Changes in version 1.5.1 (2026-04-13) Small bug fixes and hard deprecation of {qs} support to comply with CRAN issues. - load_teams() now accepts the argument file_type and respects the option "nflreadr.prefer". - nflverse_releases() and nflverse_download() now correctly work with tag names to find releases. (#296) - Stopped support of file_type "qs" and the deprecated the related function qs_from_url() because the underlying package qs has been removed from CRAN on 2026-01-17. Since the dependency is archived qs_from_url() will error. Please stop using it and make sure to change option(nflreadr.prefer) to one of "parquet", "rds", or "csv". (#303) - most_recent_season() (and its aliases get_latest_season() and get_current_season()) now flip the switch to the new season on Wednesday following Labor Day (used to be Thursday) as NFL announced that the 2026 season will kick off on Wednesday because the TNF game will be played in Australia. (#307) Thank you to @AbhuTyagi, @gacolitti, @guga31bb, @Ic4ru5Wing, @isaactpetersen, @joeflan, @JoeMarino2021, @joshuafayallen, @mrcaseb, @nromano2, @patrickconners2334-glitch, @tanho63, and @TheMathNinja for their questions, feedback, and contributions towards this release. Changes in version 1.5.0 (2025-09-02) This release covers changes released before the start of the 2025 NFL season. Breaking Changes - load_players() now loads v2 nflverse players data. This is a breaking change as some variables have been removed or renamed. Please see the data comparison for more details. - load_player_stats() now access new player_stats files created by nflfastR::calculate_stats() (#279) and has a few function signature changes: - stat_type argument is deprecated - now returns offense, defense, and kicking player statistics as one file. - gains a new argument summary_level so that it can return player stats summarized by week, regular season, postseason, or regular + postseason combined - load_team_stats() added to access new team_stats files created by nflfastR::calculate_stats() (#279) - load_depth_charts() now provides depth charts by date (including the preseason), and defaults to most_recent_season(roster = TRUE), rather than most_recent_season(roster = FALSE). Please note that the data structure has changed because the data source had to be changed from NFL Data Exchange to ESPN. (#275, #277) - load_participation() is back, somewhat! FTNData.com has graciously offered to provide participation data after each season has ended, so we now have participation data from 2024 and 2023. Please note that this data is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and should be credited (for 2023 onwards) to FTN Data via nflverse. (#278) - Now requires a minimum R version of 4.1.0, to align with the tidyverse's version support policies. Other Changes - nflreadr now exports the variable nflreadr::nflverse_data_timezone which defines the standard timezone across all nflverse data. When printing to the console, nflreadr will convert timestamps to the user local timezone. - Added several player name mappings (#249, #253, #255, #270) - Added a dictionary to describe what each shorthand roster status indicates (#232) - clean_team_abbrs() now converts "PHO" to "ARI". (#260) - Improved description of next score probability variables in nflreadr::dictionary_pbp. (#262) - .sitrep and all *_sitrep functions now redact nflfastR option paths. (#263) - clean_team_abbrs() now converts full team names like "Los Angeles Chargers" or team nicknames like "Bills" to corresponding team abbreviations ("LAC" and "BUF" in this example). (#269) - get_current_week() now passes arguments on to most_recent_season(). (#272) Thank you to @christianlohr9, @Glumdar, @JanCalalo, @john-b-edwards, @johnathan-o-h-napier, @LearnThinkCreate, @marvin3FF, @mrcaseb, @sdb-208, @tcash21, @TheMathNinja, and @wyaruss for their questions, feedback, and contributions towards this release. Changes in version 1.4.1 (2024-07-29) This release covers a number of bugfixes and function improvements: - %c% internal helper now uses data.table::fifelse() to avoid falsely converting dates to integers. (#214) - load_schedules() cleans the roof variable in order to avoid nflverse model issues. (#218) - join_coalesce() coerces x/y args to data.frame and will return a data.frame - most_recent_season() now internally computes the exact day of the season opener as Thursday after first Monday of September. (#221) - load_espn_qbr() no longer supports argument league which used to allow loading of College QBR (not in nflverse scope) (#222) - New function stat_mode(), a re-export from nflfastR, which computes the statistical mode of a vector. (#224) - load_ftn_charting() now accepts the argument file_type. (#228) - clean_team_abbrs() now accepts the "team" name "NFL". (#231) - load_participation() now returns additional fields time_to_throw, was_pressure, defense_man_zone_type, and defense_coverage_type (#233, thank you @mistakia @john-b-edwards) - clean_player_names() now can transliterate to latin-ascii if the stringi package is available, controlled by the convert_to_ascii argument. Thank you to: @arjunmenon10, @engineerchange, @isaactpetersen, @Jeffery-777, @john-b-edwards, @justlikekevin, @mrcaseb, @SCasanova, and @tanho63 for their questions, feedback, and contributions to this release. Changes in version 1.4.0 (2023-09-05) This release addresses bugs, improves some utilities, and adds a few new datasets. New Datasets - load_player_stats(stat_type = "defense") added to provide defensive player stats as computed by nflfastR::calculate_player_stats_def() (#200) It also comes with a data dictionary, courtesy of @mpcen (#192) - load_ftn_charting() adds manual charting data for 2022-onwards, graciously provided by FTN Data. This should automatically be updated when published by FTN, and the early indication is that it will be within 48 hours after a game has finished. Function Improvements - nflverse_sitrep() and friends overhauled: - now returns a list of sitrep attributes rather than only printing to console (for programmatic use) - now checks CRAN and r-universe to tell you if your installation is behind cran or devel - now handles dependencies for nflverse/ffverse packages that are not on CRAN - nflreadr::most_recent_season() and aliases get_latest_season, get_current_season etc now use March 15th as the changeover for league year. Hopefully this is not a moving target 🙃 - nflreadr::clean_homeaway() now handles columns with suffixes _home and _away - nflreadr::nflverse_game_id() now accepts old team abbreviations and outputs useful errors. - Added .for_cran() to limit parallelization in CRAN examples and tests - make_nflverse_data_class() now uses data.table::setattr() to preserve data.table pointer Dictionary updates - Clarified description of the "special" variable in the play-by-play data dictionary. (#189) Thank you to @ak47twq, @alecglen, @andycancapital, @bullaspc, @mcarman8, @mpcen, @mrcaseb, @tanho63, @tashapiro, and @TheMathNinja for their questions, feedback, and contributions to this release. -- Changes in version 1.3.2 (2023-01-06) Minor changes per changelist and patch CRAN-related example issue. Changes - .clear_cache() now re-exported without dot prefix as clear_cache(). Hopefully more obvious. - join_coalesce() is now added as a utility to join two dataframes and coalesce any shared columns. - load_teams() now uses the argument current (TRUE/FALSE) to standardize which rows are returned - this aligns with nflreadr::clean_team_abbrs and nflreadr::team_abbr_mapping - dictionary_participation added (thank you @josephhero!) - clean_homeaway() now preserves neutral site location as well as input class and input attributes - load_ff_rankings() URL bug corrected (thank you @kharigardner) - test and example for clean_homeaway() resolved for CRAN failure Thank you to @ak47twq, @bachlaw, @brunomioto, @guga31bb, @Josephhero, @kharigardner, @mrcaseb, @MysteryPollster, @numbersinfigures, and @ohri for their questions, feedback, and contributions towards this release. Changes in version 1.3.1 (2022-09-25) Fixes CRAN bug and provides some function improvements, most notably improved logic for load_participation()'s pbp join. New Features - Added nflverse_game_id() which computes valid nflverse game identifiers in the format "{season}_{week}_{away}_{home}" Function Updates - load_participation() now joins pbp on via nflverse_game_id instead of old_game_id - load_snap_counts() now allows download of the 2012 season which was previously hardcoded from 2013 (#128) - progressively() now works with purrr-style lambda functions and no longer checks for progressor class, allowing it to be used more flexibly (and with cli-based progress bars.) Bugfixes - nflverse_releases() and nflverse_download() now accept .token arguments which default to gh::gh_token(). This is mostly to let us test things properly. (#131) - Adjust import references per Jenny Bryan's recommendations in hadley/r-pkgs#828 to avoid loading unused packages. - clean_player_names() now fully lives in nflreadr, the squish/trim happens first - player name mapping update - get_current_season() now exists, because we can't agree on what to name things. Thank you to @atungate, @grayhawk40, @guga31bb,@jestarr, @john-b-edwards,@marvin3FF,@mrcaseb, @SCasanova, @shirondru, @tanho63, and @TheMathNinja for their contributions and feedback towards this release! Changes in version 1.3.0 (2022-08-06) This release introduces several new data functions, some new utilities, and an array of data/function updates. New Data! - load_participation() returns new play-level information about what players are on the field, how many players are in the box, and what formation the offense is using. Data from NGS starting 2016 and onward - load_contracts() downloads (historical) player contracts from OverTheCap.com - load_players() returns player-level information and is the new recommended source (over rosters) for IDs, positions, birthdates etc. - load_rosters_weekly() provides week-by-week team rosters dating back to 2002. - load_officials() returns game-level information about which officials are assigned to specific games. New Functions! - nflverse_download() downloads all files attached to specified/all releases to a local folder. This facilitates something like arrow::open_dataset() for reading files locally. - nflverse_releases() lists all releases that can be loaded through nflverse_download() - load_from_url() exposes a new utility function for loading any csv, rds, qs, parquet URL to memory. Function Updates! - load_draft_picks() now has the rest of the career stat fields from PFR - *sitrep() functions now report package-specific options that are set. - get_current_week() helper to get the current nfl season week - load_rosters() now provides season-level rosters dating back to 1920. Other bugfixes - moved rbindlist to a helper that manages attributes better - update dictionary_snap_counts and dictionary_schedules with some missing fields - rewrite from_url error messages to use cli and improve usefulness - bump minimum rlang version to 1.0.0 - add piggyback suggested dependency - Export old class to support S4/DBI/nflfastR::update_db() as if it were a tibble - Fix exportOldClass so that it supports only data.frame stuff? we have no idea,,, - options(nflreadr.prefer) defaults to rds now since qs is no longer a required dependency - clean_player_names() now also removes commas (after optionally using them for convert_lastfirst) - clean_player_names() now also removes all caps suffixes - dictionary updates: return labelled. - .sitrep() exits nicely if no packages are to be investigated. #114 - refactored all the loaders to use load_from_url as primary - fixed broken example in load_ff_opportunity() documentation. #117 Thank you to @albtree, @john-b-edwards, @mrcaseb, @pranavrajaram, @tanho63, and @tpenney89 for their contributions and feedback on this release! Changes in version 1.2.0 (2022-03-17) This release updates all nflverse URLs to use the new nflverse-data repository releases, as well as provides improved pretty-printing methods that tell you when the data was last updated. Changes in version 1.1.3 (2022-01-28) This release adds functions and arguments to access new data, along with some backend changes. New data and functions - load_ff_opportunity() downloads expected fantasy points data from the ffopportunity package - load_ff_rankings() gains an "all" parameter to return all available rankings data (weekly archives since 2019) - load_pfr_advstats() gains a "summary_level" parameter to return season-level data, which has some fields that are not available at the week-level. Backend - options(nflreadr.verbose) replaces options(nflreadr.cache_warning) as the best way to silence nflreadr messages. - Improved data dictionaries for ESPN QBR, Injuries, Trades, Depth Charts, and Combine - Exported most_recent_season() function - Updated documentation with improved linking and where to file data issues. - Sitrep functions have ffopportunity and nflverse packages. - Pkgdown site upgraded to Bootstrap 5. Thank you to @armstjc, @Grayhawk34, @john-b-edwards, @mrcaseb, @pranavrajaram, @rogers1000, and @tanho63 for their contributions and feedback on this release! Changes in version 1.1.2 (2021-12-08) New Functions - nflverse_sitrep() and ffverse_sitrep() give a minimal overview of the package dependencies - Minimum R version bumped to R 3.6.0 - this is the minimum version required to read the current RDS file-version. - _sitrep() functions receive a small print-related bugfix and colouring improvement. Changes in version 1.1.1 (2021-10-05) New Data and Functions - clean_player_names() and clean_team_abbrs() added - these help standardise player names and team abbreviations based on internal dictionaries. - load_ff_rankings() now has a type argument and can return "draft" or "week" rankings from the DynastyProcess/data repo. - clean_homeaway() converts a dataframe of games with columns prefixed with home_ and away_ to a dataframe of teams, renaming to team_ and opponent_ and doubling the rows. - Added load_pfr_advstats() which provides pass, rush, rec, def additional data for each week. Bug Fixes - Add Rcpp and RcppParallel minimum dependencies to fix qs issues. - Added a message that reminds the user of the caching behavior. The message will be displayed once every 8 hours if the session is interactive. - Adjusted file location of snap count data Thank you to @ajreinhard, @brunomioto, @jthomasmock, @mrcaseb, @SCasanova, and @tanho63 for their feedback and contributions to this package! Changes in version 1.1.0 (2021-09-02) This release makes some backend changes for speed, reduced dependency footprint, and ease of maintenance. New Data - load_player_stats() can now retrieve weekly summaries of kicking data by specifying the stat_type argument to be "kicking". - load_combine() retrieves NFL combine data (from PFR). Backend Changes - Remove progress handling from *_from_url() family of functions and move responsibility to progressively() function decorator instead. See vignette for details. - Removed dependency on dplyr and purrr in favour of data.table - this hopefully improves speed and reduces the dependency footprint. - Uses rlang::arg_match0 instead of match.arg (uses rlang explicitly instead of implicitly as a dependency of memoise). Changes in version 1.0.0 (2021-08-09) The goal of {nflreadr} is to efficiently load data from nflverse GitHub repositories, and features caching, optional progress updates, and data dictionaries. At this time, it includes data from the following repositories: - nflverse/nflverse-pbp - nflverse/nfldata - nflverse/nflverse-rosters - nflverse/espnscrapeR-data - nflverse/nflverse-pfr - dynastyprocess/data This will hopefully provide a unified and reliable package for downloading nflverse data that can be extended to the rest of the nflverse and ffverse package families. Special thanks to Seb, Ben, John, Lee, and Thomas for their contributions to the package and to the data pipelines that this package relies on 🎉