As with baseball and basketball, we've now added player Twitter account links to player pages. Let us know if we're missing anybody.

2012 NFL Draft Picks Added to the Site

To prepare for tomorrow's draft, be sure to use the PFR Draft Finder to search through every NFL and AFL draft pick ever made.

For more on the NFL Draft, check out the research done by Doug Drinen, Chase Stuart, and Jason Lisk for our old PFR Blog:

* All NFL Draft posts
* The Best Player Available
* Are safeties really a risk at the top of the draft?
* Do star safeties have shorter careers than players at other defensive positions?
* Do good teams really build along the lines?
* Matt Ryan, Brian Brohm, and the right to choose
* AFL versus NFL: draft class peaks and declines
* The Draft Value Chart: Right or Wrong?
* Would you trade the first overall pick for the entire fifth round (all 32 picks)?
* Fifth-round picks
* An AV-based draft chart
* Best draft classes
* Random trivia: draft class edition
* There are really two charts
* Brady Quinn and the discount rate on future picks
* Insane idea: quit scouting
* Rule change proposal: abolish the draft
* What’s a draft pick worth? (Parts I, II, & III)
* Rookie impact: running backs
* Rookie impact: wide receivers and tight ends

The 2012 NFL schedule has been updated, as well as team-by-team schedules.

With the NFL Draft coming up this week, here's a reminder that you can check out the event's history in our Draft Section. You can also learn what kind of production your team can expect from each pick using the Draft Preview, and be sure to visit S-R's College Football site to view the college stats of this year's prospects.

Yearly tables of player births and player deaths have just been rolled out.

We now have player biographical information updated through 2011, featuring updated full names and ages for players.

The 2012 NFL Draft Preview has been updated to reflect compensatory picks for free agency as well as the latest trades.

Today we're rolling out a new feature -- expected points on boxscores, year pages, and team pages back through 2000. What are expected points, you ask? Inspired by a concept introduced by Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer, & John Thorn in their 1988 book The Hidden Game of Football, our crack staff of statisticians (Sean and Neil) have used a decade's worth of play-by-play data to develop a formula that estimates the expected number of points given a combination of down, distance, and yard line. Let's look at this year's Super Bowl for an example. The first play after the kickoff looks like this:

That means that given a first and ten from their own 23, the expected value of the next score in the game is roughly 0.48 points by the Giants. With a run for no gain (resulting in second and ten from their own 23), the play changed that to -0.07 expected points, meaning that the play itself had a value of -0.56 expected points. Looking at the first touchdown of the game, we see:

Before the play was run, the expected points for a second and goal play from the 2 yard line is 5.72 points, so scoring the touchdown there netted the Giants 1.28 expected points (note that for touchdowns, 7 points are assumed and a made extra point is not worth any additional points, though a missed extra point subtracts one and a made two-point conversion adds one).

What can we do with these? Well, when you sum all of the differences together (minus an adjustment for the end of half and end of game plays), you should get the scoring margin of the game, which you can see in the table below the box score:

Given this table, we can break down the contributions each team's various squads made to the margin of victory -- the Giants' passing offense was their largest positive contributor, while their rushing offense actually contributed negatively overall. In addition to the box score pages, team totals have been added to team and year pages so you can see what cumulative totals each teams' offensive and defensive squads have.

Keep an eye out for further features using this play-by-play data as the year progresses.