Sports Reference Blog

We'd like to announce a recent addition to the Pro Football Reference Player Season Finder tool in the Play Index. We've added the ability to sort player seasons by receiving yards per target.

Former Saints field stretcher Devery Henderson owns the two best seasons since 1992 in terms or yards per target among receivers with 50+ targets.

If you adjust the minimum to 100 targets, Greatest Show on Turf-era Torry Holt is the leader.

With a minimum of 150 targets, Calvin Johnson's 10.64 yards/target in 2011 takes the cake.

And only one player with 500+ targets since 1992 has averaged over 10 yards per target. That would be Jordy Nelson, who leads receivers with that minimum number of targets with a career mark of 10.25 yards per target.

Check out the career Yards/Target leaders (min. 500 targets) since 1992 below:

We have added the ability to search by Touchdown Percentage to the Player Season Finder in the Pro Football Reference Play Index. Among passers with 150+ attempts, the single-season record is Sid Luckman's 13.9% in 1943. However, you can also sort by Adjusted TD%, which makes era adjustments. By that measure, Peyton Manning's 2004 season is the best.

Today, we finalized the purchase of basketballreference.com from the folks at Rotowire (thanks guys!). This really doesn't do much for you as an end user, but I thought I'd also mention that there are some domain name tricks that can help you.

The main one is that each site has a shortened url of 5-6 characters that can save some typing on your end. This is especially useful on your phones.

bbref.com => baseball-reference.com
bkref.com => basketball-reference.com
hkref.com => hockey-reference.com
pfref.com => pro-football-reference.com
cfbref.com => sports-reference.com/cfb
cbbref.com => sports-reference.com/cbb
olyref.com => sports-reference.com/olympics

We're excited to announce a new Play Index feature at College Basketball Reference, which allows users to search for results of all matchups between Division I schools since 1949-50: the Matchup Finder.

There's a lot of cool new searches you can make with this tool, so let's show some examples:

• Find every meeting between two schools since 1949-50. For example, here's every Duke vs North Carolina game in that span in chronological order.
• Or maybe you only want to see the meetings where both schools were ranked in the AP Poll.
• Or games that went to overtime.
• But you don't have to strictly look for matchups between two explicit opponents. You can also do more generalized searches. For instance, we have integrated AP Poll data back to 1949-50 in the search, so you can find the largest margins of victory in wins over the top-ranked team.
• Or the largest wins by an unranked team over AP #1.
• Or meetings between #1 and #2 in the AP Poll.
• You can also look for things like wins by your favorite team over AP Top 10 opponents.

In conjunction with the addition of the Matchup Finder, we have also enhanced the Team Game Finder. The Team Game Finder allows for more specific statistical searches than the Matchup Finder, but it only goes back to 2010-11 (the first season for which have all box scores) rather than 1949-50. The enhancement we've now made to this feature is that the AP Rankings are also synced into the search table. So you can now find things like best FG% against the AP #1 team since 2010-11. Or most wins vs ranked opponents since 2010-11.

The other addition we've made with syncing of the AP Rankings are matrices for each season showing all of the ranked vs ranked games. For instance, here's the Top 25 Matchups matrix for the 2014-15 season. Click on any of the hyperlinks to be taken to a matchup finder link showing the list of games in that season fitting the criteria. These matrices go all the way back to 1950.

We'd also like to mention a few inaccuracies we uncovered in the NCAA Record Book in preparing this tool. The record book lists all of the wins over AP #1 teams. However, it includes 2 wins which were actually over schools ranked #2 by the AP at the time of the game (DePaul's win over St. John's on January 17, 1950 and Virginia Tech's win over Memphis State on January 10, 1983). Consequently, we've removed those two games from our list of wins over AP #1. The record book also lists every meeting of #1 vs #2 in the AP Poll. However, it is missing the 1999 Final Four matchup between Michigan State and Duke, which can be found with our tool.

We should mention, however, that in dealing with such a large dataset, there are probably some minor inaccuracies in this data. This is likely mostly with dates, since schools often publish dates that are odds with one another in media guides. If you notice any issues, please let us know and we will work to confirm and fix. Another wrinkle is that prior to 1995-96, the games are almost exclusively limited to Division I vs Division I. We added Virginia's December 1982 loss to Chaminade manually, but you won't be able to find things like Georgetown's "rivalry" vs St. Leo. If you're looking for the Hoyas against Syracuse, though, we've got you covered.

With the AP releasing it's All-Pro teams today, we have an important piece of information for constructing our 2015 Approximate Values for NFL players. These numbers will change as Pro Bowl rosters change, but these values give a strong estimate of what the final 2015 AV numbers will look like (since All Pro nods have a far greater impact on AV than Pro Bowl nods do). At this time, the provisional leader in 2015 AV is J.J. Watt, with 21. For the time being, Watt's 88 AV through 5 seasons are the most in NFL history (we calculate AV back to 1960). The previous record had been 84 by Thurman Thomas. Something to ponder is that Watt was drafted between Blaine Gabbert and Christian Ponder in 2011.

As a reminder, Approximate Value is our method (developed by Doug Drinen) for putting a single numerical value on any player's season. You can read all about it here. You can see the all-time leaders in career AV here and the single-season leaders here.

The rest of the top 5 in 2015 Approximate Value can be seen below:

At Pro Football Reference, we tend to deal in the factual, objective historical record.  Our website contains tables of things that really, actually happened already. This blog post will not involve that. Instead, today we're going to take a look at the hypothetical. Here's what could happen this weekend, in the four Wild Card games, and why: Read the rest of this entry

We made a small enhancement to our NFL Receiving stats table by adding "catch percentage" as its own column. You can sort the data by that column to see which players caught the highest percentage of their targets. If you leave the "hide non-qualifiers for rate stats" box checked, it will only sort players with 30+ targets. Please bear in mind that targets are an unofficial category. Our numbers for targets are based on play-by-play descriptions from official accounts, but may slightly differ from numbers seen elsewhere. Our unofficial target data goes back to 1992, so you can run searches across multiple years for catch percentage via the Player Season Finder in the Play Index. For instance, Larry Fitzgerald's 2015 was the highest catch percentage on record by a 100-catch WR not named Wes Welker.

The best catch percentage by any qualified player since 1992 (regardless of position) was Cleveland Gary's 52 receptions on 55 targets in 1992.

We just wanted to quickly note that we have added the ability to search for safeties to the Team Game Finder tool in the Play Index.

So now you can search for things like:

• Most safeties in a game (since 1940)
• Most safeties in a season (since 1940)
• Safeties in postseason games (since 1940)

If you checked out the above links, perhaps you noticed this oddity: no team in our data has had more than 4 safeties in a single season, yet the 1984 Rams had 3 safeties in a single quarter!

You may already know that we track box score stats for the NBA D-League, meaning that you can keep an eye on the progress of prospects, potential future NBA players, and post-hype sleepers who play in the NBA's minor league. However, in addition to basic stats like points and rebounds, we've also started tracking advanced stats for all D-Leaguers. That includes numbers like PER, BPM, WS, and USG%, among others. So, for example, you can see that right now, Erick Green leads all D-Leaguers in WS:

Read the rest of this entry

PER NFL COMMUNICATIONS:

2015 NFL PLAYOFF SCENARIOS FOR WEEK 16

AFC

CLINCHED: New England – AFC East and a first-round bye

Cincinnati – playoff berth

• NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (at New York Jets, Sunday) 

   

  New England clinches home-field advantage throughout AFC playoffs with:

  1. NE win OR
  2. NE tie + CIN loss or tie

  CINCINNATI BENGALS (at Denver, Monday)

  Cincinnati clinches AFC North division with:

  1. CIN win or tie OR 
  2. PIT loss or tie

  Cincinnati clinches a first-round bye with:

  1. CIN win or tie

  DENVER BRONCOS (vs. Cincinnati, Monday)

  Denver clinches AFC West division with:

  1. DEN win + KC loss or tie OR
  2. DEN tie + KC loss

   

  Denver clinches a playoff spot with:

  1. DEN win + NYJ loss or tie  OR 
  2. DEN win + PIT loss or tie OR 
  3. DEN tie + NYJ loss OR
  4. DEN tie + PIT loss

   

  HOUSTON TEXANS (at Tennessee, Sunday)

  Houston clinches AFC South division with:

  1. HOU win + HOU clinches strength of victory tiebreaker over IND OR
  2. HOU win + IND loss or tie OR
  3. HOU tie + IND loss

   

  KANSAS CITY CHIEFS (vs. Cleveland, Sunday)

  Kansas City clinches a playoff spot with:

  1. KC win + NYJ loss OR
  2. KC win + PIT loss

   

  PITTSBURGH STEELERS (at Baltimore, Sunday)

  Pittsburgh clinches a playoff spot with:

  1. PIT win + NYJ loss?

  NFC

  CLINCHED: Carolina – NFC South and a first-round bye

  Arizona – NFC West

  Green Bay – playoff berth

  Seattle – playoff berth

  CAROLINA PANTHERS (at Atlanta, Sunday)

  Carolina clinches home-field advantage throughout NFC playoffs with:

  1. CAR win or tie OR 
  2. ARI loss or tie?

  ARIZONA CARDINALS (vs. Green Bay, Sunday)

  Arizona clinches a first-round bye with:

  1. ARI win or tie

  GREEN BAY PACKERS (at Arizona, Sunday)

  Green Bay clinches NFC North division with:

  1. GB win + MIN loss or tie OR 
  2. GB tie + MIN loss

   

  MINNESOTA VIKINGS (vs. New York Giants, Sunday night)

  Minnesota clinches a playoff spot with:

  1. MIN win or tie OR 
  2. ATL loss or tie OR
  3. SEA win or tie

  WASHINGTON REDSKINS (at Philadelphia, Saturday)

  Washington clinches NFC East division with:

  1. WAS win OR 
  2. WAS tie + NYG loss