Time to share some data: CFBstats.com edition

I more or less owe my livelihood to Marty Couvillan at cfbstats.com. Since 2009, he has been feeding me week-to-week play-by-play data so I can update my S&P+ rankings and react to them. When I was doing everything by hand, it would take me until about March to finish going through the play-by-play on my own, and keeping up with week-to-week demands was virtually impossible.

After quite a bit of tinkering, he is now making his data available to the public. He is the Manchester City of college football.

collegefootballdata.org-2005-1.1.1.zip
collegefootballdata.org-2006-1.1.1.zip
collegefootballdata.org-2007-1.1.1.zip
collegefootballdata.org-2008-1.1.1.zip
collegefootballdata.org-2009-1.1.1.zip
collegefootballdata.org-2010-1.1.1.zip
collegefootballdata.org-2011-1.1.1.zip
collegefootballdata.org-2012-1.1.1.zip

The data is made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License:http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/summary. In short, this license gives you the freedom to do what you’d like with the data, only requiring attribution of collegefootballdata.org as the source of the data. The collegefootballdata.org website will be available in the near future.

Refer to the RELEASE.txt file included in each zip file for information about the content of the data files.

Be aware that the format of the data may (and probably will) change significantly while feedback from those who use the data is incorporated into future releases. I will try to document the changes for each release in the release notes that are included in the zip files.

Please send any comments or feedback to feedback@cfbstats.com..

Want player data, play-by-play data, drive data or virtually anything else from the last 7.5 years of college football? Have at it. Want to create a better play-by-play rating than S&P+? Go for it. There is so much information here.

This is absolutely huge, and I can't thank Marty enough for doing this. Advanced stats get better when a bunch of spoons are in the pot. The more, the merrier.