As a pre-bowl season present to all, we would like to announce that we have added a LOT more college football data. New data fills out individual player stats back to 1956, and includes:

• Passing/Rushing/Receiving - complete seasonal offensive stats back to 1956 for players, which means we now have leaderboards for the past 57+ years
• Interceptions - we now have full data back to 1976, which means that a player like Charles Woodson no longer looks like just a wide receiver, and Deion Sanders isn't just some guy who played for Florida State.
• Punt and kick returns - we now have full data back to 1976, which also benefits Woodson & Sanders, of course, but helps fill out the stats of players like Tim Brown and Barry Sanders
• Punting and kicking stats - also dating back to 1976, you can now get your fill of the kicking stats of various Zendejases

We've also added 1,312 new team seasons worth of data back to 1956, updating every major and many non-major schools' complete offensive stats. Finally, we've fleshed out player links between the college football and pro football sites, so finding pro stats for college players should be much easier (and vice versa). Look for an expansion of the Play Index tools soon to encompass this new data.

A BIG thanks to guys at Sports Data Research for working with us to bring this update to the site.

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As Nate Silver tweeted out earlier today, Neil Paine is leaving Sports Reference early next month to join Nate's new FiveThirtyEight.com. I know I speak for everyone here at SR when I say I'm feeling a mix of sadness that on a daily basis we won't get to tap Neil's encyclopedic knowledge of European NBA players, his knowledge of pretty much every sabermetric study ever done, his patience dealing with every kind of user complaint, and his wit, pluck, and genuine enthusiasm for his work. But also happiness for Neil that his writing and thinking is getting the platform it justly deserves. I know someday we'll be bragging that we knew Neil Paine before he was a bigshot. :)

I'll be anticipating his articles and I suggest you search them out as well when the site launches in early 2014.

Just a quick note that we've added the Recruiting Services Consensus Index (RSCI) high school rankings to BBR, going back to the HS class of 1998. These will now show up on yearly RSCI pages, as well as player pages (under the bio section -> "recruiting rank") when applicable.

If you're not familiar with the RSCI service, they cull together various national recruiting lists and combine them together into a consensus ranking (like DraftExpress, we've also tweaked the basic RSCI by including prep-school players for their final year of the recruiting process, which is also why some players may be listed multiple years). The rankings you see at BBR are the final standings for each year; for more info on how the process works, as well as additional data like in-season rankings (fall, pre-summer, etc.), be sure to go to RSCIhoops.com.

It's a frequent question - who throws the most interceptions returned for touchdowns? Chase blogged about it here a few years ago, but in an effort to help find who's the king of the pick six I've added the ability to filter by type of touchdown to the game play finder tool. Setting the turnover type to interceptions only and searching for most pick sixes thrown since 1999 shows us Peyton Manning tied with Brett Favre and Carson Palmer as the leaders with 21 apiece, with 810 total thrown over that span.

Note that this does pick up a couple of instances where a pass was intercepted, fumbled, and subsequently returned for a touchdown by the offensive team, so subtract one pick six apiece from Drew Brees and Brad Johnson.

Happy Holidays from Sports Reference

Here's to a great 2013 and a blessed 2014.

Just saw this tweet:

that's one mr. bobby mitchell! http://t.co/d3CNK9VymA RT @bwebster: @jon_bois I only have one question pic.twitter.com/j5FCvKWIMX

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 12, 2013

Which made me wonder - who really is the fumblingest player of all time? First, it seems only fair to look at fumbles on a per-touch basis. Yes, Terry Metcalf managed to fumble 62 times in 81 games (which is admittedly nuts), but he was rushing, receiving, and returning kicks in that time, so he had the ball in his hands 1226 times over those 81 games. On a pure per-touch basis (since 1960 with a minimum of 300 touches) it looks like it was one Kermit Alexander who was the most likely to put the ball on the ground - 29 fumbles on 329 overall touches (that's a fumble almost 9% of the time he put his hands on the ball). Here's your top 50 overall "leaders":

+------------------+---------+---------+---------------+
| name             | fumbles | touches | fum_per_touch |
+------------------+---------+---------+---------------+
| Kermit Alexander |      29 |     329 |        0.0881 |
| Howard Stevens   |      30 |     372 |        0.0806 |
| Darrien Gordon   |      27 |     338 |        0.0799 |
| Todd Kinchen     |      26 |     334 |        0.0778 |
| Robbie Martin    |      23 |     302 |        0.0762 |
| Ron Smith        |      39 |     542 |        0.0720 |
| Eddie Payton     |      21 |     321 |        0.0654 |
| Speedy Duncan    |      26 |     406 |        0.0640 |
| Walter Stanley   |      24 |     400 |        0.0600 |
| Mike Fuller      |      21 |     353 |        0.0595 |
| Bobby Wade       |      23 |     394 |        0.0584 |
| Sidney Thornton  |      22 |     405 |        0.0543 |
| Alvin Haymond    |      23 |     433 |        0.0531 |
| Steve Odom       |      19 |     367 |        0.0518 |
| Dennis McKinnon  |      17 |     336 |        0.0506 |
| Terry Metcalf    |      62 |    1226 |        0.0506 |
| Stefan Logan     |      17 |     337 |        0.0504 |
| Wayne Patrick    |      18 |     363 |        0.0496 |
| R.W. McQuarters  |      15 |     304 |        0.0493 |
| Alonzo Highsmith |      16 |     325 |        0.0492 |
| Michael Bates    |      20 |     407 |        0.0491 |
| Lionel James     |      32 |     665 |        0.0481 |
| Az-Zahir Hakim   |      25 |     526 |        0.0475 |
| Dexter Carter    |      33 |     696 |        0.0474 |
| Fulton Walker    |      15 |     317 |        0.0473 |
| J.W. Lockett     |      15 |     319 |        0.0470 |
| Mack Herron      |      27 |     581 |        0.0465 |
| Willard Harrell  |      36 |     785 |        0.0459 |
| Joe Auer         |      16 |     350 |        0.0457 |
| Tommy Mason      |      61 |    1354 |        0.0451 |
| Greg Pruitt      |      83 |    1843 |        0.0450 |
| Devin Hester     |      32 |     717 |        0.0446 |
| Mel J. Gray      |      31 |     705 |        0.0440 |
| Rick Kane        |      24 |     550 |        0.0436 |
| Shaun McDonald   |      13 |     303 |        0.0429 |
| Louis Lipps      |      22 |     516 |        0.0426 |
| Scott Laidlaw    |      14 |     330 |        0.0424 |
| Rod Woodson      |      23 |     552 |        0.0417 |
| Troy Walters     |      15 |     362 |        0.0414 |
| Izzy Lang        |      14 |     338 |        0.0414 |
| Michael Lewis    |      19 |     464 |        0.0409 |
| Dick Gordon      |      15 |     368 |        0.0408 |
| Rick Upchurch    |      27 |     662 |        0.0408 |
| Wendell Tyler    |      64 |    1573 |        0.0407 |
| Roscoe Parrish   |      14 |     347 |        0.0403 |
| Bobby Duhon      |      15 |     374 |        0.0401 |
| Tim Worley       |      20 |     500 |        0.0400 |
| Ed Williams      |      12 |     301 |        0.0399 |
| Louie Giammona   |      13 |     327 |        0.0398 |
| Bob Tucker       |      17 |     428 |        0.0397 |
+------------------+---------+---------+---------------+

Note that without a minimum number of touches the leader is Norman Jefferson who managed 5 fumbles on 11 career kick returns (which is likely why he only got 11 career kick returns).

Since it's a frequent request & the mercury is dipping ever downward, today I've added temperature as an option to the team game finder. You can search for the best records in sub-10 degree temperatures or even performance in hot games. Look for this to show up on the player game finder soon as well, to help stoke the debate about cold weather performance.

Temperature data from before 1999 is local to the airport nearest the stadium site (as detailed in this blog post) and from 1999 on is from gamebook data directly. Note that temperature is only recorded for games outdoors, so you may want to select "Outdoors" as the stadium type before trying a temperature search.

If you're also a Baseball-Reference user, you might recognize this new feature we recently added to Basketball-Reference:

If not, it's a sparkline that shows the team's scoring margin for every game of the season, with green representing wins, red representing losses, and the height of the bar representing the margin of the game. We think it's a great way to visualize the peaks and valleys of a team's season, and we hope it adds your BBR experience.

Chase asked where FSU's +42.3 pre-bowl PPG differential ranked among all BCS-bowl teams historically, so I thought I'd run a quick database search:

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Today, we added a new feature to Basketball-Reference: historical team Pace Factors and Offensive/Defensive Rating estimates.

As of yesterday, we only had Pace and ORtg/DRtg for NBA teams going back to 1973-74, the first season in which the league tracked team/opponent turnovers and offensive rebounds (which are, of course, necessary to the possessions formula). However, it is possible to estimate possessions for years prior to '74 -- an idea I developed casually at the old BBR Blog in 2010, and one which was expanded on in more detail by ElGee35 at his (now-defunct) blog in 2012.

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