REGARDING THE NFL API DATAMAGEDDON (thread):

I'm obviously not "in the know" here, but from my cursory digging around:

I don't think the "easy" NFL feeds are coming back. It's gonna be a lot more like whoscored, which is to say, a huge PITA (but not strictly impossible) (1/n)

This is especially frustrating for me, as I'd spent a [sigh] fair amount of time over the past weeks documenting, categorizing, and otherwise "linking" a number of the NFL endpoints, in service of basically building a historical @seanlahman database, but for football (2/n)

As an educator, given how instrumental Sean's DB has been as a first touch in sports data analysis for so many, the idea of having something similar for football -- even if it's not as novel as dots or even event data -- was really enticing. That may be, uh, "delayed". (3/n)

For me personally, I'd struggled with what to do with what I'd learned about the APIs. I'm 100% a proponent for OSS, and was eager to share what I'd learned. But I feared incentivizing dozens/hundreds (more?) of people to hammer those endpoints without remorse. Whelp. (4/n)

I still hold out hope that perhaps this will go back to "normal", and regardless, there's *always* a way. But the reality is, who's signing up for implement named-entity resolution on (e.g.) "J.Clowney" to try to link it to an ESPN user ID? It's not "hard" per se, but.... (5/n)

Some people are of the "Dirty data builds character! This is what the real world is like!" camp, and I absolutely see/understand that viewpoint. But it inarguably hampers "actual" progress, and there are diminishing returns on the level of effort required to *do* something (6/n)

Long story short: I was -- unfortunately -- kinda right about what it means to empower people to hammer "undocumented" APIs with impunity. I am not optimistic it's gonna return, from what I've seen. I VERY MUCH hope I'm wrong about that.

And we've all lost. A *lot*. (n/n)