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

I took a coding class in college, but found it frustrating and hard to understand. This book (and the subject matter of football) has renewed my interest in learning to code. I enjoyed learning about how stats and models are created and it made me a smarter football fan. Great work by Eric and Richard!

Incredibly helpful from for building skills, knowledge, and familiarity with football analytics!

It’s a great learning experience to anyone’s football analysis journey.

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.

I love this book. I’m a beginner to coding and love football analytics, so it was very rewarding to produce useful graphs with raw data myself. So much more fun learning data science this way- answering questions I want to answer.

This book is absolutely amazing and I have learned so much with Python and R! I started as a novice and now love playing around with NFL data! Only issue I have with the book is I received it and the binder was damaged, which annoyed me a bit. But it is a phenomenal book!

I've never given a one-star review before, but this book is built on a library and a dataset (nfl_data_py) that is no longer actively maintained, which kind of has the effect of making everything in the book useless. I'm not going to throw around speculation as to whether or not this happened from greed, laziness, or incompetence, but it's obviously inexcusable. My first-ever lemon from O'Reilly.

This book is a perfect book for novices in either football and/or analytics as well as python and/or R. A combination rarely seen in books like this.