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	Field-goal attempts credited to this kicker, counted on field-goal attempts only (never kickoffs or PATs), under the kicking team.
field_goals_yards	integer	Sum of the kicker's 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: 2026-10-12 13:09:16 UTC
#> # A tibble: 5,878 × 14
#>    pos_team_id pos_team          player_name field_goals field_goals_yards punts
#>          <int> <chr>             <chr>             <int>             <int> <int>
#>  1          30 USC Trojans       Reggie Bush           0                 0     0
#>  2          30 USC Trojans       Ryan Kille…           2                75     0
#>  3          30 USC Trojans       Tom Malone…           0                 0     4
#>  4          30 USC Trojans       Tom Malone…           0                 0     1
#>  5          30 USC Trojans       Trojans.              0                 0     0
#>  6         259 Virginia Tech Ho… Brandon Pa…           2                77     0
#>  7         259 Virginia Tech Ho… Eddie Royal           0                 0     0
#>  8         259 Virginia Tech Ho… Hokies.               0                 0     0
#>  9         259 Virginia Tech Ho… Josh Hyman            0                 0     0
#> 10         259 Virginia Tech Ho… Richard Jo…           0                 0     0
#> # ℹ 5,868 more rows
#> # ℹ 8 more variables: punts_yards <int>, kick_returns <int>,
#> #   kick_returns_yards <int>, punt_returns <int>, punt_returns_yards <int>,
#> #   game_id <int>, season <int>, week <int>
# }