Air Yards
Running Hot & Cold The model was asked to project air yards on a play-by-play basis in games that have already occurred. It was trained on everything that happened pre-snap but wasn’t allowed to see anything that happened post-snap. Since we now know what happened on
Bandit FootballBrad Beatson

Attribution

Bandit Football uses NFL data accessed through the nflverse ecosystem of open-source packages.

Play-by-play data and EPA: Carl S, Baldwin B (2026). nflfastR: Functions to Efficiently Access NFL Play by Play Data. R package version 5.2.0.9014, https://nflfastr.com/.

Data access (rosters, Next Gen Stats, Pro Football Reference stats, participation): Ho T, Carl S (2026). nflreadr: Download 'nflverse' Data. R package version 1.5.1.9000, https://nflreadr.nflverse.com.

Next Gen Stats: player tracking data provided by NFL Next Gen Stats, accessed via nflverse.

Advanced stats and snap counts: provided by Pro Football Reference (pro-football-reference.com), accessed via nflverse.

Participation data: participation data from 2023 onward is provided by FTN Data, accessed via nflverse, released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license — attribution to FTN Data via nflverse. Participation data prior to 2023 is provided by NFL Next Gen Stats, accessed via nflverse.

FTN charting data (QB alignment, backfield, motion, play action, screens, RPOs, no-huddle, catchable and contested balls, drops): provided by FTN Data, accessed via nflverse, and released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Game and schedule context (weather, surface, betting lines): schedule data maintained by Lee Sharpe, accessed via nflverse.

Roster and player information: nflverse roster data.

College football: data from the SportsDataverse data repository, released under CC BY 4.0. It is the data behind cfbfastR: Gilani S, Easwaran A, Lee J, Hess E (2026). cfbfastR: Access College Football Play by Play Data. https://cfbfastR.sportsdataverse.org/, Underlying game, box score and roster data from ESPN; logo links point to images hosted by ESPN.