Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Good afternoon,

For those of you in attendance in St. Paul, I mentioned this would be coming soon. Thrilled to announce that pro-football-reference.com now has play-by-play for all games back to 1978 https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2 ... reference/

If anyone has video or play-by-play of the last 4:47 of that 1979 Giants/Cards game, please let me know!

That's great! I'm guessing this is data from Football Outsiders.

mlynch33 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 07, 2025 1:25 pm Good afternoon,

For those of you in attendance in St. Paul, I mentioned this would be coming soon. Thrilled to announce that pro-football-reference.com now has play-by-play for all games back to 1978 https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2 ... reference/

If anyone has video or play-by-play of the last 4:47 of that 1979 Giants/Cards game, please let me know!

If so, then that's awesome! That means we will have target data available to the public for receivers from 1978-1991 for the first time (Was on football outsiders at one point I believe, but it was behind a paywall).

This also means that I'm going to have to add fourth down conversion rates to my score percentage calculations going back to 1978 as well.

Out of curiosity, did they say if they thought they could go any further back than that?

Yes, this is the same PxP Aaron Schatz uses to calculate DVOA

1977 and, perhaps, 1976 are very real possibilities. Here's the currently missing info for '77:

9/25/1977 - Week 2 - Falcons @ Redskins (video is missing the final 1:30; PFRA gamebook scan is unreadable)
10/2/1977 - Week 3 - Cardinals @ Redskins (no video; entire 1Q and all Cardinals drives are unreadable on the PFRA gamebook scan)
10/23/1977 - Week 6 - Saints @ Cardinals (video is missing the final 0:59; no gamebook)
10/31/1977 - Week 7 - Giants @ Cardinals (no video; no gamebook - this was MNF so public copies are ironically hard to find - someone in charge must have a copy somewhere)
12/10/1977 - Week 13 - Redskins @ Cardinals (video is missing the last 3:55 of 2Q and a portion of 4Q; no gamebook)

Thank you, Mike Lynch ... great stuff to look at.

Brian wolf wrote: ↑Fri Aug 08, 2025 2:53 pm Thank you, Mike Lynch ... great stuff to look at.

You're welcome and glad you like it! Thank you for checking it out

In 1990 Houston had 251 passing first downs but Moon and Carlson add up to 252 on PFR.

TodMaher wrote: ↑Fri Aug 08, 2025 7:36 pm In 1990 Houston had 251 passing first downs but Moon and Carlson add up to 252 on PFR.

Normal pxp disclaimers apply. Many small discrepancies though I was surprised at how well things lines up. Sacks are most discrepant due to scoring changes in days after games