Time accurate player-on-team data

[kennysushi]

Been digging through nfldb recently. Really easy to understand & powerful tool. Great work! One thing I noticed is that when querying past data (ie 2015 stats) that player data returns with their current (2016) team information. For example:

(43, 'Zach Mettenberger (PIT, QB)'),

Despite a 2015 game query, it thinks that ZM is on PIT, which didn't happen until 2016. I'd imagine this issue propagates further back as well when players change teams? Is there any way to link time-accurate team-player data?

edit:
I see this was also discussed here but solution was never reached #157

[ochawkeye]

All depends on how you're querying the data.

You could do something like this:

import nfldb

db = nfldb.connect()
q = nfldb.Query(db)
q.game(season_year=2009, week=1, season_type='Regular', team='MIN')

for pp in q.as_play_players():
    print 'Player:', pp.player
    print '\tTeam at time of game:', pp.team  # Use this to get the player's team
    print '\tCurrent team:', pp.player.team  # Not this which would get the player's current team

Player: Abram Elam (UNK, UNK)
    Team at time of game: CLE
    Current team: UNK
.
.
.
Player: Chad Greenway (MIN, OLB)
    Team at time of game: MIN
    Current team: MIN
.
.
.
Player: Phil Dawson (SF, K)
    Team at time of game: CLE
    Current team: SF
.
.
.