Sports Reference Blog

Sports Reference has incorporated thousands of updates, additions and improvements to its Men's College Basketball data on the Sports Reference College Basketball site thanks to the efforts of Dave Quinn.

This expansion of data runs from 1950-51 through 2006-07, with a particular concentration in 1998-99 and 1999-00 (with over 20,000 new datapoints added to those seasons). The most-impacted statistics are Minutes Played (9,165 additions), Defensive Rebounds (8,910 additions), Offensive Rebounds (7,060 additions), Turnovers (5,283 additions), Personal Fouls (3,573 additions) and Games Started (3,072 additions). Every statistical category had over 100 updates or additions.

We hope you enjoy these new additions as we aim to cover the history of the sport as well as we are able. Historical NCAA data can be quite tricky/messy as many of the old team sheets are handwritten, prone to errors/typos and not always properly balanced. To this end, we also corrected hundreds of scoring/shooting totals where a typo decades ago had led to an incorrect total somewhere along the line. While we corrected many of these cases where we able to ascertain where the error was, in hundreds more cases it's simply impossible to diagnose the error without box scores for all games in question. Another thing we did was make sure that three-pointers were accounted for in player point totals before the shot was officially adopted in 1986-87. Hundreds of conference games were played with the three-point shot in effect (at varied distances) before 1986-87 and schools were not always consistent in how they counted those shots in season totals. It is our policy that if a shot was worth three points in a game, it should be worth three points in the season totals and so we have made some adjustments where necessary to make things consistent.

This update vastly improves our coverage of certain statistics. Some highlights:

Our coverage of Offensive Rebounds is complete back through 2009-10 and over 90% complete for all seasons back through 2000-01 (and 87.1% complete for 1999-00)

Our coverage of Minutes Played is complete back through 2009-10 and over 95% complete for all seasons back through 1998-99.

Our coverage of Turnovers is complete back through 2009-10 and over 98% complete for all seasons back through 2000-01 (and 92.6% complete for 1999-00).

Our coverage of Personal Fouls is complete back through 2009-10 and over 95% complete for all seasons back through 1999-00.

Thanks again to Dave Quinn for his assistance in compiling this information.

If you have further statistics beyond what we have on the site, please let us know and we can look into adding it.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2023 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.