We're excited to announce a new Play Index feature at College Basketball Reference, which allows users to search for results of all matchups between Division I schools since 1949-50: the Matchup Finder.

There's a lot of cool new searches you can make with this tool, so let's show some examples:

• Find every meeting between two schools since 1949-50. For example, here's every Duke vs North Carolina game in that span in chronological order.
• Or maybe you only want to see the meetings where both schools were ranked in the AP Poll.
• Or games that went to overtime.
• But you don't have to strictly look for matchups between two explicit opponents. You can also do more generalized searches. For instance, we have integrated AP Poll data back to 1949-50 in the search, so you can find the largest margins of victory in wins over the top-ranked team.
• Or the largest wins by an unranked team over AP #1.
• Or meetings between #1 and #2 in the AP Poll.
• You can also look for things like wins by your favorite team over AP Top 10 opponents.

In conjunction with the addition of the Matchup Finder, we have also enhanced the Team Game Finder. The Team Game Finder allows for more specific statistical searches than the Matchup Finder, but it only goes back to 2010-11 (the first season for which have all box scores) rather than 1949-50. The enhancement we've now made to this feature is that the AP Rankings are also synced into the search table. So you can now find things like best FG% against the AP #1 team since 2010-11. Or most wins vs ranked opponents since 2010-11.

The other addition we've made with syncing of the AP Rankings are matrices for each season showing all of the ranked vs ranked games. For instance, here's the Top 25 Matchups matrix for the 2014-15 season. Click on any of the hyperlinks to be taken to a matchup finder link showing the list of games in that season fitting the criteria. These matrices go all the way back to 1950.

We'd also like to mention a few inaccuracies we uncovered in the NCAA Record Book in preparing this tool. The record book lists all of the wins over AP #1 teams. However, it includes 2 wins which were actually over schools ranked #2 by the AP at the time of the game (DePaul's win over St. John's on January 17, 1950 and Virginia Tech's win over Memphis State on January 10, 1983). Consequently, we've removed those two games from our list of wins over AP #1. The record book also lists every meeting of #1 vs #2 in the AP Poll. However, it is missing the 1999 Final Four matchup between Michigan State and Duke, which can be found with our tool.

We should mention, however, that in dealing with such a large dataset, there are probably some minor inaccuracies in this data. This is likely mostly with dates, since schools often publish dates that are odds with one another in media guides. If you notice any issues, please let us know and we will work to confirm and fix. Another wrinkle is that prior to 1995-96, the games are almost exclusively limited to Division I vs Division I. We added Virginia's December 1982 loss to Chaminade manually, but you won't be able to find things like Georgetown's "rivalry" vs St. Leo. If you're looking for the Hoyas against Syracuse, though, we've got you covered.

With college hoops tipping off today, we thought we'd quickly note an offseason addition to our Frivolities section: Historical AP #1 Losses. This table contains the date, score and coaches for every game in which the top-ranked team in the AP Poll lost. Additionally, we have links to the box scores for each of the games since 2010-11, and all of the games which occurred in the NCAA Tournament. We have the arena listed for most of these games, and hope to flesh out that data further soon.

What is your favorite kind of baseball play? I imagine a lot of people would go with a classic like the dinger. Or perhaps you prefer the swinging strikeout? I imagine Red Sox fans who were in Fenway for Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS may be partial to the stolen base. No matter what it is, I'm very jealous of you, because your favorite play has an easily understood definition and mine does not: Read the rest of this entry

In case you missed it yesterday, we rolled out a couple of new goaltending stats for the 2014 season -- Save Percentage+ and Goals Saved Above Average. Overnight we got some feedback about SV%+ in particular, and the structure of having 1 minus the goalie's own SV% in the denominator of the formula. Right now, we are measuring the rate at which the league allowed more goals than the player, where 100 = average. So in the case of a 133 SV%+, the league's rate of goals allowed per shot would be 33% higher than the player's rate.

There are other alternatives. If we re-arrange the formula so that 1 minus the league SV% is in the denominator, we would be measuring the rate at which the player allowed fewer goals than the league. (Because of the nature of division, this is an important distinction from the definition in the previous paragraph.) If we tweak the formula in this direction, there are 2 options: we can compute a "minus" type of stat in which lower numbers are better, or we can stick with the "plus" style familiar to all from baseball's OPS+ and ERA+. The former would represent a goalie who allows 33% fewer goals than the league as a 67 (remember, lower is better); the latter would represent that as a 133.

(If any of this sounds familiar, it's because this battle was fought at Baseball-Reference 3 years ago and continues to rage in some corners of the internet to this day.)

As is the case sometimes in this business, there is no "right answer" here, but rather a matter of preference. For instance, we've long assumed users would find it counterintuitive to have a rate stat where lower numbers = better performance, but maybe that's not true. I'm interested in opinions on this, so let your voice be heard in the following poll -- which format do you prefer? Or do you care at all? I can't promise the poll-winning format will be what we eventually stick with, but I'd like to know what people think.