Sports Reference Blog

If you want a variety of detailed splits for a player's stats, check out the Splits [+] option on his player page. By mousing over "Splits [+]", you can access career splits, as well as the numbers for any individual season of his career.

Might as well face it -- most people are going to use our new Play Finder tool to search for clutch stats on quarterbacks. How do I know this? Because, when Basketball-Reference rolled out its Play Index+, the most popular searches (by far) involved some combination of Kobe Bryant and clutch/late-game shooting splits.

And if there's anything fans love more than the fabled NBA "closer", it's the crunch-time QB.

So let's do this. Much like I did in the clutch receivers post, I'm going to dig up clutch stats for QBs from a variety of different angles. There is no one single, unifying definition of "clutch", but we can at least try to get close to a consensus by using the splits most people would think about when looking for clutch performances.

Want to find a chain of teammates between any two players in MLB history, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-style? Then check out our Oracle of Baseball, which can help you find things like this:

Chain from Mickey Mantle to Mike Trout

One old football aphorism was always that teams needed to "establish the run" -- running early, as the theory went, would set up the pass later in the game. Often it was cited that "Team X is 10-1 when they run 30 or more times in a game," or some such number that failed to see the difference between correlation and causation.

Later, researchers like Football Outsiders' Aaron Schatz would point out that teams have such great records when they rush so frequently because the running game is used to run out the clock late in games by the team in the lead. Teams run when they win, not win when they run.

Using our new Play Finder tool, you can illustrate this by looking at rushing yards by half. Here were the teams who had the most rushing success in the first halves of games a year ago:

And here were the most successful rushing teams in the 2nd half:

If you look at how those numbers correlate to winning percentage, total 1st-half rushing yards have a Pearson coefficient of -0.090 (meaning there's practically no relationship -- and whatever relationship there is is negative!), while yards per rush in the 1st half have a 0.179 correlation with winning. 2nd-half total rushing yards have a correlation of 0.289 with winning percentage, and yards per carry in the 2nd half has a correlation of -0.303.

These are small correlations, but the point is that total 2nd-half rushing success is much more correlated with winning than 1st-half rushing (which has practically no relationship with winning whatsoever). In other words, so much for "establishing the run."

More interestingly, per-play rushing success in the 2nd half has the strongest correlation of any of the variables I looked at above... and it's negative! This makes sense, because teams running out the clock are often calling safe, straight-ahead plunge plays, while defenses with the lead are willing to concede effective runs to the trailing offense.

Because of those factors, the most telling numbers of all are simply that 1st-half rushing attempts had a -0.312 correlation with winning, while 2nd-half rushing attempts had a correlation of 0.612.

Which basically proves once again that teams need to establish the pass early, not the run, and use rushing to run out the clock once they have the lead.

For the few week or two, I'll be looking at a different example search from the new PFR Play Finder tool. Today's topic: Clutch Receivers...

Who was the best clutch receiver in the game last season? Obviously any definition of "clutch" is going to be pretty arbitrary, but let's use the Play Finder to look at this from a couple of different angles.

First, who were the best receivers in the 4th quarter or OT? Here's who had the most yards:

I have modified the player, team, and season pages to make it a little easier to navigate the site.

On the player pages there is a gray menu bar that will "stick" to the top of the page as you scroll down. You can use this menu to access the various tables within the page (totals, per game, etc.) and to jump to a player's game logs, splits, shot charts, and finders. I have also added some extra tables to the player pages. Previously there was a basic table with playoff totals & per game stats and an advanced table with advanced playoff stats. Now there are four playoff tables: Totals, Per Game, Per 36 Minutes, and Advanced.

There is also a menu bar on the team pages. From this bar you can jump to a team's roster & stats, schedule & results, transactions, game log, and splits. Also, if you hover over the team name you will see a dropdown list with links to every season in the team's history.

The menu bars on the league and playoff pages contain links to the various season pages (summary, schedule & results, etc.). If you hover your mouse over the league name, you will see a dropdown list with links to every season in the league's history.

Although some may find these menus obtrusive at first, I think that with time you will appreciate the improved functionality, in particular when using the player pages. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions, either here or using the feedback system.

This is utterly random, completely meaningless and less than 100% accurate, but earlier this summer I noticed, that MLB was nearing 500,000 errors since 1876. We track all all-time stats on our seasons index. So as the half million mark approached, I decided to add a counter to the front page of the site. We'll also try to pinpoint the offending player on the day the milestone is broken.

Are we 100% certain this will actually be the true, honest-to-god, real 500,000th error since 1876? No, it undoubtedly isn't as there are lots of accounting discrepancies in the "official" record, especially in the fielding stats. I'm sure Elias has a different number and in our case our player-by-player and team stats don't even match up on error, putout or assist totals. For pre-1970's results, fielding records were mostly an afterthought and no effort was made to make sure they balanced at the end of the season. But it's a fun milestone, so we're going to track it.

UPDATE: One other issue that may affect things is that some errors are overturned at a later date, so even on the night we deign an error the 500,000th it may actually move up or down the last next week when mlb reviews borderline scoring calls.

So always remember this milestone is for fun and is accurate to the best of our ability, but in no way 100% accurate.

Thanks to a lot of hard work by our programmer Mike Kania, Pro-Football-Reference is proud to introduce the PI Play Finder, which allows you to query play-by-play data from every NFL game since 2000. Here are a few of the things you can use this tool for:

• Event Searches. Example: Find all playoff plays (2000-11) on 3rd/4th down and 11+ yds to go that ended in 1st downs
• Team Play Searches. Example: Find every 3rd-and-short run by the Eagles in 2004
• Aggregate Stat Searches. Example: Eli Manning had the most yards of any QB in the 4th quarter last season
• Team Aggregate Searches. Example: Tennessee had a league-high 194 pass attempts on 3rd down last year

...You get the idea. With this feature, you can find events and calculate splits where the only limit is your imagination.

So enjoy the new Play Finder, and as always, let us know via email if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

This is just a short announcement to let you know that I have added a referees section to Basketball-Reference.com. The main index lists each referee and includes a link to his or her page. Please note that the personal fouls columns on these pages include all fouls, not just fouls called by a particular referee.

Referee data is available for the 1988-89 through 2011-12 seasons. There are 13 games from the 1990-91 season and one game from the 1995-96 season that are missing referees:

• Jan 15, 1991, CHH at LAL
• Mar 2, 1991, ORL at DEN
• Mar 2, 1991, SAC at SEA
• Mar 23, 1991, MIN at UTA
• Apr 27, 1991, HOU at LAL
• Apr 27, 1991, GSW at SAS
• May 4, 1991, SEA at POR
• May 10, 1991, LAL at GSW
• May 11, 1991, BOS at DET
• May 11, 1991, POR at UTA
• May 18, 1991, LAL at POR
• May 25, 1991, CHI at DET
• May 26, 1991, POR at LAL
• Dec 19, 1995, POR at SAS

If you can can find a source that lists the referees for any of these games, please let us know in the comments section or by sending us a message through our feedback system.

We're happy to announce that we've added new injury information to Pro-Football-Reference:

• Current-Season Injuries - The 2012 team pages now have "Current Injuries" tables that pull from the NFL's most recent injury report.
• Team Injury Grids - Dating back to 2009, we have team injury grids that display the injury-report status for every player on the roster for each week of the season.

Hopefully these will help you in your research and with your fantasy teams!