How this site is built

Games, rosters, play-by-play, betting lines and recruiting all come from CollegeFootballData, an independent college football API. Game results run back to 2001; player-level box scores begin in 2004, which is as far back as that data exists.

Every response is stored exactly as it arrived before anything is done with it. When a figure on this site looks wrong, the original payload is still there to check it against — which is how we tell a mistake of ours from one we inherited.

Nothing on this site is calculated while you wait. Totals, ranks, splits and season records are computed in advance by a loader and stored, so a page read is a lookup rather than a scan of a hundred thousand plays.

That is a deliberate constraint rather than an optimisation. A figure computed in one place, once, is a figure that reads the same on every page that shows it — and when it is wrong, it is wrong in one place and fixable in one place.

Live scores refresh about once a minute while games are in progress. If the scoreboard is showing you stale data, it says so rather than quietly presenting an old score as a current one.

A first audit compared our box scores against four commercial outlets and, decisively, against the official NCAA scoring summary — the only genuinely independent record available.

Offensive statistics agreed with every source checked, in every game checked. Defensive statistics are a harder case, because tackles and tackles-for-loss are charted by a human rather than counted: outlets disagree with each other on them routinely. Ours matched the official NCAA team totals; two major outlets ran lower on the same games.

That was three games, not three hundred. It is a real check rather than a complete one, and a wider sample is still owed.

The advanced metrics are not ours. EPA, success rate and explosiveness arrive already calculated from CollegeFootballData. We store and display them; we do not compute them, and we cannot vouch for the model behind them the way we can for a yardage total.

Identity is a weaker story than arithmetic. Matching a player in a box score to the same player on a roster and to his recruiting profile depends on identifiers that are not always right upstream. Where two sources disagree about which player a record belongs to, this site withholds the record rather than guessing — so a blank is sometimes the honest answer, and you will see them.

Recruiting ratings do not cover a whole roster. On the rosters measured so far, a little over two thirds of players have a recruiting profile to link to. The rest are largely walk-ons, junior-college and FCS transfers, and international players who were never rated by anybody. A missing star rating usually means no rating exists, not that the player was rated zero.

Conference standings are not a championship seeding. They are ordered by conference record, and teams on the same record are shown tied. Head-to-head results and the other tiebreakers each conference publishes are not applied, because applying one and not the rest would be more misleading than applying none.