Get season statistics for NFL players

Question

So as the title suggests I'm trying to retrieve NFL stats for players. I've found that Wikipedia has a quite extensive statistics panel for a lot of players (i.e Tom Brady https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brady#Professional_statistics) but I can't seem to figure out how to retrieve this data. The Wiki API doesn't seem very helpful and I can't get it from the DOM because the class is wikitable and there are many wikitables on the site.

Does anyone have a solution for this? Or perhaps a better method of retrieving NFL stats (preferably free or close to it).

Answer 1

Since the 2016 season is about to start I figure I'll update this to hopefully help some others that stumble upon this page.

The best resource for getting free and comprehensive nfl statistics is the nfldb and nflgame python APIs. The developer pulls the information directly from json feeds used by NFL.com's gamecenter data, which is about as accurate and real as it gets for free IMO.

Check out their GitHub. The wiki has instructions on how to get started. nfldb

Answer 2

nflsavant has every nfl player from 1960-2013
http://nflsavant.com/about.php
http://nflsavant.com/dump/players_2013-12-12.csv

Answer 3

Free historical data with a simple request: http://api.suredbits.com/nfl/v0/stats/jones/julio

Docs: https://www.suredbits.com/api/nfl/stats/

Answer 4

I've spent the last year or so working on a simple CLI tool to easily create your own NFL databases. It currently supports PostgreSql and Mongo natively, and you can programmatically interact with the Engine if you'd like to extend it.

Want to create your own different database (eg MySql) using the Engine? Simply implement an interface and the Engine will do the work for you.

Running everything, including the database setup and updating with all the latest stats, can be done in a single command:

ffdb setup

I know this question is old, but I also realize that there's still a need out there for a functional and easy-to-use tool to do this. The entire reason I built this is to power my own football app in the near future, and hopefully this can help others.

Also, because the question is fairly old, a lot of the answers are not working at the current time, or reference projects that are no longer maintained.

Check out the github repo page for full details on how to download the program, the CLI commands, and other information:

FFDB Github Repository