We're excited to post the latest video in our How To series, showing you some secrets and hacks that will help to get the most out of the Sports-Reference family of sites. Today's video is all about sharing. While many users know how to find the data they're look for, fewer know the different ways of sharing it. From embedding tables on a website or blog, to posting them to Reddit, to downloading directly to your computer as a spreadsheet, this video will show you the different ways that you share all the info you find on our sites:

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We know that a lot of you are interested in grabbing data from our site and reusing it in excel and generating reports on your own. We got our start doing that.

The redesign complicates that because we add some helper elements to the page that are relevant for the vast majority of users and helpful in their use of the site. I'll call this material Mobile Formatting. It includes the frozen left column on wide tables, the max width of the page and side scrolling, the use of interior table header rows and sort direction indicators. So to make sorting easier, I've added an option to the "Share & more" menu to strip this content out in one click.
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On the old version of the site on the front page, we placed the cursor into the search box automatically which could cause some issues if you had already scrolled down the page. Your browser would then be jerked back to the top of the page. On the site redesign, all you have to do is (once the page has loaded) hit the tab key one time and you'll be put into the search box. Lickety Split.

In November, we announced that we were no longer able to support automatic export of our tables to Excel. This was due to newer browsers not behaving in ways we expected, making it difficult to support the feature. We're happy to announce that we've figured this out, however.

Today, the automatic Excel export feature has returned to all of our sites. To export any of our tables to Excel, please hover over "Share & more" above the table you'd like to export. Once you hover, you'll see a dropdown where you can select "Get as Excel Workbook (experimental)", which will download the table into an xls file you can open with Excel.

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After 20 weeks of football (and an extra week of skills challenges and half-contested exhibition action in the Pro Bowl), we've arrived at the Super Bowl. And in between the commercials, the (sometimes overly enthusiastic) questions from reporters, Media Day, Opening Night, the NFL Honors show with awards like NFL Most Valuable Player and the announcement of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2017, more commercials, Lady Gaga, and the Jack Bauer-free return of 24, there's an actual game to played!

The good news is that, on paper, Super Bowl LI seems like it should be a good one. The bad news is that I also said that last year and, unless you're a Denver Broncos fan, there wasn't much to enjoy in that one. However, between the quality of the two teams, especially at quarterback, and the extremely high-stakes historic implications in play for the outcome, there's plenty in this year's matchup for us to dig into. Read the rest of this entry

Welcome back to Play Index 101! This series of videos will teach you how to use the Sports Reference Play Index to research statistics and facts from sports history. This is Episode 2; in this episode, you'll learn all about how to use the Game Finder:  Read the rest of this entry

I'd estimate that around 99% of the time, when someone comes to a Sports Reference site, they go to a player or team page and then log off. More advanced users may find their way to the frivolities pages, experiment with features like the Oracle of Baseball, or just spend several hours following link chains to various players and games.

But, just like Westworld, there's another level to our websites, one that relatively few people know how to navigate. It's called the Play Index and, in all sincerity, figuring out how to use it will change your life as a sports fan. If you've ever wondered how people find tidbits like "Mike Trout has the most WAR of any hitter through age-24" or "Dennis Rodman had seven 0-point, 20-rebound games in his career", the answer is usually that they've used the Play Index.

While the Play Index is easy to use if you know your way around, it can seem daunting to a newcomer. We often get messages from people who are eager to learn how to use the Play Index, but don't quite know where to start. So, with that in mind, we're starting a new video series called Play Index 101! Read the rest of this entry

On November 22, 1945, the Detroit Lions hosted the Cleveland Rams. Although there had been some professional football games on Thanksgiving in the 1920s and 30s, this marked the beginning of a new era and an impressive streak. For each of the next 71 years, the Lions would play on Thanksgiving. The Dallas Cowboys officially joined in the fun in 1966, as football joined turkey, naps, and contentious political arguments as a universally recognized Thanksgiving Day tradition. Read the rest of this entry

UPDATE: As of March 14, 2017, we figured out how to once again allow for automatic export to Excel

As you may have noticed, on our re-designed sites we recently disabled the feature allowing you to export our tables directly to Excel. This was because updated browsers were no longer supporting the function and it was becoming problematic to keep up. However, this doesn't mean that you can't still easily export our tables into spreadsheets. There's just an extra step or two, now.

First, look for the "Share & more" tab atop the table you'd like to export. If you don't see this tab, it means the particular table you're looking at isn't exportable. Otherwise, hover over it and options will drop down (see image). Select "Get table as CSV (for Excel)", which will convert the table to comma-separated values.

Once the table has been converted to CSV, copy and paste the entirety of the table (or whatever section of it you want) into Excel, as text. You will now have an unintelligible, single-column mess in your spreadsheet, but that's fine. The commas are there for a reason and Excel will help us easily convert those commas into nice, readable columns of data. This next step is sometimes variable depending on the version of Excel you're working with, but what you want to find is the "text to columns" function. In my Excel for Mac 2011, this can be found under the "Data" tab. If you can't find it on your version, a google search for "Excel text to columns" with your Excel version number should yield useful results.

Once you have located the "text to columns" function, you will choose a file type that best describes your data. You will want to choose "delimited" since the fields are separated by commas. Next, you will choose the delimiter. Check the box next to "comma." Once you make that selection, you can finish up with the text to columns wizard and you should then have a nicely formatted spreadsheet.

We realize this is not quite as quick or simple as the old export function, but unfortunately we can no longer support that function. Once you get the hang of this method, you'll see it's also quite simple.

You may have noticed that we recently expanded much of our player game logs coverage back to 1950. Previously, this data only went back to 1960 on our site. Below is a complete breakdown of the added material:

• Passing statistics (pass attempts, completions, yards, pass touchdowns and interceptions) are complete for all players from 1950-59
• Rushing/Receiving statistics (rush attempts, rush yards, rush TD, receptions, receiving yards, receiving TD) are 95% complete from 1953-59. 25 games over these seven seasons are missing some data (though all HOFers and All-Pros are complete). From 1950-52, this data is 100% complete for HOFers/All-Pros and for the Packers, 49ers, Lions, Rams and Browns. The Bears, Giants, Eagles, Steelers, Redskins and Cardinals are 90% complete. The Colts, Yanks and Texans are 75% complete.

That fine print is not particularly exciting to read, so below I'll highlight just some of the cool data this now adds to our site:

• We now have Adrian Burk's 7-TD game in 1954 in play index searches
• No big surprise that Jim Brown had the high game for rushing yardage in the 1950s
• In fact, Brown's 237-yd game remains the most by a player 21 or younger since 1950
• We now have game logs for Jim Brown's entire career. Click here to ogle.
• Crazy Legs Hirsch had 22 games with 100+ receiving yards in the 1950s

In addition to the play index searches, you can also view the fleshed out box scores of the games of from the 1950s.

We hope you enjoy this addition. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.