Sports Reference Blog
Introducing the PFR Play Finder!
Posted by Neil on August 29, 2012
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.
Been looking forward to this feature, thanks so much guys!
I don't mean to sound ungrateful by making a suggestion after you guys just launched this major new feature. However, I think that adding fantasy football info to the Play Index would make it even more valuable of a tool than it already is. Since you guys have the great CSV feature, it is really easy to pull the data into excel and calculate fantasy points. However, the ability to search and filter by position rank, overall rank, VBD, etc. would really increase the functionality of PFR. I am sure that adding this is much more difficult than I am making it sound (I have absolutely 0 programming experience), but even changing the way that fantasy points are calculated on the season pages would be a major help. I know that ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, NFL, and most other major fantasy sites use 4 points for Passing TDs, so I think most people are in the same boat. Again, I don't mean to seem ungrateful for the new features, but I just wanted to share the idea.
Trent, you could copy and paste all of it into Excel and use the custom sort on the drop-down menu on Sort& Filter located in the Editing Tab. It allows you to sort certain columns as a primary objective and then allows you to choose secondary columns to sort after the primary has been sorted. Example: Coulmn "A" could be players position. Use custom sort to sort the positions out alphabetically. Then use a secondary level to sort through yards or TD's. This will seperate all players respective positions.
This is a great feature. I was using your 3rd example above http://www.pro-football-reference.com/play-index/tiny.cgi?id=1JPSI to do a similar query to look for the Most Passing Yards accumulated by a QB in a Regular Season OT game in the OT period only. I couldn’t get this to work for just 1 Game but I could for all Season games.
From what I have found (though I have now found much OT Play by Play data is missing) is that Drew Bledsoe may have the Most Passing Yards in an OT period (since 2000) with 161 Yds against Minnesota in 2002.
Is there a quick way to do this Query using the “Game Play Finder”?
I love this feature. Been waiting a long time for something like this.
One question (so far): If I search for Scoring Play=YES and Turnover=YES (looking for pick sixes and fumbles returned for scores) I only get about five hits since 2000. None since about 2003. Is this a bug? Or a limitation in the data?
My only suggestion would be to still show all after a re-sort of stats.
You can show all then re-sort but ya can't re-sort then show all...
The won/loss segment isn't separating the wins and losses.
No matter which you click it gives all the games for the list and not wins or losses