With the 2015 college football season upon us, just a few reminders on where to find info for this season:

• The full 2015 FBS schedule can be found here. This page also contains links to game previews, which will turn into box scores as the games are completed.
• Individual school schedules are available on that school's season page, which is accessible from this index. These pages will also track team/player statistics and contain links to box scores and previews. We also display an injury report for injuries and suspensions that will appear at the top of the team pages.
• If you'd just like to see box scores for a given day, they are available here.
• Any information on the 2015 season can be accessed from the Season Summary page. This page features a comparison of the conferences, an AP Poll summary and also national statistical leaders. Furthermore, this page provides navigation to standings, ratings and every AP Poll (and CFB Playoff standings once they begin their release). You can also access a larger selection of national statistical leaders.
• For deeper dives into our statistical offerings, we recommend utilizing our Play Index. This is a series of tools offering unique access to our database, which allows users to create custom leaderboards. For instance, the most TD passes in a game since 2000 or the most games in a season with 4+ TD passes since 2000, which can be found via the Player Game Finder. The School Game Finder can tell you things like the most bowl wins since 2000 or most points in a conference championship game since 2000. The School Streak Finder can give you the longest losing streaks in major bowl games since 1869 or the most consecutive 40-point games. Finally, the Rivalry Finder will provide you with a detailed series history between any two schools you choose.

If you have any questions about where to find something or if you encounter any issues, please let us know here.

Jonah Gardner joined the Sports Reference crew (working out of Philly) a few weeks ago as our Social Media Coordinator bringing SR's head count to seven full-time staff. Jonah brings experience working in social media for The Human Solution in Austin and also for several musical acts and record labels. He's an Atlanta Braves fan, backs Everton FC (the Braves of the EPL), and is a big NBA fan (see his Kevin Garnett Trade Voltron). Jonah will be leading our change on social media for Sports Reference and you'll see us on much more active on twitter and joining additional platforms in the near future.

JOB ADVERT: Social Media Coordinator
.
.
.
.
PLEASE SEE OUR ADVERTISEMENT
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

One of the more common subjects for queries we receive at Sports-Reference is our SRS (Simple Rating System) figures. For some background, the first of our sites to add SRS was Pro-Football-Reference, when Doug Drinen added it to the site in 2006 and provided this excellent primer. The important thing to know is that SRS is a rating that takes into account average point differential and strength of schedule. For instance, the 2006-07 Spurs won games by an average of 8.43 points per game and played a schedule with opponents that were 0.08 points worse than average, giving them an SRS of 8.35. This means they were 8.35 points better than an average team. An average team would have an SRS of 0.0. The calculation can be complicated, but the premise is simple and it produces easily interpreted results.

However, there are some variations in the way we calculate SRS across our various sites. We'll break down these differences below.

Pro-Football-Reference.com SRS: PFR's SRS is unique in that a home-field advantage is included as a part of the calculation because of the short schedule compared to the other sports (we don't want a team to look relatively weak at the halfway point because they've only played 3 of their first 8 at home, for instance). This HFA fluctuates yearly based on game results, but it is generally somewhere between 2 and 3 points (2006 being an outlier, as you'll see). Below is a look at the HFA numbers we have used since 2001. If you'd like to calculate these HFAs yourself, just sum up every team's home point differential and then divide by the total number of games played across the league that season. This data can easily be found in the Play Index for each season:

• 2001: 2.0081
• 2002: 2.2461
• 2003: 3.5547
• 2004: 2.5078
• 2005: 3.6484
• 2006: 0.8477
• 2007: 2.8672
• 2008: 2.5586
• 2009: 2.2070
• 2010: 1.8945
• 2011: 3.2656
• 2012: 2.4336
• 2013: 3.1055
• 2014: 2.4883

College Football SRS: Our CFB SRS does not contain a home-field advantage element, but it does have some other quirks. Most importantly, we have capped the margin of victory considered for the formula. Due to the number of mismatches seen in college football, the maximum point differential a team can be credited with in a game is 24. We also credit all wins as a minimum of plus-7 margin of victory (so if you win by 1 point, it's treated the same as a 7-point win). The same logic is applied to losses, as well. One other wrinkle for CFB is that all non-major opponents are included as one team for the sake of the ratings.

College Basketball SRS: SRS for college hoops is straight forward (no HFA & no adjusted MOV), but one item to note is that games against non-major opponents are not counted in our calculations.

MLB, NBA & NHL: All of these SRS calculations are straight forward with no adjustments for HFA and no capping of MOV. It should be noted, however, that no special consideration is given for extra-innings, overtimes or shootouts, either.

We'll close with a quick rundown of the various merits and weaknesses of SRS, from Drinen's original 2006 post. These bullet points were created to describe the system used for NFL SRS, but many of the strengths and weaknesses can applied to the other sports, as well:

• The numbers it spits out are easy to interpret - if Team A's rating is 3 bigger than Team B's, this means that the system thinks Team A is 3 points better than Team B. With most ranking algorithms, the numbers that come out have no real meaning that can be translated into an English sentence. With this system, the units are easy to understand.

• It is a predictive system rather than a retrodictive system - this is a very important distinction. You can use these ratings to answer the question: which team is stronger? I.e. which team is more likely to win a game tomorrow? Or you can use them to answer the question: which of these teams accomplished more in the past? Some systems answer the first questions more accurately; they are called predictive systems. Others answer the latter question more accurately; they are called retrodictive systems. As it turns out, this is a pretty good predictive system. For the reasons described below, it is not a good retrodictive system.

• It weights all games equally - every football fan knows that the Colts' week 17 game against Arizona was a meaningless exhibition, but the algorithm gives it the same weight as all the rest of the games.

• It weights all points equally, and therefore ignores wins and losses - take a look at the Colts season. If you take away 10 points in week 3 and give them back 10 points in week 4, you've just changed their record, but you haven't changed their rating at all. If you take away 10 points in week 3 and give back 20 points in week 4, you have made their record worse but their rating better. Most football fans put a high premium on the few points that move you from a 3-point loss to a 3-point win and almost no weight on the many points that move you from a 20-point win to a 50-point win.

• It is easily impressed by blowout victories - this system thinks a 50-point win and a 10-point loss is preferable to two 14-point wins. Most fans would disagree with that assessment.

• It is slightly biased toward offensive-minded teams - because it considers point margins instead of point ratios, it treats a 50-30 win as more impressive than a 17-0 win. Again, this is an assessment that most fans would disagree with.

• This should go without saying, but - I'll say it anyway. The system does not take into account injuries, weather conditions, yardage gained, the importance of the game, whether it was a Monday Night game or not, whether the quarterback's grandmother was sick, or anything else besides points scored and points allowed.

JOB AD: Analytics Consultant, Posted Feb 27, 2015

Link to the job ad.

Adam Wodon has joined Sports Reference today as a Managing Director for Hockey Reference. Adam will be working out of our Philadelphia office as our staff size has now risen to six. Adam brings a great deal of development experience and hockey knowledge to Sports Reference. Adam is the founder and managing editor of College Hockey News. Adam is an Isles fan through and through and also supports the Mets, Jets, and Nets making him the first diehard National League fan on staff. Adam is also on twitter at (@chn_AdamWodon).

Hans VanSlooten (@CantPitch) who had been working on the hockey site for the last 14 months will be taking over primary day-to-day development of Baseball-Reference.com.

Since we've launched the various Play Index tools on our sites, we've struggled with the best way to monetize what we feel is the deepest and most powerful set of sports data tools anywhere. We know they are useful, our users, the teams, broadcast networks, and newspaper reporters tell us so.

On baseball, we charge an annual fee of $36, but our best guess is that the traffic and audience of the other sites would not be sufficient to make a subscription model worth our while. We have been running traditional banner ads on those pages, but they pay so little and the play index content is niche content (valuable, but niche content) so the traffic will never rise that high on the play index pages. So we have decided to remove all banner advertising and instead run Google consumer surveys on the non-baseball play index pages.

Here's how it works. The first time you run a report each day your results will be obscured and you will be asked to answer a 1-5 question survey. After you answer the survey, your requested report will be shown to you and you won't see another survey for that site on that browser for 24 hours (multi-question surveys are good for 48 hours). These surveys pay us around 5 cents per survey which, while it doesn't sound like much, is about 15 times what we would get from banner ads on those pages. Here is an FAQ if you are wondering how Google uses this information.

Also, if you find these gateway surveys a step too far, consider subscribing to our Ad-Free Access. Starting at $20/year you can surf every Sports Reference page ad and survey free.

If you are wondering what our play index tools are, give them a try. We think you'll enjoy them.
Play Index at Basketball-Reference.com
Play Index at Pro-Football-Reference.com
Play Index at Hockey-Reference.com
Play Index at Sports-Reference.com/cbb
Play Index at Sports-Reference.com/cfb

By Dan Pizzuta

There's not many things in sports that can increase ticket prices on the secondary market like successful on-field performance. Generally the best teams have the highest ticket prices. However, early in the season some of the price points are still based on preseason expectations and on-field performance has not yet led to shifts in the market. That's especially true early in the college football season on the secondary market.

TiqIQ tracks the most average prices by school on the secondary market during the college football season with the TiqIQ Top 25. Of the schools with the 25 most expensive average prices, 12 are also currently in the Top 25 of SRS after two weeks of the season.

Through two games, the closest match between SRS and secondary market prices is Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish are ranked as the top team with a SRS of 56.99. Notre Dame football tickets are also the third most expensive on the secondary market with a $215 average price for 2014 home games. The University of Georgia is close to Notre Dame, ranking fourth in SRS and second on the secondary market as UGA football tickets have an average price of $219. The biggest disagreement between the two is Ohio State. Ohio State football tickets are the most expensive in the country with a $252 average price. Ohio State's average is 15 percent above the next school, however, they come in just 55th in SRS, 7.43 points above average.

Four of the top ten schools in SRS do not appear in the 25 most expensive schools on the secondary market. Of those four, only Michigan football tickets are the closest to cracking the Top 25. The Wolverines currently have the 26th highest average price in the country at $120. Home games on the Michigan football schedule are typically more expensive, but both high profile rivalry games against Notre Dame and Ohio State were scheduled on the road this season.

When it comes to average prices on the secondary market, there's not much of a difference between top offensive and defensive schools. Both eight of the top 25 schools in defensive and offensive SRS appear on the TiqIQ Top 25. The best defensive schools have a bit of an edge when the it comes to being top five units. Four of the top defensive teams in the TiqIQ Top 25 are in the top five in Defensive SRS. However only two of the eight offensive teams on the secondary market are top five in Offensive SRS--Georgia and Auburn.

Of the 25 most expensive schools on the secondary market, Auburn football tickets might be the best deal. The Tigers rank 14th on the TiqIQ Top 25 and third in SRS. They are only top secondary market school that rank in the top 25 in SRS for both offense and defense. For that type of balance, the $149 average price at Jordan Hare Stadium could be considered a steal.

Thanks to Chris Creamer and his wonderful site SportsLogos.net, we've added current logos to all 2014 school pages, as well as a new top 25 listing in the left column on the college football front page. Clicking the link below the logo on the school page will take you to the SportsLogos.net historical logos page for that team, where you can see historical logos, helmets, lettering, and more.

With the 2014 college football season upon, just a few reminders on where to find info for this season:

• The full 2014 FBS schedule (complete with TV info and links to purchase tickets) can be found here. This page also contains links to game previews, which will turn into box scores as the games are completed.
• Individual school schedules are available on that school's season page, which is accessible from this index. These pages will also track team/player statistics and contain links to box scores and previews. New for this season is an injury report that will appear at the top of the team pages.
• If you'd just like to see box scores for a given day, they are available here.
• Any information on the 2014 season can be accessed from the Season Summary page. This page features a comparison of the conferences, an AP Poll summary and also national statistical leaders. Furthermore, this page provides navigation to standings, ratings and every AP Poll. You can also access a larger selection of national statistical leaders.
• For deeper dives into our statistical offerings, we recommend utilizing out Play Index. This is a series of tools offering unique access to our database, which allows users to create custom leaderboards. For instance, the most TD passes in a game since 2000 or the most games in a season with 4+ TD passes since 2000, which can be found via the Player Game Finder. The School Game Finder can tell you things like the most bowl wins since 2002 or most points in a conference championship game since 2000. The School Streak Finder can give you the longest losing streaks in major bowl games since 1869 or the most consecutive 40-point games. Finally, the Rivalry Finder will provide you with a detailed series history between any two schools you choose.

If you have any questions about where to find something or if you encounter any issues, please let us know here.