Sports Reference Blog

Over the past few months, we have significantly bolstered our Engineering team with four new full-time hires.

• Ben Wozniak, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2022. Ben lives in Milwaukee and previously worked at Brady Corporation as a Software Engineer. He is primarily a Chicago sports fan, particularly the Cubs and Bears. Follow him on Twitter at @ben_woz.
• Jonathan Moore, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2022. He attended Illinois State University and Tufts University. Jonathan lives in Boston and previously worked at Left Hook, Inc. as an Integrations Engineer. He is originally from Bloomington-Normal, IL and is a Chicago Sports fan.
• Matthew Carr, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2023. He lives in Toronto, Canada and previously worked as a full stack developer in the healthcare industry. He was in attendance for Joey Bats’ bat flip and is a fan of the Raptors, Jays and Leafs.
• Joe Zobel, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2023 after interning the summer of 2022. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer Engineering. He is a Chicago and Purdue sports fan.

Welcome to the team, Ben, Jonathan, Matthew, and Joe!

Joe is an example of our summer intern program leading to a full-time hire. If you're interested in our intern program, we are currently hiring seven summer interns for 2023 (in Data, Engineering, Marketing, and Product). These are paid internships.

If you're a Stathead user, you're probably already familiar with the Player Span Finders, which give you the option to search player stats over a span of games. Well, now we're excited to roll out the team version of this tool to all the Stathead sports!

Previously, Baseball users had a Team Span Finder, but now the option is there for Basketball, Football, and Hockey as well. With the Team Span Finder, you can:

• Search for combined stat totals over a consecutive span of games
• See records like "the most points in any 10-game span"
• Filter spans by ranges like the beginning or end of a season, or narrow the search by team, game circumstances, and more
• Use a Postseason filter to search for Postseason spans

In short, all the same great functionality and search options that you had in the Player Span Finder are now available on the team level. Search any and every span of games to uncover remarkable records in Stathead, your all-access pass to the Sports Reference database.

One of Stathead Basketball's most powerful tools just got even better.

The Player Span Finder now has WNBA stats. This tool gives you the power to search for player stats over any consecutive span of games from any point in their career. Now, with WNBA spans, you can answer questions like "Who had the most points in any 20-game span in WNBA history". Read the rest of this entry

We're excited to announce a new tool for Stathead Football, and it's one of our most-requested features.

The Player Span Finder gives you the power to search for player stats over any consecutive span of games from any point in their career. We've often had users ask for tools to answer questions like "Who had the most passing touchdowns in any 16 game span since the merger". Now, with the Span Finder, you can look that up. Unlike the Streak Finder, it will give you cumulative stats over every game in the span, regardless of if it fits the streak. And unlike the Game Finder, it can search every single possible span. Read the rest of this entry

Basketball Reference has added NBA Coach of the Year voting back to 1995-96 thanks to work of Noureddine Hourani, a researcher who passed this information along to us.

This new information can be found on coach pages such as Phil Jackson and Monty Williams. Additionally, if you visit our page with the full history of the NBA Coach of the Year Award, you will see a 'v' link in the rows for years where we have voting. Those links will lead to a page with voting summaries for all of the awards for which we have data for that season. For instance, here's the 1995-96 NBA Award voting summary.

Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to the research of Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis, Pro Football Reference has added player statistics (passing, rushing, receiving, defensive interceptions, kicking, punting and kick/punt returns) to every box score in AAFC history. This means we now have, for instance, complete passing logs for Hall of Famer Otto Graham, rushing logs for Hall of Famer Marion Motley, receiving logs for Hall of Famer Mac Speedie, kick/punt return logs for Chet Mutryn,  kicking logs for Hall of Famer Lou Groza, and the whole nine yards from Spec Sanders, who passed, ran, received, returned, punted AND intercepted during his outstanding AAFC career.

These statistics can be found in our AAFC box scores, as well as on player game log pages like the ones mentioned above.

Read the rest of this entry

We're excited to announce the addition of a new tool to Stathead Hockey: the Player Span Finder!

The Span Finder is one of the most powerful tools in the Stathead arsenal. It gives you the ability to search for combined stat totals over a span of games. For hockey, that means you now have the ability to search for things like the most goals in *any* ten game span.

Additionally, there are filters that give you the ability to narrow down your search, if you're looking for different kinds of spans. You can look for the start or end of a season, the start or end of a player's career, or the start or end of a player's time with a team or franchise. If someone gets traded and has a hot start with his new team, the Span Finder is the tool to use.

There are more filters to give you the ability to narrow by team, game circumstances, position, rookie status, and more. You can also toggle from regular season to postseason and look for spans in the playoffs.

If you've never tried Stathead Hockey before, now is the perfect time! The season is in full swing and the Span Finder will give you more ways to explore hockey stats than ever before. Learn more about Stathead Hockey, your all-access pass to the Hockey Reference database

In April of 2021, we announced a series of changes to player name presentations on Baseball Reference and Pro Football Reference in which we changed the main name presentation for many historical players who had been tagged with offensive nicknames decades ago. When we completed that task, we hinted that we'd perform similar work with less offensive nicknames, as well. Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to some research from Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis, we've been able to add several new categories of punting statistics all the way back to when they were first officially tracked in 1976 to Pro Football Reference. The addition of this new data is substantial enough that we have also decided to split out a separate punting stats table from the kicking stats. This means that these statistics will now be in separate tables (rather than merged together) on player, team, league, season, etc pages. A good example of the change is Craig Hentrich, an NFL punter from 1994-2009, who also spent many seasons of his career handling kickoff duties (and occasionally kicking field goals and extra points). His statistics will not only now be more detailed, but hopefully more digestible, as well.

To complement the punt stats we've always carried (punts, punt yards, yards per punt, long punt and punts blocked), we've added return yards against, net punt yards, net yards per punt, touchbacks, touchback percentage, punts inside the 20 and percentage of punts inside the 20.

In addition to appearing on a seasonal level, these new statistics are also presented on a game-by-game level. For instance, here are Hall of Famer Ray Guy's game-by-game punting statistics in 1976.

We hope you enjoy these new additions.

Thanks to our friends at SportsOddsHistory, we've added NFL point spread data that is 100% complete back to 1969 and nearly complete back to 1952*. This data includes AFL games and allows us to expand our point spread searches in the Stathead Team Game Finder all the way back to 1952.

This new data produces some of the largest point spreads we've seen in NFL games. The largest regular season point spread in our dB is now November 13, 1966 when the Baltimore Colts were favored by 28 over the Atlanta Falcons (they did not cover).

The 1960s also included a pair of 20-point dogs that won outright (Vikings over Packers in 1967 and Dolphins over Oilers in 1966).

Additionally, we have added point spread data for a smattering of games between 1941 and 1951, including every championship game (including AAFC) from 1941-51. However, these pre-1952 games are not searchable in Stathead and will just be presented in the box scores for now.

We'd also like to add that while this data expansion gives us point spreads back to 1952, our over/under data is still only complete back to 1978 (except for Super Bowls).

*The data is nearly complete (as opposed to fully complete), because we are missing lines for the following number of games: 1968 (4), 1967 (1), 1965 (2), 1964 (3), 1963 (4), 1962 (3), 1961 (2), 1960 (4), 1953 (2), 1952 (9).

Below is a list of these missing point spreads:

Read the rest of this entry