Football Analytics with Python & R: Learning Data Science Through the Lens of Sports

Description

Baseball is not the only sport to use "moneyball." American football teams, fantasy football players, fans, and gamblers are increasingly using data to gain an edge on the competition. Professional and college teams use data to help identify team needs and select players to fill those needs. Fantasy football players and fans use data to try to defeat their friends, while sports bettors use data in an attempt to defeat the sportsbooks. In this concise book, Eric Eager and Richard Erickson provide a clear introduction to using statistical models to analyze football data using both Python and R. Whether your goal is to qualify for an entry-level football analyst position, dominate your fantasy football league, or simply learn R and Python with fun example cases, this book is your starting place. Through case studies in both Python and R, you'll learn to: Obtain NFL data from Python and R packages and web scraping Visualize and explore data Apply regression models to play-by-play data Extend regression models to classification problems in football Apply data science to sports betting with individual player props Understand player athletic attributes using multivariate statistics Review: Working code examples for developers and sports betting - I was really pleased to find this book while searching for nfl python regression. I'm an experienced java developer making the jump to python for the purpose of building a sports betting data model. I don't like R or R studio so I haven't tried that code. But I did all the python code in the first 3 chapters using the free preview on google books and I can assure you it worked fine. After that I decided to pay for the kindle version because I want to see the rest of the the code. It will be extremely helpful in building my betting model. I don't have an issue with the nfl_data_py library like one of the 1 star reviewers said. I confirmed that it still works in dec 2023. If it stops working, I'll just find another web scraping example and use that instead. It's the concept of regression analysis that I'm after. I also think this will be applicable to other sports as well. Review: Learn coding and data science through the NFL - Book was a great tutorial. I had experience with R, but it leveled up my coding. Lots of new ideas for me to think on, plus ideas for how to create ideas that you could study (which is probably the most important). Excellent way for fans of the NFL, data science or both to become a more insightful fan.