I have to break down a dataset in Pivot Charts in Excel and in Tableau for my Master's courses.
We have been given a dataset for a company, that I am not very interested in looking at and I have the option to do whatever I want with as long as I have a Dataset to analyze.
Somethings I have thought about from a previous thread are Tracking 5 Star Athletes, where they are from compared to where they end up in school (I can't find Datasets on these anywhere!). I could look at data about where VT recruits from and schools and what not. I just need to find the data.
Hell, Joe, if you would like, I can analyze TKP google analytics.
If you have something you want analyzed, a hypothesis you would like to me to try to verify, throw it in the comment section ALONG WITH WHERE I CAN ACCESS THE DATA and I will see what I can do. If I can create a graph, I'll host it somewhere, and share it here.
Please post the questions you want me to answer and the data set. That's all I ask.
Keep in the realm of NCAA Football, TKP, or Hokie Football. It's much more fun this way.
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I have always wanted to see data on bringing kickoffs from the endzone vs taking the touchback. Like, average starting positions and success vs backfiring on the return man. I realize that there likely isn't too much information out there on it to even gather, but has always piqued my interest.
A ton of (NFL) kickoff data analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SsIKgwvz4
there was data along this line at a Harvard site for college football data and analytics.
Might even be able to find the link here on TKP.
What is the nature of the data you seek? Do you need all quantitive data or a mix of quantitive and qualitative?
Quantitative. I need to dissect numbers through proving or disproving hypothesis'. ie questions.
Understood. I think one of the difficulties with football data is that it's not easy to get in a form that is easy to analyze. There are some tools out there that can take data from HTML tables and put them into excel.
Doesn't have to necessarily be team stats. Recruiting stats by school or by region etc.
I doubt you want to pay, but if you do, for play by play data you can go here CFB Stats. If you have more time on your hands than you know what to do with I have a python script that parses ot ESPN play by play, but they aren't consistent so I am still working on the edge cases, so with out the extra work data is inconsistent.
I've also wanted to analyze cfb recruiting data, but I haven't found the time. Getting the data is an underappreciated part of doing any kind of analysis, and I'm not aware of an easy free to download dataset like what you're asking.
Some pointers from what little research I've done:
If you want recruiting data 247sports is the place to go. Sports Reference (https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/) is a good reference for free sports data in general, and it's easy to copy+paste data straight from certain pages, but I find their recruiting data lacking.
Beautiful Soup is a great python package for scraping data from websites like these. How comfortable would you be with something like that?
I have no clue how to use it.
Honestly, if you don't know how to scrape websites for data, you are not going to get very far. There aren't too many clean data sets out there available for free. If I were you I would watch some videos on how to use some of the more simple python scraping/parsing modules (requests, beautiful soup, etc.)
Winning TOP vs. winning the game.
Btw, while cfbstats makes you pay, they have a couple of sample data sets in csv for older seasons if you just wanted to crunch some numbers meaninglessly.
If I were you I would check out kaggle.com. They run data science competitions on all sorts of things and often have free data to download. Two recent ones I can think of were analyzing NFL punt play with hopes of reducing concussions and a NCAA March Madness challenge.
Thanks for mentioning that site, I just found a dataset that will help me big time with a project at work!!
Orange uniforms vs. Total mayhem.
Funny, I just started working on a predictive model that will analyze and predict recruiting results and a variety of factors (team budget, years of coaching experience, recruits in a given radius, rival schools in a given radius, and much more). The model would be able to say 'based on VT's location, coaching experience, recent success, and budget, we expect to finish with a top XX recruiting class,' OR (more interestingly IMO) 'based on VT's location, coaching experience, recent success, VT needs to spend XX more dollars in order to finish with a top 10 recruiting class.'
Running the model is the easy part, the big challenge is collecting the data - I need to collect information from sites like 247, the USA today salary database, wikipedia (to understand coaching history/time at each spot), and compare to google maps to get location data, etc. I was actually thinking about posting the spreadsheet on TKP and r/cfb to see if I could crowdsource the data.
So, @VTFootballGrad - are you looking for a complete dataset, or do you have time to collect data?
Unfortunately, I have too many other things going on for my classes to go collect the data (I work full time, and do school at night).
I could always just grab a dataset from data.gov worse comes to worst.
Just want to add, that I would love to help you dissect that data! That's the kind of thing that would be fun for me to break down!
I have a data set I think you might interested it. Can you DM me on twitter?
I just DM'd you.
You should definitely do that. It seems like something multiple people, myself included, would be interested in having or contributing to.
Pro Football Focus has a ton of stats, but its mostly about Pro Football, and you have to pay, but I know that several NFL teams and TV networks get their stats from them.
EDIT: From their website: