pick six apiece from Drew Brees and Brad Johnson.

2 Responses to “Added Turnover Type to Game Play Finder”

  1. Kyle Says:

    Hey guys,

    Thanks for a great site. I'm looking for something fairly specific and I'm not sure what the best way to get to it is. I would like data going back a few years for each individual NFL score, including the passer and runner for each TD, and the length of the scoring play.

    A previous post (http://www.spreadsheet-sports.com/2013-nfl-play-play-data-excel) includes all the data I'm searching for. I can isolate the touchdown plays, and it includes everything else I'm after. The only issue is that it includes only 2013 data.

    Bryan mentions using pro-football-reference, and I played around with the tool, but can't seem to get all that info on the same page at once.

    Any ideas?

  2. Topher Doll Says:

    Hey Kyle, I wasn't able to find any way to specifically find that other then sorting though game day data. Now I may have overlooked something, but it seems the author of that site you linked too is much better with coding or Excel than I am.

    But I will say you can find past seasons play by play data on Advanced NFL Stats (the author links to them) here and it has every season going back to 2003. Here is the link:

    http://www.advancednflstats.com/2010/04/play-by-play-data.html

    You could take that and break it down yourself.

    Sorry, hopefully one of the PFR guys is around but they would know better than I would. Another good way to hear back from them is to tweet them at @pfref.

    Good luck.