Sports Reference Blog

Following the introduction of the Team Split Finder last November, we are now proud to announce the addition of another new tool for Stathead Football subscribers: the Player Split Finder.

This powerful tool allows users to search through our splits database to compare players across various situations, with most stats going back to the 1994 season. Here's a quick look at the different splits available and some examples to help you get started.

QUARTER: Most 4th Quarter TD Passes Thrown This Season

LOCATION: Highest Passer Rating on the Road in a Single Season (min. 100 attempts)

DOWN: Most Times Sacked on Third Down This Season

YARDS TO GO: Most Rushing First Downs on Plays with 10+ Yards To Go This Season

DOWN & YARDS TO GO: Best Completion Percentage on 3rd Down and 10+ Yards to Go in 2017

FIELD POSITION: Most Red Zone Targets This Season

SCORE DIFFERENTIAL: Most Pass Attempts When Trailing in 2019

GAME SITUATION: Most Passes Intercepted While Tied with Less Than 4 Minutes Remaining Since 1994

SNAP TYPE & HUDDLE (since 1998): Most Passes Completed Under Center This Season

PASS RUSH TYPE (since 2018): Best Passer Rating Against the Blitz This Season

We hope you enjoy this addition to Stathead. If you're interested in a subscription to the service, you can sign up for a free trial here. We built this tool thanks to feedback from users like you. Should you have any questions or other feedback, please reach out to us.

With the season concluded, we're pleased to report that we've added 2020 Approximate Value (AV) numbers to the site for all NFL players. Note that these numbers are just provisional right now; the final numbers will be released after the All-Pro teams are announced.

As of now, Josh Allen, Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson are tied for the league AV lead at 18, with Derrick Henry and Aaron Donald the two non-QBs to make the top 10. You can see the top players in this Stathead.com Player Season Finder search. Washington rookie Chase Young had an especially strong year, finishing at 13 AV. Only Ndamukong Suh and Jevon Kearse had as high an AV among rookie defensive linemen in the post-merger era.

Not sure what AV is? To learn more about PFR's attempt to put a single number on each player-season since 1960 (for the purposes of comparing players across position and era), check out this link. Feel free to send us feedback via our site's form.

Katie Sharp has joined Sports Reference and will be working both on social media and customer success for our Stathead subscription service. Katie spent seven years as a researcher with ESPN's Stats and Info Group, and since then has worked as a writer, editor and researcher on dozens of articles and books. Most recently, she has been a recurring guest on Jomboy Media's Talkin' Yanks podcast. Katie graduated from Williams College and also has an MBA from the University of Oregon. She's on twitter at @ktsharp.

Per-36 minute player projections are now live on Basketball-Reference for the 2020-21 season. These projection are 'simple' projections using the Marcel the Monkey system.

Marcel's keeper, Tom Tango, describes the system as follows:

"[I]t is the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible. So, that's the allusion to the monkey."

So there is no consideration for injuries, change of scenery, etc., in these projections.

We recently fixed an issue where, because of the abbreviated 2020 season, we were not allocating enough wins to position players when calculating Wins Above Replacement. We have fixed this issue across Baseball-Reference. With this change, no position player gained more than 0.3 WAR, and no position player lost WAR. All pitcher WAR remained the same.

You can review the changes for each player here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18WY53wSt0GrBMMijLiIFMhVtvbmjuhbYNOaTvHfs-gE/edit?usp=sharing

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

A frequent suggestion we've received since launching FBref is a way to see head-to-head records between two teams and who's performed the best in those particular matchups. Well, we've heard you and released Records vs. Opponents pages and Historical Head-to-Head pages.

The Records vs. Opponents page quickly gives you a view of the teams they've played most frequently against, as well as their win-loss-draw records and goal differential with each opponent. For teams that play in both domestic and international competitions that we cover, we include results from those different competitions combined.

Once you go into the Historical Head-to-Head page for a particular series, you can see the different competitions we have record of the teams meeting in. For example, looking at El Clásico, you can see the results of Barcelona and Real Madrid facing off in La Liga, Copa del Rey, Supercopa de España and Champions League. The Head-to-Head Matches table has toggles at the top that allows you to filter victories by one team or the other, or draws. Further down, we have statistical leaderboards for the series, as well as overall player and goalkeeper statistics for the matches we have coverage for. These new features are also available for national teams, in case you want to see which teams have given the U.S. Women's National Team the hardest time.

You can see the full list of competitions and years we have coverage for on our site's Competitions index. Links to teams' Records vs. Opponents are available from their history page, and links to Historical Head-to-Head pages will also be available from upcoming fixtures tables. If you go to our daily Matches page, you can see Head-to-Head links for each of the upcoming day's matchups. If you have any suggestions or feedback on this feature or something else you want to see on FBref, you can contact us via our feedback form.

We've been listening to requests for new features from our users and we're happy to announce that we have launched a new tool for Stathead Football subscribers: The Team Split Finder

The Team Split Finder allows users to unleash the power of our splits database to run searches to compare how teams have fared in various situations. The splits are built off of our play-by-play data, which dates back to 1994.

Read the rest of this entry

Nick Pazoles has joined Sports Reference as a DevOps engineer. Nick previously worked for Cleo in the Chicagoland area and is the first White Sox and University of Michigan football fan on staff.

On Basketball-Reference, we have a special page for Michael Jordan where we house his statistics from his high school and college career. Two other superstars that have been in the spotlight since high school are Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, and we have added special pages for them that display their statistics during high school.

Kobe Bryant's high school page allows you to follow his improvement over his years at Lower Merion, along with notes marking milestones such as his first 40-point game or his McDonalds All-American honoring. The page also includes Bryant's preseason games for the first half of his NBA career. We give special thanks to Todd Spehr for compiling and donating these records and notes.

LeBron James' high school page tracks his statistics at Saint Vincent-Saint Mary in Akron before entering the NBA, with full coverage of makes, attempts and rebounds.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, you can contact us via our feedback form.

Over the past few weeks, we have added a number of exciting improvements to FBref, many of which were requested by our users.

Pass Length Categories

We have adjusted the three categories for pass lengths.
Old Categories
Short: 0-5 yards
Medium: 5-25 yards
Long: 25+ yards

New Categories
Short: 5-15 yards
Medium: 15-30 yards
Long: 30+ yards

The issue previously was that the short category was including many passes that were blocked or deflected and therefore traveled fewer than 5 yards. This resulted in low completion totals for "short" passes, which is counterintuitive. To fix this, we are excluding passes traveling fewer than 5 yards in these categories. Now we see "short" passes as the most likely to be completed.

Defensive Actions included in Goal/Shot Creating Actions

We introduced the Shot and Goal Creating Actions metric earlier this year. This stat captures which events ultimately led to a shot or a goal. Previously, these actions were limited to the offensive side, such as Passes, Dribbles, and Fouls Drawn. We are now including defensive actions that lead to a shot or goal, such as Interceptions and Tackles.

Precise Ages on Current Season pages

For winter competitions, we list players' ages on August 1st of that season, to represent their age at the beginning of the competition. Likewise, we list ages on February 1st for Summer competitions. This works well for previous seasons, but it can be an issue for current seasons when players have a birthday during the competition. To fix this, we are now displaying precise ages on current season pages. These ages are in the YY-DDD format. For example, 27-123 indicates that the player is 27 years and 123 days old.

Ages on Match Reports

We have also added player ages to our match reports. These are the players' ages on the date of the match, listed in YY-DDD format.

Average Squad Age

Also regarding player ages, we have added each team's average age to the squad stats tables. These ages are weighted by minutes played.

Completed Matches

We have added Completed Matches to our Playing Time table. These are matches in which a player was in the starting XI and played the full match (eg was not subbed or sent off).

Average Shot Distance

Our Shooting tables offer a lot of detail about a player's shooting record. We have included the average distance from the goal of their shots. Note that this stat does not include penalty kicks and is listed in yards.

Opponent's Stats

Finally, we are now including opponent's stats on our squad stats tables. These are toggleable by clicking on the "Opponents Stats" buttons above each table. These stats show how opponents performed against a particular squad.

Opponent's stats are also included in squad pages, below player totals. This provides an easy way to compare a team's "For" and "Against" stats in each category.