So I was looking at some older games on NFL.com and found something interesting about their box scores: they shave points off Example. I tried to find some pattern (in 5 minutes) as to why this was happening. There didn’t seem to be one that I could tell (some games were ones that only had field goals and were OK, others with touchdowns were OK and others were not).
I imagine it’s some missing link in the NFL database about a player or just the 49ers. I sent them an email with the game ids so they could fix it. Overall, though I was really surprised. Isn’t sports stats supposed to be the pinnacle of clean data? Don’t you have people pour over this stuff day in and day out to make lines/create schedules/reporting/etc? I know NFL isn’t doing that directly (except for making schedules and reporting), but I was still surprised.
So no – NFL doesn’t hate SF or the 9ers (that I can tell), but I am even more firm in my adage of ‘what do you mean your data is “clean”‘?
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