Ggplot

Air yards plots are popular and informative ways for assessing the accuracy of quarterbacks at different depths of the field. As examples, Josh and Ben have both done excellent work in highlighting how using where a quarterback was throwing to tells us more of a story than simply looking at completion percentage alone. Here’s one example of an air yards plot, using a pair of players from the 2019 season.

As part of the NFL’s technology conference held last week, I presented to club staffers various approaches on how R could be used to explore NFL data. Here’s a slightly abridged version. This specific audience featured both novice and expert R users. Given that a semester’s long course would be needed to truly cover the breadth of how R could help explore football, note that this particular document is more an overview than anything else.

Brian, Alex, and a host of others have done nice work recently when it comes to creating better scatter plots using images in ggplot in R. In this post, I’ll show how easy it is to use the ggimage package and do the same. What data to use? Ron, Sam, Max, and the folks at nflscrapR have built a pretty amazing tool to analyze football play-by-play data. They’ve nicely stored csv’s that summarize several play-level and team-level characteristics relating to each play.