Sports Reference Blog

Advanced Defensive Stats on PFR for 2018 and 2019

Posted by Alex Bonilla on September 18, 2019

At the beginning of the 2019 season, Pro Football Reference announced the addition of advanced offensive statistics, provided by Sportradar, the NFL's exclusive distributor for official real-time scores, player statistics and play-by-play data. This week, we have also incorporated advanced defensive statistics from Sportradar. These stats include:

* Times targeted as a defender
* Receiving yards per reception allowed
* Completion percentage and passer rating allowed on targets
* Average depth of target as a defender
* Yards after catch allowed
* Times brought on a QB blitz
* QB pressures (hurries + knockdowns + sack plays)
* Missed tackles

We've added these statistics to 2018 players and will be updating them for 2019 as well. These statistics are provided via game charting and will be populated by the Wednesday following completion of the game, if not earlier. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form or Pro Football Reference's official Twitter account. Thanks for following PFR!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 18th, 2019 at 11:55 am and is filed under Advanced Stats, Announcement, Data, Features, Pro-Football-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

8 Responses to “Advanced Defensive Stats on PFR for 2018 and 2019”

  1. Phil H. Says: September 18th, 2019 at 2:16 pm

    I'm curious if these advanced stats will eventually be added to the leaderboards. I'd love to see QB hits, defensive targets, etc. in a sortable leaderboard.

  2. Brady McElheny Says: September 28th, 2019 at 4:34 pm

    What happened to the SRS ratings for College Football? All but 2019 have disappeared.

  3. Alex Bonilla Says: October 1st, 2019 at 1:51 pm

    That should be back now.

  4. Advanced Team Statistics Tables Now on PFR | Sports-Reference.com Says: October 11th, 2019 at 12:22 pm

    […] Blog we posted about the addition of advanced statistics at the individual level on offense and defense for 2018 and 2019. We've followed up on that addition and also calculated those advanced statistics […]

  5. Chuck Says: October 15th, 2019 at 3:39 pm

    Is there a way to get this data at "team game finder" level? The team level advanced defense stats are only available on a "year to date" basis for the season (i.e. stats through 6 weeks).

  6. Alex Bonilla Says: October 16th, 2019 at 2:22 pm

    Not yet but incorporating the advanced stats into the Play Index tools is on our to-do list.

  7. Chuck Says: October 16th, 2019 at 10:13 pm

    Thanks for your reply Alex.

    Is it possible for me to harvest this from player game finder or game logs, or am I just going to have to be patient? :p

  8. Alex Bonilla Says: October 18th, 2019 at 2:44 pm

    As mentioned in the blog post, we are displaying advanced defense tables on box score pages, so ostensibly so you could engineer team advanced defense stats game-by-game from there, in the meantime.