🏈 Pro Football Reference Stats Scraper

🚀 Export NFL player statistics in seconds. Get passing, rushing, receiving, and defense stats for any season from pro-football-reference.com - no account needed.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 19 fields per record · All NFL seasons · Passing, rushing, receiving, defense

The Pro Football Reference Stats Scraper extracts NFL player statistics from pro-football-reference.com, the definitive source for professional football historical data. Choose a season and stat type to export complete player stat lines including yards, touchdowns, games played, and more.

Coverage spans every NFL season, all 32 teams, and four stat categories: passing, rushing, receiving, and defense. Each record includes the player name, team, position, game counts, and all relevant statistics for the chosen category.

Target Audience / Use Cases

Who	Why
Sports analysts	Build season-over-season performance models
Fantasy football players	Research player stats and trends
Data journalists	Power articles with real NFL data
Sports bettors	Inform player prop research
Researchers	Study NFL performance patterns
Developers	Build NFL stats apps and dashboards

📋 What the Pro Football Reference Scraper does

• Scrapes NFL player statistics from pro-football-reference.com for any season
• Supports four stat categories: passing, rushing, receiving, and defense
• Returns all players ranked by the selected stat category for that season
• Automatically retrieves the most recent archived snapshot for complete end-of-season data
• Extracts player URLs for deep-linking to individual player pages
• Free users get a 10-item preview; paid users can extract up to 1,000,000 records

💡 Why it matters: Pro Football Reference is the gold standard for NFL historical data. This scraper gives you programmatic access to decades of player statistics without manual copy-paste.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
season	string	2024	NFL season year (e.g. 2024, 2023, 2010)
statType	select	passing	Stat category: passing, rushing, receiving, defense
maxItems	integer	10	Max records to return (free: capped at 10, paid: up to 1,000,000)

Example - Passing stats for 2024:

{
  "season": "2024",
  "statType": "passing",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example - Rushing stats for 2023:

{
  "season": "2023",
  "statType": "rushing",
  "maxItems": 100
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Stats are sorted by the primary stat for each category (passing yards for passing, rushing yards for rushing). Null fields for non-applicable stats (e.g. passingYards is null for rushing stat type) are expected - only the relevant category fields are populated.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
🏷️ playerName	string	Full player name
🔑 playerId	string	Player ID from pro-football-reference.com
🏟️ team	string	NFL team abbreviation (e.g. CIN, DET)
📍 position	string	Player position (QB, RB, WR, LB, etc.)
📅 season	integer	NFL season year
📊 statType	string	Stat category (passing/rushing/receiving/defense)
🎮 gamesPlayed	integer	Games played
🎮 gamesStarted	integer	Games started
🎯 passingYards	integer	Passing yards (passing only)
🏆 passingTDs	integer	Passing touchdowns (passing only)
🚫 interceptions	integer	Interceptions thrown (passing) or caught (defense)
🏃 rushingYards	integer	Rushing yards (rushing only)
🏆 rushingTDs	integer	Rushing touchdowns (rushing only)
📡 receivingYards	integer	Receiving yards (receiving only)
🏆 receivingTDs	integer	Receiving touchdowns (receiving only)
🛡️ tackles	integer	Total tackles (defense only)
💥 sacks	number	Sacks (defense only)
🔗 playerUrl	string	URL to player page on pro-football-reference.com
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of scrape
❌ error	string	Error message if scraping failed

Sample records (2024 passing stats):

[
  {
    "playerName": "Joe Burrow",
    "playerId": "B/BurrJo01",
    "team": "CIN",
    "position": "QB",
    "season": 2024,
    "statType": "passing",
    "gamesPlayed": 17,
    "gamesStarted": 17,
    "passingYards": 4918,
    "passingTDs": 43,
    "interceptions": 9,
    "rushingYards": null,
    "rushingTDs": null,
    "receivingYards": null,
    "receivingTDs": null,
    "tackles": null,
    "sacks": null,
    "playerUrl": "https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/B/BurrJo01.htm",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T03:43:52.088Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "playerName": "Jared Goff",
    "playerId": "G/GoffJa00",
    "team": "DET",
    "position": "QB",
    "season": 2024,
    "statType": "passing",
    "gamesPlayed": 17,
    "gamesStarted": 17,
    "passingYards": 4629,
    "passingTDs": 37,
    "interceptions": 12,
    "rushingYards": null,
    "rushingTDs": null,
    "receivingYards": null,
    "receivingTDs": null,
    "tackles": null,
    "sacks": null,
    "playerUrl": "https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/G/GoffJa00.htm",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T03:43:52.088Z",
    "error": null
  }
]

✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	Detail
🏈 All stat categories	Passing, rushing, receiving, defense in one actor
📅 All seasons	Any NFL season from the historical archive
🔗 Player deep links	Direct URLs to individual player pages
⚡ Fast	Results in seconds via archive-based fetch
🆓 Free preview	10 records free, no account required
🌐 No login needed	Public data, no credentials required

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Feature	This Actor	Manual copy-paste	Sports APIs
All seasons	✅	✅	Varies
Free tier	✅ 10 records	✅	Usually no
Programmatic access	✅	❌	✅
JSON/CSV export	✅	❌	✅
No API key needed	✅	✅	❌
Historical data	✅	✅	Varies

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account on Apify (comes with $5 free credit)
2. Open the Pro Football Reference Stats Scraper
3. Set your season (e.g. 2024) and statType (e.g. passing)
4. Set maxItems to control how many records you want
5. Click Start and wait a few seconds
6. Download your data as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML

💼 Business use cases

Fantasy Football Research

Pull rushing and receiving stats for any season to evaluate player performance, identify breakout candidates, or build custom scoring models for your fantasy league.

Sports Media and Journalism

Export passing stats sorted by yards or touchdowns to power data-driven articles, infographics, and comparison pieces without manual data entry.

Historical Performance Analysis

Compare QBs across multiple seasons by running the scraper for different years and merging the datasets. Build decade-spanning performance timelines.

Sports Betting Research

Extract defense stats including sacks and interceptions to model defensive strength and inform player prop or team total bets.

🔌 Automating Pro Football Reference Scraper

Integrate this actor with your favorite tools using Apify native integrations:

• Make (Integromat) - Trigger on a schedule, send results to Google Sheets
• Zapier - Push new stats to Slack, Airtable, or Notion
• Webhooks - POST dataset results to your own API endpoint
• Apify API - Call directly from your codebase with the REST API

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research and Academia

Study positional evolution in the NFL - how has the passing game changed over 20 years? This scraper gives you the raw data to find out.

Creative Projects

Build a "guess the player" game using historical stat lines, or generate AI-powered game recaps from raw stat data.

Non-profit and Education

Coaches and sports science programs can use historical NFL data to teach performance analysis concepts with real data.

Personal Projects

Build your own fantasy football draft tool, a personal stat tracker dashboard, or a historical NFL trivia bot.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

You can ask any AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) questions like:

• "What passing stats does this scraper return for 2024?"
• "How do I get rushing stats for multiple seasons?"
• "Which fields are null for defense stat type?"
• "How do I export this data to Excel?"

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🏈 What seasons are available? All NFL seasons available on pro-football-reference.com, typically from the 1970s to the most recently completed season.

📊 What stat types are supported? Four stat types: passing (QBs), rushing (RBs/QBs), receiving (WRs/TEs/RBs), and defense (defensive players).

🔢 How many players are returned? All players with stats for that season sorted by the primary stat. Typically 30-50 for passing, 100+ for rushing/receiving.

❓ Why are some fields null? Stat-specific fields are null when not applicable. passingYards is null for rushing stats, tackles is null for passing stats, etc. This is by design.

📅 Is 2024 season data available? Yes - the 2024 season ended in early 2025 and is fully archived.

🆓 What do free users get? Free users get up to 10 records per run as a preview. Upgrade to a paid plan for full datasets.

💰 How much does it cost? Create a free account with $5 credit. Full season stats typically cost a few cents per run.

🔄 How fresh is the data? Data comes from the most recently archived snapshot of pro-football-reference.com, typically within days of the latest update.

🌐 Do I need an account on pro-football-reference.com? No - this scraper accesses public data only, no account needed on either end.

📁 What export formats are available? JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), and XML via the Apify dataset export.

🔗 Can I get player profile URLs? Yes - every record includes a playerUrl field linking directly to the player page on pro-football-reference.com.

🏟️ Are team names included? Yes - the team field contains the 3-letter NFL team abbreviation (e.g. CIN, DET, MIN).

🔌 Integrate with any app

Connect this actor to your workflow using:

• Google Sheets - via Make or Zapier integration
• Airtable - via Zapier webhook trigger
• Slack - send stat summaries on a schedule
• Notion - build a living NFL database
• REST API - call the Apify API from any language
• Python / Node.js - use the official Apify SDK
• Excel - download CSV and open directly

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more data scrapers across sports, finance, jobs, and more.

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Disclaimer: This actor accesses publicly available data from pro-football-reference.com via archived snapshots. Use responsibly and in accordance with the website terms of service. ParseForge is not affiliated with Sports Reference LLC or pro-football-reference.com.