The Scenario
You are a pro scouting intern at an NFL team. The 2024 NFL Draft happened last weekend. Your director wants a complete draft class tracker in Google Sheets by Tuesday EOD: every pick with round, pick number, player name, position, college, and drafting team — plus each wide receiver and tight end's final college season receiving stats pulled in alongside their draft data.
You have never used the CollegeFootballData.com API. You have a Google Sheet, a deadline, and a director who checks his inbox at 9 PM.
The bad version:
- You look up the draft data API endpoint, pull it, and get the pick data into the sheet by noon
- You realize you now need to look up each receiver's and tight end's college stats separately
- There are 42 receivers and tight ends in the 2024 draft class
- You spend the afternoon manually cross-referencing names across two endpoints
- Player names in the draft data do not exactly match player names in the stats data ("D.J. Moore" vs "DJ Moore")
- You send your director an incomplete sheet at 10 PM with six rows still missing stats.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI handles the cross-reference and the name-matching without requiring you to do it row by row.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all 2024 NFL Draft picks and paste them into my "Draft Class 2024" sheet with columns for round, pick, player name, position, college, and drafting team.
Then add the stats cross-reference:
Fetch the 2023 NFL Draft picks for wide receivers and tight ends, then look up each player's final college season receiving stats from CollegeFootballData and write yards and touchdowns into adjacent columns.
SheetXAI makes both API calls, fuzzy-matches on player name where exact matches fail, and writes the combined table. Your director gets the complete sheet before dinner.
What You Get
A "Draft Class 2024" table with all picks and cross-referenced stats for skill positions:
- Round, pick, player name, position, college, drafting team — the full draft log
- Receiving yards (college) — final college season receiving yards for receivers and tight ends
- Receiving TDs (college) — final college season touchdown total
- Blank cells for non-skill positions — quarterbacks, linemen, and defenders have no receiving stats to pull, so those cells stay blank rather than showing incorrect data
The table is ready for further analysis. Sort by receiving yards to see which teams drafted the most productive college receivers. Cross-reference with draft round to find value picks.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Draft and college stats cross-references have specific failure modes. SheetXAI handles them.
When player name matching fails for hyphenated or abbreviated names
"D.J. Moore" in the draft data and "DJ Moore" in the college stats data are the same player but will not match on an exact string comparison.
In the "Draft Class 2024" tab, for any wide receiver or tight end row where the receiving yards column is blank, attempt a fuzzy name match against the CollegeFootballData player stats — ignoring dots, hyphens, and spacing differences. If a match is found, fill the stats. If not, write "Name mismatch — verify manually" in a new column.
When you want to add rushing stats for running backs
The director also wants college rushing yards and touchdowns for every running back drafted.
For every row in "Draft Class 2024" where position is RB or HB, look up the player's final college season rushing stats from CollegeFootballData and write rushing yards and rushing touchdowns into columns H and I.
When you want a summary of college production by round
For the post-draft analysis memo, your director wants to know whether early-round picks had meaningfully better college production than late-round picks.
In a new tab called "Production by Round," group the "Draft Class 2024" data by draft round. For each round, calculate the average receiving yards (for WRs and TEs) and average rushing yards (for RBs) of all players drafted in that round. Show only rounds 1 through 5.
When you want to compare this draft class to the prior year
The comparison takes two API calls and a merge — exactly what SheetXAI is built for.
Pull all 2023 NFL Draft picks and their final college season stats for wide receivers and tight ends from CollegeFootballData. Write them into a "2023 Draft WR-TE" tab with the same column structure as "Draft Class 2024." Then in a third tab called "Year-Over-Year," calculate average receiving yards and average receiving TDs for WRs and TEs drafted in rounds 1–3 for each year and show the comparison side by side.
The pattern: the draft data is one API call, the stats are another. The value is in the join. Ask for both at once.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull a full NFL Draft class with college stats cross-referenced. The CollegeFootballData.com integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For more, see how to export player position stats or the CollegeFootballData.com in Google Sheets overview.