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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/TormundIceBreaker on 2025-08-07 17:26:38+00:00.
Pro Football Reference has added a massive amount of new statistics and information to their site. They now have play-by-play data going back to 1978*:
Ever wondered how effective Jerry Rice was with Joe Montana throwing him the ball? How John Elway performed in the 4th quarter? Who the best short-yardage rusher was in the 1980s? What defense could never get off the field on 3rd down in the late '70s? No? Well, we’re happy to announce that we’ve got answers for you anyways! We are thrilled to announce that Pro Football Reference now has play-by-play and related statistics/splits for all regular-season and playoffs games (with the exception of four minutes and 47 seconds of a single game) all the way back to 1978, which was the first season of the NFL’s 16-game schedule era. This sort of comprehensive, digitized play-by-play is not available anywhere else in the public realm. We are very proud to be able to democratize this data and present it to our users.
First of all, we would like to credit Aaron Schatz of FTN Fantasy and Jeremy Snyder of Quirky Research for partnering with us on this initiative. The play-by-play was all generated by Schatz and Snyder, who have also used it to generate the sort of stats Schatz has been famous for since his Football Outsiders days (like DVOA), which can now be found at FTN.
Previous to this expansion, our play-by-play coverage only went back to 1994, so this update represents 16 new seasons of coverage and means we have nearly 50 seasons worth of play-by-play coverage and related data on Pro Football Reference now (in addition to play-by-play of every Super Bowl, which we have had for many years).
*The final 4:47 of the September 9, 1979 Cardinals/Giants game is missing. If anyone has a gamebook that does not have these final moments of the game cut off, or has video of the game, please let us know.
There’s a lot more information on the blog about how they did this as well as some of the new data they’ve found most interesting. Will make having arguments about guys pre-1994 way more stat driven.