BurntSushi
commented
10 years ago TL;DR - Unlikely to be resolved completely. Sorry.
The essential problem is name mapping. In GameCenter's JSON feed, for example, Chris Johnson's name is C.Johnson. Guess what Calvin Johnson's name is? C.Johnson. This by itself isn't completely damning, since we might be able to use other information to match players. But it becomes incredibly tricky. A player in GameCenter JSON isn't the same as a player on a roster. Namely, a player in GameCenter JSON corresponds to immutable statistics about a particular person in a single point in time. But a player on a roster is ephemeral and mutable. It can change at any time. So there's just absolutely no reliable way of mapping players in GameCenter JSON to the ephemeral players found on a roster unless NFL provides a mapping.
Fortunately, there is a way to get that mapping. The code to do it is in scripts/download-player-data. The problem is that it needs to ping NFL.com 32 times to get roster data, and then ping NFL.com for each player in the NFL. In doing this, we can discover a mapping from C.Johnson to Calvin Johnson by way of a unique identifier.
The number of requests required to establish this mapping means that it isn't a good idea to rely on this for "real time" data. You could certainly run it before a batch of games every week, and that might be good enough. In particular, if you have a player stats object, then you can access that player's information with the player attribute. Here's a brief code sample:
import nflgame
game = nflgame.one(2012, 1, 'NE', 'NE')
tfb = list(game.drives.plays().players().filter(name='T.Brady'))[0]
print tfb.formatted_stats()
print tfb.player.name, tfb.player.collegeThat tfb.player object is populated directly from nflgame/players.json. If players.json is up to date, then it will tell you which team a player is on. So if you wanted to print the name, team and position of every player in the NFL, you could do:
for p in nflgame.players.itervalues():
print p.name, p.team, p.positionAnd you can get statistics this way for a particular player:
tfb = nflgame.find('Tom Brady')[0]
print tfb.name, tfb.team, tfb.position
stats = list(tfb.plays(2012, 1).players().filter(playerid=tfb.playerid))[0]Those stats should be the same as the ones above. So this allows you to complete the circle: full player name to GameCenter statistics and back. The problem is that keeping that mapping up to date is expensive. If you wanted to keep it up to date yourself, then running
download-player-data > players.jsonand moving that players.json into the nflgame package directory will square you away.
With regard to injury status, I think that is outside the scope of nflgame. I'm unlikely to add it. I want to keep the number of external sources to a minimum. In particular, getting injury updates suffers from precisely the problem I've just outlined. The mapping is difficult to get.
I do have one idea though. It might be possible to make download-player-data a bit cheaper than it is. Namely, I could provide an --update switch that only tries to fetch player information that differs essentially from the data we already have (like a switched team or position). However, it would still require a minimum of 32 requests (one for each team), so it couldn't be updated in real time. But I'd feel better about, say, running it every day. But you'd have to set up a cron job (or whatever the Windows equivalent is) to run it.
So I'll leave this issue open for now until I get around to looking into that.
teamfball
""How do I programmatically resolve where a player will be before the game takes place? Additionally, a player’s injury status pre game is another hurdle.""
We discussed this topic at length five or six months ago. Any chance the DB will afford a solution?