This summer we have added a number of new features to College Football at Sports Reference, not to mention statistics for over 2600 school seasons prior to 2000 (the first year we have complete FBS statistics). In this post I would like to highlight some of these new additions.

One new feature is a collection of research tools that has become a staple on our other sites: the Play Index (or PI). The PI currently has three “finders” that allow you to query our database:

• the Player Game Finder, which allows you to search through player game logs spanning from 2000 to today for games that match your criteria;
• the School Streak Finder, which allows you to search through school game logs spanning from 1869 to today for streaks that match your criteria; and
• the Rivalry Finder, which allows you to find all of the matchups between your favorite school and their biggest rival.

Another new feature is the Elo School Rater, which is a community-based project with the goal of rating the best schools of the FBS era (i.e., since 1978). The user is given two schools and asked to choose the school that is the better football school. It is up to the user to determine how much weight to give to head-to-head results, regular season games versus bowl games, etc. The ratings are updated after every vote.

Last, but certainly not least, we have added statistics for over 2600 school seasons prior to 2000. Let me make a few comments about these statistics:

• For some schools we have a lengthy run of uninterrupted seasons (e.g., Notre Dame: 1946-2010), while other schools will have gaps (e.g., Missouri: 1960-1983, 1987, and 1997-2010).
• Bowl game statistics did not become part of the official record until the 2002 season, but some of the season statistics prior to 2000 will include bowl game statistics while others will not. In summary: all schools from 2002 to 2010 will have their bowl game statistics included, all schools from 2000 and 2001 will have their bowl game statistics excluded, and schools prior to 2000 may have their bowl game statistics included or excluded (this will be noted on each school’s page).
• We have done our best to link players from one season to the next, but the data files that we used occasionally used different names for the same player from one season to the next. If you find a case where two players need to be merged into one record, please let us know.

We hope you enjoy these new features, and that they prove to be useful to you as you prepare for the upcoming 2011 college football season. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please send us some feedback and we will do our best to get back to you in a timely manner.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 at 8:08 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.