Standardize Team Abbreviations — clean_team

Standardizes team abbreviations to the canonical abbreviations used by sdvplotR. Matching is case-insensitive and understands full team names ("Kansas City Chiefs"), common alternate abbreviations used by other data sources ("WSH" / "WAS", "GNB" / "GB"), and historical abbreviations of relocated franchises (see resolve_historical_abbr()). For the college sports it also takes the school names NCAA.com / stats.ncaa.org, KenPom, Bart Torvik and Sports Reference use ("Iowa St.", "St. John's (NY)", "Saint Mary's (CA)", "Southern California", "Brigham Young"). Conference names resolve to the conference: ESPN's ("SEC", "Southeastern Conference"), the NCAA's, KenPom's and Torvik's ("B10", "MWC"), and the names a conference went by before ("Pac-10", "Mid-Continent Conference"). The WAC, which ESPN no longer draws, keeps its archived ESPN mark; "UAC", the name the basketball WAC took for 2026-27, does not resolve to it. Where a team already uses the name, the team wins, so the American Athletic Conference is "AAC" ("American" is American University).

Usage

clean_team_abbrs(
  abbr,
  sport = c("nfl", "nba", "wnba", "mlb", "nhl", "cfb", "mbb", "wbb"),
  keep_non_matches = TRUE
)

Arguments

abbr: A character vector of abbreviations or team names.
sport: Character string identifying the sport. One of supported_sports().
keep_non_matches: If TRUE (the default) an element of abbr that can't be matched will be kept as is. Otherwise it will be replaced with NA.

Value

A character vector with cleaned team abbreviations.

Examples

clean_team_abbrs(c("KC", "kansas city chiefs", "OAK", "WSH"), sport = "nfl")
#> [1] "KC"  "KC"  "LV"  "WAS"
clean_team_abbrs(c("BOS", "GS", "INVALID"), sport = "nba", keep_non_matches = FALSE)
#> [1] "BOS" "GS"  NA   
clean_team_abbrs(c("Iowa St.", "St. John's (NY)", "Miami (OH)"), sport = "mbb")
#> [1] "ISU"  "SJU"  "M-OH"