Alright, so I wanted to figure out this whole “points allowed” thing in the NFL. You know, like, how many points each team lets the other team score on average. It sounded simple enough at first, but, well, it turned into a bit of a rabbit hole.
First, I grabbed my trusty notebook and pen – yeah, I’m old school like that. I figured I’d start by just jotting down some team names and their recent scores. I opened my browser, thinking, “Okay, I’ll just Google this, easy peasy.”
Boy, was I wrong. I was immediately bombarded with a million different websites, each with their own stats and tables. I mean, there was total points allowed, points allowed per game, points allowed per play… my head started to spin!
Digging Through the Data
I decided to focus on points allowed per game, figuring that was the most straightforward stat. I found a few reputable sports sites and started copying down the numbers for each team. I quickly realized I needed a better system than my notebook, so I fired up a spreadsheet.
I have created serveral columns, the data of team, points, game, and average points.
- Team:Name of the team.
- Points:Points allowed for a team.
- Game:Games the team played.
- AVG Points: Points allowed per game.
I painstakingly entered all the data, team by team. It took forever! But finally, I had a nice, organized spreadsheet with all the points allowed per game for each NFL team.
Then I got curious. I started wondering, “What about home games versus away games? Do teams allow more points when they’re on the road?” So, back to the websites I went. I started filtering the data by home and away games, adding more columns to my spreadsheet.
It got messy. I mean, really messy. I had numbers everywhere. But after a lot of copying, pasting, and calculating averages, I started to see some patterns. Some teams were definitely tougher to score on at home, while others seemed to struggle no matter where they played.
Finally, I took all my data. It wasn’t perfect, and I’m sure there are fancier ways to do it with all sorts of algorithms and whatnot, but I felt like I had a pretty good handle on which teams were stingy on defense and which ones were, well, not so much. It’s a pretty great feeling!