sports-snaps.com

Website

Beta launch of a website that captures the essence of american football games in a more meaningful way. Empowering fans to own the game's narrative.

Screenshot of the homepage of www.sports-snaps.com

sports-snaps.com

Background

Gaining a useful retroactive understanding of what happened in an American football game is impossible.

If you look up a past game, you will find:

  • A scoreline
  • A table of statistics
  • A written list of play descriptions

I created Sports-snaps.com to look back at games in a more informative way; instead of just getting better at trivia.

The Status Quo
(Blocks of Text)

The scoreline of an nfl football game; a table with the score from each quarter.
A list text descriptions for each play that happened in a football game.
A screenshot of a box score from a football game. Statistics in various categories listed by player.

Note: click each image to enlarge.
Captions
Top-left: the scoreline of a game; points scored by quarter. | Bottom-left: a box score of a football game. Individual player statistics aggregated. | Right: A list of descriptions of each play that happened in the game.

I want to re-live the game's drama...

The goal of sports-snaps is to move the digital experience closer to the dialogue fans have with eachother when talking about a game.

My friends and I refer to the flow of the game, how how we saw the offense/defense play and about specific important plays.

Some common overarching questions include:

  • Did one team dominate from start to finish?
  • Were the teams evenly matched and the outcome was merely circumstantial?
  • Did one team start great and tragically lose at the end? 

Changing the Status Quo

Today, overarching questions are typically answered by pundits and most fans default into the mass-media narrative.

Sports-Snaps.com empowers fans to determine for themselves the why and how of a game’s statline through charts.

SNap Chart

A screenshot of a snapschart depicting a long touchdown pass.
  • A Snap Chart has a silhouette of a football field with arrow markers representing plays in the game.
  • The green rectangle highlights the current play in the sequence, a touchdown pass by the Miami Dolphins.

MEasuring more Thoughtfully

While box scores provide a way to tally the game’s individual events, measuring each play's impact requires more nuanced insight. Sports-snaps.com employs advanced statistics like EPA (expected points added) and success rate to provide readers with a sharper image of the game’s results.

Visualzing with charts

Charts immeasurably communicate more information than plain text and numbers. Compare for yourself the experience of reading a play-by-play recap to analyzing a snap chart.

 Written recap  |  Snap Chart

A list text descriptions for each play that happened in a football game. A screenshot of a snapschart depicting all of the plays in the first quarter of a football game.

My Role

I started working on this project in graduate school by drawing the play-by-play drive chart manually in Photoshop.

I later experimented in R writing a program to generate the Snap Chart digitally for any football game using the NFLFastR dataset.

In 2025 I launched a Next.js web application to make the Snap Chart accessible.

Skills Aquired

Some skills that I've grown while launching this site:

  • R
    • Rearranging datasets into a desired format
    • Scripting functions to perform data scrubbing tasks
    • Plotly charts with animations
  • Full-stack web development:
    • Next.js, React, Firebase
  • Patent application process
  • AI prompting: how to effectively use AI to improve coding efficiency.
Collage of loges: R, React.js, Next.js, Firebase

On the Radar

Next steps for app development:

  • Usability testing
  • Adding EPA and success rate charts
  • Finding like-minded fans and spreading the word
  • Evolving to meet my users' needs
screenshot of a snap chart, a play-by-play chart of a football game

Learn More

Reach out to me directly if you would like to learn more about this project.