Simulating Plays and Drives in the NFL

The intent here is to enable the simulation of plays/drives and evaluate game-play strategies in the National Football League (NFL). Built-in strategies include going for it on fourth down and varying the proportion of passing/rushing plays during a drive. The user should be familiar with nflscrapR data before trying to write his/her own strategies. This work is inspired by a blog post by Mike Lopez, currently the Director of Data and Analytics at the NFL, Lopez (2019) < https://statsbylopez.netlify.app/post/resampling-nfl-drives/>.

NFLSimulatoR

Simulating plays and drives in the NFL using nflscrapR or nflfastR data.

Website

The NFLSimulatoR package website is hosted at https://datacolorado.com/r/NFLSimulatoR.

Overview

The intent of NFLSimulatoR (version 0.1.0) is to enable the simulation of plays/drives and evaluate game-play strategies in the National Football League (NFL). Built-in strategies include going for it on fourth down and varying the proportion of passing/rushing plays during a drive. The user should be familiar with nflscrapR data before trying to write his/her own strategies. The package itself is inspired by a blog post by Mike Lopez, currently the Director of Data and Analytics at the NFL.

Getting Started

If you are just getting started with NFLSimulatoR, we recommend reading an upcoming paper related to use cases.

Installation Instructions

From CRAN (v0.3.0):

install.packages("NFLSimulatoR")

The latest developmental version from GitHub (v0.3.1):

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("rtelmore/NFLSimulatoR")

Resources

• Open an issue (GitHub issues for bug reports, feature requests, etc.)