FourthDown

Background

Most tools to analyse NFL data is limited to Python and R packages or miscellaneous data from GitHub repos. This means all the C#/.NET devs (and most other languages) are missing out or needing to create data pipelines to actually make doing any analysis work-able!

The aim of this API is to make it easier to work with NFL data, without having to do much more (formatting/parsing) around it. The benefits here for a NuGet Package is that this can be language agnostic and extensible. This Web API is written in ASP.NET Core 3.1.

There are a set of API endpoints to query team, schedule and various aspects of game data. You can find more details on the Swagger page.

Try it out

If you want to see how the API works and if it can meet your needs you can pull the docker image from dockerhub.

Loosely from your favourite command line tool you can pull the image and run the API locally.

$ docker pull pratikthanki9/fourthdown-api:latest

$ docker images

REPOSITORY                        TAG         IMAGE ID        CREATED      SIZE
pratikthanki9/fourthdown-api      latest      f50f9524513f    1 days ago   85.1 MB

$ docker run pratikthanki9/fourthdown-api:latest

Or you can add it to your docker-compose and spin it up with other service, an example could look like this:

version: '3.4'

services:
  api:
    image: pratikthanki9/fourthdown-api:latest
    container_name: fourthdown-api
    ports:
    - 5000:5000

And then docker-compose up -d from the directory of your compose file.

You can then query the api at http://localhost:5000.

The ./monitoring directory contains a docker-compose file to deploy the api and monitoring resources locally. Run the shell script to create the docker network and services from root: ./monitoring/build-monitoring.sh

On linux-based systems you'll need permissions to execute the script. To do so run the following: chmod +x monitoring/build-monitoring.sh

View stats at the following:

• Jaeger: http://localhost:16686
• Prometheus: http://localhost:9090
• Grafana: http://localhost:3000

Projects

• FourthDown.Api: client-facing project (deployed on Azure)
• FourthDown.Client: nextJS web app
• FourthDown.Collector: project for writing records to the database
• FourthDown.Shared: library of shared models and helper methods

Thanks

Shoutout to the guys of the R package nflfastR (Ben Baldwin and Sebastian Carl) on the game data and modelling of EPA, WP and CPOE amongst other things available.

Lee Sharpe for the game schedule data going back to 1999.

Feedback

You can reach out to me on Twitter with any feedback or questions. I also write about all things CS on my blog.

Should you have any thoughts, questions, bugs or suggestions on the Fourth Down API you can also raise an Issue with details and I will aim to fix or expand capabilities!

Thanks and I hope this can be of use to you.

Pratik Thanki ✌️