Okay, so I was digging into some NFL stats today, specifically looking at “time to throw.” I’ve always been curious about how long quarterbacks actually have in the pocket, and wanted some hard data to show for that.
Finding the Data
I started out just by Googling around. I figured, “Hey, there must be some site that tracks this, right?” Surprisingly, finding the raw data was the actual tough part.
I finally came across some websites and saw that a lot of other people have done some work on this before.
Wrangling the Data and make them readable
I fired up a plain text file, I wanted to take things one step at a time and started copy and pasting some stats.
- First, I copied every table I could find.
- Second, I noticed that the data can be grouped by players’ names.
- Finally, I found I have got all the data of players’ “time to throw” stats.
Seeing the Results
After cleaning everything, I was able to get some simple results, like average time to throw for each quarterback. That was pretty cool to see who holds onto the ball the longest and who gets it out quick.
This was a fun little project! It showed me that sometimes the hardest part isn’t the analysis, but just getting your hands on the data in the first place.