I was looking for a web scraper for work, when I stumbled upon a really good online one that makes the automation of capturing names and other info from a site like Yahoo sports simple.
I setup an automated web scrape to capture the roster info of every division 1 college team roster, which gives me a list of names I could use to generate players, as well as some name-related stats - like the fact that 0.2% of players are a "John Doe, II" (0.08% are a IV), and 1.01% have hyphenated names. I very quickly generated a random hyphenated name, and naturally it came out 'T.J. Williams-Williams'.
About 7-8 years ago I extended the FBCB names list by manually copying and pasting every player from every roster...... The above took me about a minute to setup, and a few hours to run in the background.
Also in the "interesting but not really related to my sim" category, the top 5 most popular jersey numbers in college basketball - 5, 1, 2, 3, 11.