NFL Public API

This article is a short summary about all public available and machine-readable data of the NFL.

Scores

A good entry for this is the following URL:

https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/scores.json

The root node contains metadata about the current week. This information will be used also for other calls below.

• Season: Year, when the season stared
• Season Type: In what part of season we are (PRE or REG)
• Week: The play week within the season and season type

But more interesting are the games. Here you find information about the game itself (like start date/time and the team names).

But for the teams you can also use the visitor and home team node (contains abbreviation, full name, nick name and city state):

Also interesting is the place where the game is:

But we want scores. So let’s have a look at that. It contains nearly all you might be interested in: Current play clock and game phase, yard line info, red zone indicator and all scores in summary (including the points for each quarter and how many timeouts are available).

This is a huge amount of information. And this data is live!

If you need just a short overview about the scores you might be also using this one instead:

https://www.nfl.com/ajax/scorestrip?season=2018&seasonType=REG&week=7

Here it is also possible to receive information about historical scores. Just replace the Season-Year, Season Type and Week.

The tag names are shorten here but should be self explaining. E.g. “hs” is home score.

Big Play Videos

Yes also the Big Play videos are available via the NFL feed API:

https://feeds.nfl.com/feeds-rs/bigPlayVideos.json

It contains also the metadata about the current game week. But we continue here with the metadata about the Big Play itself:

Here the interesting information is the type (if it’s scoring or not) and the clock tine information. Also a short description is provided.

The next block in the JSON here is the game schedule as explained above.

But we want videos, right?

This is a lot of data including a preview screenshot in multiple resolutions.

Here you find the video in multiple bitrates (quality levels) for downloading as a single MP4 file. If you want to stream the video directly you should use the Video Playback URL instead. This is a HLS video feed that contains all available resolutions, Here the player picks automatically the correct video resolution.

At the end you find information about the players that were involved in this Big Play:

Game Live Data

The following URL contains the game id (can be loaded using one of the APIs above).

http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/game-center/2018102107/2018102107_gtd.json

This API gives you a lot of information about the game stats (including passing-, receiving- and rushing yards, fumbles and much more).

Also all drives (yes really all drives!) including its plays are also included als you might know it from the NFL.com website:

If you are just interested in the major drives you should have a look at the summary:

Since all URLs posted here are used by the NFL website itself there is no guarantee that they will not change within the future.