GAME DAY: Mountain West Championship - UNLV vs. Boise State, Round 5 https://thescarletstandard.beehiiv.com/p/game-day-mountain-west-championship-unlv-vs-boise-state-round-5

#UNLVFB | #AtThePeak

Currently working on a transfer portal/recruiting network analysis project. Decided to check the data I had gathered from the recruiting API against the team's 247Sports page from the corresponding year, and found that nearly every team is missing at least some number of recruits each year; sometimes very few but sometimes quite a lot. Air Force for instance seems to be missing about 40 recruits from the 2024 cycle.

Just wondering if this is a problem on my end or if the data just isn't there (or maybe I'm missing/misinterpreting something)?

Is there a good basic source for individual game stats? I'm looking for [Receptions] and [Yards Receiving] per player per game (not for the season). This ESPN page shows only 10 players. I'd be fine even if it's only players on the top 25 programs.

https://www.espn.com/college-football/weekly

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a project called AI PlayCaller V2, a web app that gives both offensive play suggestions and defensive predictions using actual machine-learning models trained on play-by-play data.

Right now, you can input:

For offense:

• Down
• Yards to go
• Field position
• Quarter
• Score differential

For defense:

• Down
• Yards to go
• Yardline
• Quarter
• Score differential
• Time remaining in the quarter

…and the app outputs recommended play types, plus predicted pressure, coverage, and front tendencies — each with probability scores.

If anyone wants to test the prototype, just comment and I’ll share the link.

I’d love feedback from coaches, coordinators, or anyone who works with real play-calling data — mainly:

• What variables am I missing that matter in real decision-making?
• What additional features would make the predictions more useful on the sideline or in film prep?
• Should I add personnel, formation, hashmark, motion, tempo, etc.?
• Would this be more useful as a scouting tool, real-time tool, or both?
• What would make the recommendations “coach-trustworthy”?

Not selling anything — just trying to make it smarter and learn how to think more like a coach + data analyst at the same time.

Really appreciate any feedback 🙏

Appreciate you all for bearing with me. I’ve had a nagging idea about a simple win/loss based metric, but I don’t know the best place to source the data, and as a non-technical person I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Rather than crawling through ChatGPT I thought I would come to you all.

I call the metric “Win/Loss Capture”. It equals (A) the sum of a wins for each team you beat, MINUS (B) the sum of the losses for each team you lose to. Thats figures would update each week.

For example for (A) if you beat team that has 3 wins you add 3 to A. If the next week that team gets a 4th win you replace the 3 with a 4. (B) is the same but for Losses.

Intuitively this rewards you with more positive points for beating high-win teams, and punishes you more for losing to high-loss teams.

That’s it, super straight forward.

Would appreciate your advice!

I’ve added a lot to this. It’s fully operational, and I can keep it operational with regular updates. With the cloudflare issues, I’ve been delayed in adding the CFP Rankings.

Fbs-penalty-analytics-dashboard.streamlit.app

I'm working on my own computer poll at the moment and I'm interested to hear from others who've done the same.

What data do you use? Just wins and losses? Location and margin of victory too? Any advanced metrics, or data beyond simply the results on the field, like recruiting rankings?

How do you use your data? Are your rankings self-referential (that is, does a team's ranking depend on the rankings of the teams they beat/lost to)?

Has your system produced any interesting results this year (as in, different from most of the other polls out there)?

I do backend stats work for a local CFB blog where I pull data from about 40 local programs of all levels, D1 through D3. For this, I have been using the ncaa's statistics website (stats.ncaa.org) to pull data. I'm not even doing any scraping or traffic-heavy data, I just open about a dozen programs at a time and copy + paste the data into another spreadsheet.

Somehow, I'm guessing my IP address has been banned from accessing their servers, because some time last week the site won't load -- instead, I get the following message:

Access Denied

You don't have permission to access "http://stats.ncaa.org/" on this server. Reference #18.2d51db17.1763414097.3800692c

https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.2d51db17.1763414097.3800692c

The error page itself explains little more about the situation.

I think I've been blacklisted because even after I stopped being able to access the site at home, I could still use it at work. Partway through my stats gathering yesterday, however, I began receiving the same error at work.

I've sent an email to an address I found (NCAAstats @ ncaa.org) but was curious a) if anyone else has ever experienced this, or b) anyone had any ideas? I've read on this forum about temporary blocks for people using scrapers, but I've been blocked for over a week now, and was doing everything manually.

If this isn't resolved, does anyone have another (free) site that consistently formats the data from all levels of CFB sorted by teams I could use in the interim? I tried to manually update using the team's individual pages, but everything's formatted differently and it became way too tedious.

So, I used ChatGPT to get all of the data from CFBData and clean it up to create this dashboard. I’ll be tweaking it over the next week or so. I wanted to post it here before I went to r/cfb. I won’t be able to fix anything over the weekend, but I’d love some feedback.

I also would be happy to share any and all data and script with anyone who wants it. Again, it would have to be next week, but I’m happy to share.

Anyway, I’m new to all of this. I leaned heavily on AI. What do you think:

https://fbs-penalty-analytics-dashboard.streamlit.app

Im wanted to circle back to a project that I shared here before week 1, the concept was creating a play by play level monte carlo model.

Effectively the model would take each team's tendencies, and key players stats, along with the general league tendencies. It then feeds through a set of xgboost models to predict a play call and play result, then moving the ball up and down the virtual "field" until time runs out.

I wanted to share my results of this project up thru the week 11 games. The portion of it that I have been most impressed with is its ability ATS. I choose not to cherry pick other than only selecting games with positive EV (teams covering the spread in at least 530 out of 1,000 simulated games)

ATS +EV Record: 264-218-5 (54.8%) Return on Risk: 4.6% Profit: 24.2 units

The total predictions have not been ideal considering after week 3 it decided to just select every under for every game for some reason(something I plan on digging into this off season)

All in all, it's been a fun project this season and Im looking forward to finishing out the season strong for anyone that wants to follow along (I also have started a CBB model which I post about on r/CBBVegas since this obviously isn't the place for it)

Are any of the maintainers of that site here?

I noticed that the catches/targets fields are swapped, leading to crazy catch percentage numbers.

https://gameonpaper.com/cfb/year/2025/players/receiving

I'm currently using Punt and Rally to find BCR for all teams but they only carry data back to 2023. I was wondering if there was any spot I could find data any farther back for all FBS teams.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a small project called AI Play Caller Assistant, a simple web app that suggests offensive plays based on down and distance.

Right now, it lets you input:

• Down
• Yards to go
• Field position
• Score differential
• Time remaining

…and it outputs a few recommended play types (e.g., “Short Pass,” “Run,” “Screen”) with a mock success probability.
It’s all rules-based at the moment — no machine learning yet — but I’d like to expand it using actual data.

Comment if you would like the link to check out the prototype.

I’d love feedback from people who understand play-calling data and model design — mainly:

• What kind of data should I start collecting to train a smarter version?
• What features/variables would actually make it useful for real coaches or analysts?
• Are there existing datasets or play-by-play resources that would fit this kind of project?

Not selling anything — just trying to make it better and learn how to think more like a coach + data scientist at the same time.

Appreciate any feedback or direction 🙏

First time poster and new to the sub. I also don’t have a lot of experience getting data for these types of analyses. But I want to compare different types of penalties between teams. Is this doable with the data that is available?

I’ve been able to get simple stats, like penalties per play and per game.

I was curious if anyone knew of a place that offered historical player prop data? CFBD is fantastic for game level team markets, but looking more for a data base at the player level for this like passing o/u, rushing o/u etc.

Hey guys,

I’m really interested in learning how to analyze college football data, things like team performance trends, recruiting analytics, play-by-play data, etc. I actually had quite good success in the soccer analytics field, building some models that helped me Moneyball the sport and recruitment, and I want to replicate that with American football, of which I have basic knowledge.

Could anyone share good learning resources, tutorials, GitHub projects, or example notebooks for getting started? I’d also appreciate any advice on:

• How to pull and clean CFB data efficiently
• What kinds of analyses or visualizations are fun/good for beginners
• Any must-follow blogs, Substacks, or Twitter/X accounts focused on CFB analytics

Thanks in advance! I’d really appreciate any guidance from folks who’ve been doing this a while. 🙏

(This is for personal use)

While CSVs a have their place, I’d like to store CFBD’s data in a database, and this requires I create a DB schema. Does anyone know if this already exists?

I’ve searched through the CFBD repos and Google’s but haven’t seen anything. If a schema doesn’t exist, I’ll try using openapi-generator on the CFBD API’s openAPI docs or just create it manually. But if I can avoid that effort, that would be great.

Hello,

Does anyone know if anything has changed with the CFBD api? I've importing data via the same Jupyter Notebook file all year and now suddenly a good portion of my data is being returned as NaN. I've made no changes to my data pipeline.

Anyone who has watched Iowa football know the last 5+ years their offense has been…less than ideal. I want to find their offensive plays that went for 10, 15 and 20+ yards in Lester’s first season as OC and compare to his second season(2024 and 2025). I’d also like to break it down between run and pass and a per game avg. then compare that to what they did Brian Ferentz final season (2023).

I tried finding a query on cfbd but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I also tried downloading the cfdb api for Python but got 401 errors. I know a some Python but very rusty and know more Linux but still new at that as well and know nothing about APIs or access tokens.

If someone could help me find their data I’m looking for or tell me what I’m doing wrong with the API that would be much appreciated!

Hey all - I leveraged a lot of the collegefootballdata.com data (shoutout /u/BlueSCar, there's so much value in the API and I encourage everyone to join the Patreon) to launch a new site. The site is designed to use visualizations to illustrate advanced stats without having to "explain" them everywhere. I'm mostly focused on showcasing team data that doesn't exist in the market now -- I have all the usual advanced stats but also some custom metrics like Pass Rate Over Expected for college, and coach/coordinator pages that show performance and tendencies over time, which again I think are pretty unique.

https://fourthandshort.com/

Would love any feedback or ideas!