Is it accurate that there are 544 rosters? If so, even at 2 minutes a roster isn't that days of work, even if you coded something? How would you go about completing this task in 1 hour as a human? (also chatgpt 4.1 gave me 2,503 and it said it used the NFL 2024 fact book)
544 rosters but half as many games (because the teams play each other).
Technically I can probably do it in about 10 minutes because I've worked with these kind of stats before and know about packages that will get you this basically instantly (https://pypi.org/project/nfl-data-py/).
It's exactly 4 lines of code to find the correct answer, which is 2,227.
Assuming I didn't know about that package though I'd open a site like pro football reference up, middle click on each game to open the page in a new tab, click through the tabs, copy paste the rosters into sublime text, do some regex to get the names one per line, drop the new one per line list into sortmylist or a similar utility, dedupe it, and then paste it back into sublime text to get the line count.
I see. When you said "game day rosters for many NFL teams are available on many sites" - I thought "that sounds like a lot of hours!!" heh. - I didn't realize it was packaged well, I also know sweet fa about football. Thanks for explaining it more. :)
If the rosters are in some sort of pretty easily parsed or scrapable format from the nfl, as sports stats typically are, this is just a matter of finding every unique name. This is something that I imagine would take less than an hour or two for a very beginner coder, and maybe a second or two for the code to actually run
FYI for readers: All the major leagues have a stats API, most are public, some are public and "undocumented" with tons of documentation by the community. It's quite a feat!
