App review: Pocket Stats NFL

review by Steve Loopipe


As a fantasy football player, I’m always looking for any sort of an edge. Any tool that lets me slice and dice stats or get player news sooner than my opponents can mean the difference between winning my league and sitting at the bottom of the standings. So when I discovered Pocket Stats NFL, it sounded like the answer to my prayers – full NFL stats on my iPod Touch without requiring an internet connection, plus additional web data baked into the app alongside the stats. Visions of a league championship danced in my head as the app downloaded to my iPod Touch.

Opening up Pocket Stats NFL presents the user with a long, searchable list of NFL players, past and present. Choosing a player brings up a summary of that player’s career stats by season. The user can also choose to view this person’s “Player Card”, or Wikipedia page, as well as a selection of video clips from YouTube. The interface is fairly simple, but it is clean and works well to collect a good amount of information about an individual player all in one place.

However, there are some fairly glaring problems with this app that keep it from being a truly must-have app for hardcore NFL fans First of all, only offensive skill players are included in the current build of Pocket Stats NFL; offensive linemen, defensive players and special teams players are missing entirely. Defensive players are promised in a future update, but even for a work-in-progress app, this seems like a significant omission.

Similarly, career stats cut off at the end of the 2008 season; while real-time stats might be too much to expect, looking up a current player’s stats and not seeing any mention of the current season limits the usefulness of the stats that are included in the app, especially given that the app bills itself as a tool to help fantasy football managers evaluate players. As a heavy fantasy player myself, the only stats that matter are the most recent stats, so not having those negates that claim. In fairness, full stats can usually be obtained via the link to NFL.com on the player’s Wikipedia page, but when your app bills itself as a full NFL stats database, you shouldn’t have to go to an external site (even via a tab inside the app) to get full stats.

Which leads to the biggest problem with Pocket Stats NFL, which is that it costs 99 cents in the App Store as of this writing. If this were a free app, it could be a useful resource to keep on your iPhone. However, at 99 cents, it’s a tough sell, given that the stats database itself is incomplete and the additional functionality is available either as a built-in app (YouTube) or available for free on the app store (Wikipedia). Those features are indeed nice, but I could just as easily save the 99 cents and type a player’s name into Wikipedia or YouTube.

Pocket Stats NFL has potential, but it feels, much like a rookie quarterback pushed into the starting lineup, it was released into the wild before it was ready. This app is one to keep an eye on; with several significant updates and/or a drop to free, it could indeed be a useful resource on an NFL fan’s iPhone. In its current state, though, I simply can’t recommend spending the 99 cents on an app that doesn’t do enough to make me want to use it instead of just going to NFL.com.

Pocket Stats: NFL is available for 99 cents in the App Store.