Sports Reference Blog

We have made a huge update to our player class data on College Basketball Reference. Previously, we had this data more or less complete back to 1992-93, and fairly spotty for previous seasons. However, we realized that for players for whom we have four seasons of data who played during years with freshman eligibility that we could infer what their freshman, sophomore, junior and senior seasons were. Likewise, we could do the same for players with three years of data during the years freshmen were ineligible to play varsity. So we have now identified freshman, sophomore, junior and senior seasons for 13,842 additional players in our database.

With this update we now have a full accounting of class years for 57,343 of the 102,750 players in the database. For an additional 2,910 players we have a partial accounting of their class years. It should be noted that while this method of inference should work in 99% of all cases, there may be some players who maybe had four seasons but were able to repeat their eligibility for one of those seasons or something similar. So if you happen to see any bugs in this data, please let us know.

Our next priority with this data is to go through players who declared early for the draft before 1993 to make sure that we fill in their class data, since in most cases these are important, prominent players.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2018 at 11:28 am and is filed under Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Data, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.