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1PRIDE

Your first SELECT

Level 1 · Lesson 1

Hook

You can’t answer questions about football until you can pull a single row out of a table. SELECT is the door. Everything you do for the next four levels starts here.

Concept

A SQL query says four things, in order:

  1. What columns you want — SELECT player_display_name, rushing_yards
  2. From which table — FROM weekly_stats
  3. Which rows — WHERE recent_team = 'DET' AND week = 1 AND season = 2024
  4. In what order — ORDER BY rushing_yards DESC

Only the first two are required. The rest are filters and sorting on top.

SELECT player_display_name, rushing_yards
FROM weekly_stats
WHERE recent_team = 'DET' AND week = 1 AND season = 2024
ORDER BY rushing_yards DESC;

The column names look long because nflverse named them precisely: player_display_name instead of player, recent_team instead of team. That’s the schema — get used to typing them.

Lions example

The Lions opened the 2024 season on the road against the Rams — a Sunday-night 26-20 OT loss in LA. To find every Detroit player with rushing yards that night:

SELECT player_display_name, rushing_yards, rushing_tds
FROM weekly_stats
WHERE recent_team = 'DET'
  AND season = 2024
  AND week = 1
ORDER BY rushing_yards DESC;

Expected shape: a small table with David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs at the top, then a few smaller contributors.

Try it

Write a query that returns every Lions receiver with receiving yards in Week 1 of 2024, sorted from most to least.

You’ll want receiving_yards instead of rushing_yards, and you can leave the WHERE clause structure the same.

Common mistakes

  • Forgetting the season filter. weekly_stats has every year nflverse has loaded. Without AND season = 2024 you’ll get a decade of Week 1s.
  • Using team instead of recent_team. The nflverse weekly stats table uses recent_team for the player’s team at that point in time. Watch the column name.
  • Sorting before filtering in your head. SQL evaluates WHERE before ORDER BY, but you should think filter-first too — narrow the rows, then sort what’s left.

Quick check

  1. What does SELECT * return? When should you avoid it?
  2. If you remove ORDER BY rushing_yards DESC from the example above, what happens to the result?
  3. Which column would you change to find passing leaders instead of rushing leaders?