Load college football advanced specialists from the SportsDataverse data repo

Loads season-level specialist stats – one row per kicker/punter/returner with kicking EPA, field-goal profile, and return aggregates. Published to the espn_cfb_adv_specialists release tag on the sportsdataverse-data repo.

Usage

load_espn_cfb_adv_specialists(
  seasons = most_recent_cfb_season(),
  ...,
  dbConnection = NULL,
  tablename = NULL
)

Arguments

seasons: A vector of 4-digit years associated with given college football seasons. Published coverage runs 2004 through the most recent season. Pass seasons = TRUE for every published season. (Min: 2004)
...: Additional arguments passed to an underlying function that writes the season data into a database.
dbConnection: A DBIConnection object, as returned by DBI::dbConnect()
tablename: The name of the data table within the database

Value

Returns a cfbfastR_data tibble.

col_name	types	description
pos_team_id	integer	ESPN team id of the team on offense. Present for every season 2004+.
pos_team	character
player_name	character
field_goals	integer	Number of field-goal attempts.
field_goals_yards	integer	Sum of the field-goal attempt distances parsed out of the play text; it stays at zero when no distance could be parsed from the narrative.
punts	integer	Punts attempted.
punts_yards	integer	Total gross punt yardage parsed from the play text for this punter, working out to roughly 42 yards per punt league-wide.
kick_returns	integer
kick_returns_yards	integer	Total yards the team gained returning kickoffs.
punt_returns	integer
punt_returns_yards	integer	Total punt-return yardage credited to this returner, with fair catches, downed punts, and out-of-bounds punts scored as zero.
game_id	integer
season	integer
week	integer

Author

Saiem Gilani

Examples

# \donttest{
  try(load_espn_cfb_adv_specialists(2004))
#> ── college football advanced specialists from the SportsDataverse data repo ────
#> ℹ Data updated: 2026-09-10 05:49:43 UTC
#> # A tibble: 5,184 × 14
#>    pos_team_id pos_team             player_name   punts punts_yards kick_returns
#>          <int> <chr>                <chr>         <int>       <int>        <int>
#>  1          30 USC Trojans          Tom Malone  …     4           0            0
#>  2         259 Virginia Tech Hokies Vinnie Burns…     2           0            0
#>  3         259 Virginia Tech Hokies Vinnie Burns…     1           0            0
#>  4         259 Virginia Tech Hokies Vinnie Burns      2           0            0
#>  5          30 USC Trojans          Tom Malone  y     1           0            0
#>  6          30 USC Trojans          Reggie Bush       0           0            3
#>  7         259 Virginia Tech Hokies Josh Hyman        0           0            1
#>  8         259 Virginia Tech Hokies Eddie Royal       0           0            1
#>  9         259 Virginia Tech Hokies Hokies.           0           0            2
#> 10         259 Virginia Tech Hokies Richard John…     0           0            0
#> # ℹ 5,174 more rows
#> # ℹ 8 more variables: kick_returns_yards <int>, punt_returns <int>,
#> #   punt_returns_yards <int>, game_id <int>, season <int>, week <int>,
#> #   field_goals <int>, field_goals_yards <int>
# }