Where does the analytic talent on our board get their data?

Submitted by umich1 on

Morning all,

Forgive me as I know this has been discussed before - but google searches online and board searches for "college football data" yields no promising results.

Where does the mathlete et al find their data to run their analysis?  I've found the college football data warehouse, but it isn't descriptive enough for my modelling plan.  I'd like to find a place where I can get aggregated drive-by-drive detail for every team in America.  Is it possible? 

Help is appreciated, thanks!

joeyb

October 18th, 2010 at 10:20 AM ^

This is the official data. I used to parse ESPN sites, but this is much cleaner and easier. I'm in the process of writing a program to gather all of this data into a database. If and when I finish it, I will post it up for other people to use if they would like.

joeyb

October 19th, 2010 at 10:46 AM ^

Thanks. I'm doing the play-by-play stuff though so that I can start analyzing runs vs. passes and stuff like that. I have this big idea for what I want to do with it, but that's only going to happen if I actually get this parser done.

HeismanPose

October 18th, 2010 at 10:02 AM ^

http://www.cfbstats.com - updated every monday and easy to search.

http://www.cfbdatawarehouse.com - has historical records/results and ranking info for just about every football program in the country. 

Edit - Michigan-specific stats:

Record Book (pdf): http://www.mgoblue.com/photos/schools/mich/sports/m-footbl/auto_pdf/fbl…

Stat Archive: http://stats.ath.umich.edu/football/footstart.php

Bentley Library Football Archive: http://bentley.umich.edu/athdept/football/football.htm

umich1

October 18th, 2010 at 8:15 PM ^

Specifically I'm looking for drive-by-drive data.  As in:

Team | Game # | Quarter | Starting Field Position | Distance Driven | Result

Something like that.  Essentially, I want to create a metric by generating the distribution of Yards Driven / Possible Yards Driven for the offensive and defensive side of the ball.

MCalibur

October 18th, 2010 at 10:08 PM ^

If you scrounge around a little on NCAA.org, most of what you'll ever need is there. If you click on the box-score for each game and select the Drives/Play-by-play link you'll end up here:

http://web1.ncaa.org/mfb/driveSummary.jsp?acadyr=2010&h=418&v=312&date=16-OCT-10&game=201000000041820101016

Exactly what you're looking for.

The front page for this season is here. Change the year in the URL and you can look up previous seasons through 2000.