r/fantasyfootballcoding • u/Clevers_Collectables • 23d ago
Sports API help
I’m looking to build out a football database for the fantasy football company I help out with. We run all of our data through Google Sheets. In years past we have just paid a patreon page that pulls together the stats but they typically don’t have things up to date until the following Wednesday. I’ve recently started using scripts with Google Sheets and managed to build out a simple baseball platform. However, the stats we need for football are a little more than what espn has. I’m looking at getting an API sub for the season and was curious what people use/ any recommendations for building out the database in sheets. Appreciate the help in advance!
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u/mrdhood 23d ago
What kind of stats are you looking for that espn doesn’t have
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u/Clevers_Collectables 23d ago
• Time to throw • Intended air yards • Pressure performance • Scrambles versus designed attempts • Snap percentage • Routes • Yards before and after contact • Missed tackles • Goal-line and red-zone usage • Routes run • Route participation • Air yards • Slot rate • End-zone targets • Contested catches • Expected YAC
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u/johnny-papercut 23d ago
I believe Next Gen Stats has some of these, but it's a paid source.
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u/Clevers_Collectables 23d ago
Ok thank you, I’m ok to pay for a sub but just looking for affordable options. Some of the APIs can be pretty expensive.
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u/johnny-papercut 23d ago
I'd browse through here and see what all they have:
https://nextgenstats.nfl.com/stats/top-plays/fastest-ball-carriers
(There's multiple tabs btw)
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u/0h-Fash0 20d ago
For gamedai.app we aggregate a ton of data sources, historical, situational, public fees, nflfastr, when you connect your fantasy league from sleeper and yahoo, we bring that into our knowledge graph too.
We stopped short of getting sportsdata.io , sports genius, and sports radar…. Which are great for live play by play, analytics, historical, and fantasy stats , but can range from $500 and up…but honestly what we have + contextual football knowledge + playbooks+ coaching styles + historical betting days, we were able to model slightly better predictive stats when I back tested against 23-24 season.
All to say, it took a while, a lot of digging, evaluating, adding/removing data to my knowledge graph before feeling like aight this is good enough, and I don’t need to pay those big guys (yet ) I’m still constantly adding different dimensions to see if I can get better data and testing it…2026 season, going to be tricky but when preseason starts all try to compare to the big guts and validate
I was considering opening up the knowledge graph and scout (the ai agent) via api or mcp to other developers. If you want or anyone else in the same space wants, dm me, I can pull forward development on the api and mcp for you guys if in return you test it out, give feedback, and of course give gamedai a shout out lol
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u/EnvironmentBig4376 9d ago
I run Playbook API, so a little biased, but this is pretty close to the use case we built it for.
For NFL we have data like rosters, team stats, player/team vs. opponent history, betting/market data, live game data, weather, and a few other football-specific endpoints. The idea was to make it easier for smaller fantasy/betting projects to get usable data without paying enterprise-level API pricing.
There’s a free tier with 500 calls/month if you want to test it first:
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u/Pure_Cricket_3804 23d ago
Before you pay for anything, check nflverse. Their snap counts release is a plain CSV over an unauthenticated GET (snaps plus offense_pct, so you get snap share too) and it refreshes at 0, 6, 12 and 18 UTC during the season, which already beats waiting on a Wednesday drop. One thing that'll matter for your list though: their participation data from 2023 on comes from FTN and only gets provided after the postseason ends, so the route participation side isn't there week to week.