feeds-rs on nfl.com contains all you could possibly ask for

So after some friendly help over at Reddit, turns out that what I posted in #28 really was only the tip of the iceberg. Not even that.

http://www.nfl.com/feeds-rs?_wadl

If you check that link, you’ll get all the endpoints that are under feeds-rs. There are dozens and dozens more. Just some examples:

#The 1983 NFL teams (goes back to 1970) https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/teams/1983.json

#The current roster of the Arizona Cardinals https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/roster/3800.json

#All draft picks in the 4th round of 2015 https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/draft/byRound/4/2015.json

#Player stats on Khalil Mack (one of the many player-related endpoints, depending on what kind of info you want and how you want it presented/filtered) https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/playerStats/2543463.json

#Player transactions for the Denver Broncos in september: https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/transactions/team/1400/2018/9.json

#Colts@Patriots 2 weeks ago http://www.nfl.com/feeds-rs/boxscorePbp/2018100400.json

And the list goes on, and on, and on. You can get info on officials, blog posts, free agency…

In the way nflgame is used now, this doesn’t really change things drastically. There are things that could be simplified though, especially the update-player logic which is pretty advanced and relies on web scraping. So that would benefit from this.

I gladly admit when I’m wrong, I think it is safe to say that the NFL does have an API (apart from api.nfl.com), this is way more than a few “accidental” feeds.

[mickeelm]

I don’t think that these resources are more reliable than the ones nflgame uses right now but just to take an example - scheduling. IMO, nflgame should simply use https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/schedules/2018.json (insert 2019 next season, or just omit the parameter to get the current season), plain and simple. This contains the whole schedule for this season, and changes throughout the season when games are moved. The logic today in nflgame is built during other circumstances, where only one week at a time could be fetched. This is a limitation that no longer needs to be. So issues like the one mentioned above can easily be removed by simply removing a lot of now unnecessary logic and just fetching the whole schedule every now and then. Of course, if NFL indeed was feeding the wrong data, then there’s nothing we can do about it, regardless of data source.

As mentioned before but as another example, player logic relies on web scraping. As sophisticated and great it may have been written during different circumstances with different conditions, it is no longer necessary to have this kind of advanced logic and it requires many more HTTP calls than necessary (which have been up to debate before).

As for my own contribution, I’m pretty swamped with other stuff so I’m not gonna take the lead here (also, in my application I just go straight towards these endpoints, so I don’t use nflgame personally, I just like the project). But, I’ll be glad to help out when I can if you want me to, when specific tasks/questions pop up.

[derek-adair]

Oh how wrong I was to count on feeds-rs.