Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I figured out which Akron Zips players made it to the NFL. It was kind of a rabbit hole, but hey, that’s half the fun, right?
First things first, I started with the obvious: Google. I typed in “Akron Zips NFL players,” figuring there’d be some kind of official list. What I got was a bunch of random articles and outdated rosters. Not exactly helpful. So, scratch that.
Next, I remembered that the NFL has its own website with all sorts of historical data. My thought was: what if I could search players by college attended. Turns out, it’s not that straightforward. The NFL’s site is great for stats and current rosters, but digging into the past is a bit of a pain.
I then tried a few different sports data sites, you know, the ones that track everything from high school football to the pros. Some of them had partial lists, but nothing felt complete or totally reliable. One site even listed a guy who only played one season at Akron before transferring! Close, but no cigar.
Then, I had a brainwave. *! These guys are serious about their stats. I hopped on over there and started digging. What I did was search to see if I could see the players who went to college and their carrer. It was a bit clunky, I had to manually type “University of Akron”, but it worked. Finally.
Once I had the raw data, it was just a matter of cleaning it up and double-checking everything. I cross-referenced the names with other sources to make sure I wasn’t missing anyone or including someone who didn’t actually make it to the NFL. It took awhile. Like maybe an hour of cross referencing between multiple websites, but I wanted to be as accurate as possible.
Anyway, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to find this information, and now at least I have a good reliable list!
