Division II Football Analytics

Abstract

For our university’s football team, one of their biggest competitors is Emporia State. We decided to comb through their play by play data to figure out if there are any consistencies in which plays occur at specific moments to aid our team. The play by play code was extracted from Emporia State’s website and imported into R Studio where we used functions to create different variables such as side, offense, yards, to go, and receiver. Once we were able to get the variables we needed from one game, we went through all of the games and compiled the variables into a table. From there, we were able to get a better look at the data and find notable consistencies. We performed statistical tests to figure out if these consistencies were statistically significant. Hopefully the data and results will be of use to our football team in order to better prepare for one of their biggest rivals.