NFL Utilities Core Library for Evaluating Analytics in R with Fantasy Football (NUCLEARFF)
nuclearff is used to obtain NFL analytics and statistics using nflverse packages in conjunction with fantasy football. Functions are created to parse the play-by-play data and output a dataframe that contains all the information a user needs. In addition, additional capabilities are added for fantasy football considerations. More information on nflverse and the NFL packages is available in the nflverse documentation.
For more information on nuclearff and how to use this package, refer to the documentation.
Installation
Installing the nuclearff package can be accomplished by using the remotes package. First, install remotes by using the following command in R console:
install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("NuclearAnalyticsLab/nuclearff")Installation of the nuclearff package can now be performed with the install_github() function.
remotes::install_github("NuclearAnalyticsLab/nuclearff")If for any reason the package needs to be uninstalled, use the command:
remove.packages("nuclearff")Data Usage
To use the package, play-by-play data from nflverse packages is required. By default nuclearff functions assume there is no database with play-by-play data. Instead, the play-by-play data is pulled using nflreadr::load_pbp.
The alternative is to use a database, since it is simple to build a database and keep it up-to-date. Play-by-play data since 1999 takes up a lot of memory, so working with a database allows you to store only what is necessary into memory. Functions allow for using the database with arguments pbp_db and pbp_db_tbl. These arguments must be defined as strings, where pbp_db is the path to the database as well as the name. pbp_db_tbl is the name of the table in the database.
For example, you can store the database in the directory data/ with the default naming scheme used by nflfastR. This means that pbp_db="data/pbp_db" and pbp_db_tbl="nflfastR_pbp". The database is not included in the repository, and users must download a play-by-play database prior to utilizing functions with database options in nuclearff.
For detailed instructions on setting up the database with nflfastR, view the vignette using vignette("setup_pbp_db") in an R console. Users may also refer to the article, Setting Up the nflfastR Database.