PSA - Nfl data feed is down

[derek-adair]

This renders nflgame useless at the moment. I will be looking into how we can make historic data usable in the worst case scenarios like this.

[derek-adair]

just so no one is panicking... There is a light at the end of the tunnel and there is a way out of this for us. There are some potentially huge breaking changes... There is a very real possibility of removing all http requests to nfl.com and relying only on data already downloaded.

[derek-adair]

Unlocking to invite conversation on this subject.

I've also released version 3.0.0 which will work with historic data.

[andrew-shackelford]

Hey,

First off: really sorry to hear that the NFL api is essentially dead, and I think I speak for everyone who's used the library to say thanks for your work on fixes to get the library to work with historic data as a stopgap.

As for moving forward, I'd be happy to help with measures to scrape the NFL website. I've got a decent amount of time to work on them given the COVID situation, and am especially invested in the live play-by-play data as I use that for a Twitter bot I run (although am happy to help on roster data or anything else too).

[ThomasMorgani]

I am also looking to work on this. I rely heavily on the live stats for my fantasy football league app and would really like to get this back up before the start of the season.

I am mostly JS/PHP code wise but have experience web scraping and should have no problem adapting and collaborating.

I will probably start digging around sometime soon. Is there somewhere anyone is willing to work together or should we just keep it all here?

[JimHewitt]

The real value of the NFL feeds was the statids included with each play. It would be difficult to derive that info from the play by play text.

[tomweingarten]

I haven't used the new API yet. But if I understand correctly, it looks like the playStatType enum takes the place of statids in the new API? It looks to me like it should be fairly easy to convert between the two. I'd bet on the backend they use the same integer values to represent the statids, if we're lucky they might expose them in the API.

[justin-haight]

I ended up here in search of info when I realized the old NFL API was removed. Since I haven't used nflgame (yet) I'm not sure if this will be useful to you but today I did figure out how to use their new API to retrieve schedules, scores, and I think at least some stats. It looks like they're using a revised version of the API they documented in ~2015 at https://api.nfl.com/docs

Since I'm not sure that I'll have the time to familiarize myself with nflgame and create a proper pull request, I thought I'd share what I found here. This gist will connect to the new NFL API, retrieve an access token, and then uses the access token to pull down the 2020 week 1 schedule. I was also able to successfully retrieve the equivalent of 2019 week 1 score strip.

[andrew-shackelford]

This new API does look promising...I’m not that familiar with the nflgame source code either and wouldn’t know where to begin on implementing, but it looks like this could replace the existing functionality in every way? (correct me if I’m wrong) I’d probably defer to Derek or somebody else to be in charge of this effort, but still happy to help in whatever way I can.