The friedcheese.org College Football Poll returns!!!1!!

So beginning in the 2013 season, the NCAA took down their .csv file containing the scores of all their games. And when I bugged them about it, they even acted like no such thing had ever existed! From their response:

“At this time there are no plans to make bulk downloads of scores available to the general public. You can access all scores from our scoreboard pages or from team pages that are available for all teams.”

So that’s what I did. Well, five years later…

My old script was in Perl. I’ve been playing around with Python recently, so the new one is in Python. It uses BeautifulSoup to scrape the NCAA’s scoreboard pages and NetworkX for the graph theory stuff. You can find the source code at https://github.com/d-torrance/cfb-cor.

So without further ado, here’s the poll. Since the poll is based solely on a team’s resume, there’s usually a few surprises. The big ones this week are #5 Buffalo and #7 Kentucky, who come in at unranked and #17, respectively, in this week’s AP poll. There’s also a bunch of AP-unranked teams in the teens (Indiana, Maryland, Syracuse, North Texas, and Ole Miss).

1 - Alabama (12.8125)
2 - LSU (11.40234375)
3 - Duke (11.078125)
4 - Notre Dame (10.65625)
5 - Buffalo (10.19873046875)
6 - Georgia (9.8779296875)
7 - Kentucky (9.75)
8 - Oklahoma (9.67822265625)
9 - Clemson (8.23388671875)
10 - Penn St. (8.0927734375)
11 - Indiana (8.046875)
12 - Ohio St. (7.8984375)
13 - Stanford (7.625)
14 - Maryland (7.390625)
15 - Syracuse (7.234375)
16 - California (7.125)
17 - North Texas (6.998046875)
18 - Ole Miss (6.390625)
19 - Texas Tech (6.28125)
20 - Miami (FL) (5.935546875)
21 - Texas (5.65625)
22 - South Carolina (5.427734375)
23 - West Virginia (5.375)
24 - Missouri (5.3544921875)
25 - Iowa (5.35205078125)

I’ll probably be adding some more features in the coming weeks, e.g., keeping track of changes in ranking, W-L records, and a pic of the directed graph like I had in the Perl script.