As a college hoops junkie, I'm pretty excited to announce that College Basketball Reference has added digitized stats for nearly all NCAA Division I (or equivalent) men's basketball players back to 1947-48. This is literally the biggest update in the life of this site, as the player statistics were previously only digitized back to 1992-93. For many older seasons, we had scans of team stat sheets (which we have left in place at the bottom of many pages), but those players couldn't be searched for, sorted, or linked to. Now that everything is digitized, you can search for players or even do things like look at every player in the 1984 ACC sorted by scoring average, or see the season statistics for every ACC Player of the Year winner.

We would like to thank Dave Quinn for his incredible efforts in compiling all of this data. This is a massive update, which adds great depths of information to the site, but it's also not 100% complete. To give you a better idea of the breadth of this data, please let me offer some details:

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Based on 5,000 simulations, here is our 2017 NCAA Tournament Forecast. We have Gonzaga as the likeliest champion, and 10-seed Wichita State as the 14th-likeliest champ. Don't forget to check this out before you fill out your bracket!

There are other contenders for Best Sports Weekend of the Year -- the first two days of the NBA Playoffs and the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs are both up there -- but, in my opinion, there's no better series of days on the sports calendar than the first week of the NCAA Tournament. For one thing, unlike other sports weekends, this extra-long one lasts four days, and it's packed with wall-to-wall basketball, starting at noon and stretching well into the night.

That weekend is nearly here! March Madness kicks off this week and there's a lot to look forward to. Pro basketball fans will have the chance to see how top prospects for this year's NBA Draft, like Lonzo Ball and Josh Jackson, perform on the NCAA's biggest stage. College hoop-heads will have the chance to see Naismith Award semi-finalists like Nigel Williams-Goss and Josh Hart in action and potentially even squaring off in later rounds. Read the rest of this entry

As we work our way back in adding seasons of college basketball data, we're happy to announce that player and team statistics for the 1992-93 season are now live on our college basketball site. This gives the site a full 25 seasons of player and team stats.

The 1992-93 college basketball season, the final season of the 45-second shot clock, featured North Carolina defeating Michigan in the National Championship Game.

With the new data, you can access things like 1992-93 player leaders and sortable school stats.

The Player Season Finder is now searchable back to 1992-93, as well. 1992-93 was Jason Kidd's freshman season at Cal and you can see that UCLA's Lonzo Ball is currently on pace to surpass him for most APG by a Pac-10/12 freshman since 1992-93.

1992-93 was Billy McCaffrey's first season at Vanderbilt, after transferring from Duke. It is also the best shooting season by a high-scoring guard in our database (68.6 TS%).

Another thing to mention is that our leaderboards now go back to 1992-93, as well. Warren Kidd's 1992-93 rebounds per game, are now the single season leader (back to 1992-93).

We hope you enjoy this new addition and keep an eye out for more seasons added in the future.

I'd estimate that around 99% of the time, when someone comes to a Sports Reference site, they go to a player or team page and then log off. More advanced users may find their way to the frivolities pages, experiment with features like the Oracle of Baseball, or just spend several hours following link chains to various players and games.

But, just like Westworld, there's another level to our websites, one that relatively few people know how to navigate. It's called the Play Index and, in all sincerity, figuring out how to use it will change your life as a sports fan. If you've ever wondered how people find tidbits like "Mike Trout has the most WAR of any hitter through age-24" or "Dennis Rodman had seven 0-point, 20-rebound games in his career", the answer is usually that they've used the Play Index.

While the Play Index is easy to use if you know your way around, it can seem daunting to a newcomer. We often get messages from people who are eager to learn how to use the Play Index, but don't quite know where to start. So, with that in mind, we're starting a new video series called Play Index 101! Read the rest of this entry

With the college basketball season now up and running, we've added the 2016 RSCI Top 100 recruits to Basketball Reference. RSCI stands for Recruiting Services Consensus Index and can be seen here. It combines the rankings from various respected sources into one consensus ranking. It should be noted that this consensus can under-rank reclassifying players like Thon Maker or Jamal Murray since they're not always taken under consideration by all of the rankers.

This page contains links to college stats for this season's top freshmen (when applicable) so could come in handy if you're checking out 2017 NBA Draft prospects.

Historical RSCI rankings are available back to 1998, if you're curious about their predictive value.

This data is accessible via the "High School Season Honors" section of our NBA Awards menu.

With another 24-hour marathon in the books, another year of college basketball is officially underway! While this year will have a hard time topping the heart-stopping finish to last year's NCAA Tournament, the 2016-17 NCAA basketball season promises all sorts of fireworks, including one of the most talented collections of freshmen we've seen in years. As the season gets started in earnest, we wanted to take a look at a few of the freshmen receiving the greatest amount of hype and see what sort of things we can expect from them. Read the rest of this entry

UPDATE: As of March 14, 2017, we figured out how to once again allow for automatic export to Excel

As you may have noticed, on our re-designed sites we recently disabled the feature allowing you to export our tables directly to Excel. This was because updated browsers were no longer supporting the function and it was becoming problematic to keep up. However, this doesn't mean that you can't still easily export our tables into spreadsheets. There's just an extra step or two, now.

First, look for the "Share & more" tab atop the table you'd like to export. If you don't see this tab, it means the particular table you're looking at isn't exportable. Otherwise, hover over it and options will drop down (see image). Select "Get table as CSV (for Excel)", which will convert the table to comma-separated values.

Once the table has been converted to CSV, copy and paste the entirety of the table (or whatever section of it you want) into Excel, as text. You will now have an unintelligible, single-column mess in your spreadsheet, but that's fine. The commas are there for a reason and Excel will help us easily convert those commas into nice, readable columns of data. This next step is sometimes variable depending on the version of Excel you're working with, but what you want to find is the "text to columns" function. In my Excel for Mac 2011, this can be found under the "Data" tab. If you can't find it on your version, a google search for "Excel text to columns" with your Excel version number should yield useful results.

Once you have located the "text to columns" function, you will choose a file type that best describes your data. You will want to choose "delimited" since the fields are separated by commas. Next, you will choose the delimiter. Check the box next to "comma." Once you make that selection, you can finish up with the text to columns wizard and you should then have a nicely formatted spreadsheet.

We realize this is not quite as quick or simple as the old export function, but unfortunately we can no longer support that function. Once you get the hang of this method, you'll see it's also quite simple.

If you follow me on twitter, you know that this work has been a long time coming. Starting last summer, Adam Wodon, Adam Darowski, and I started throwing around ideas for a more mobile-friendly version of our sites. Our mobile experience is probably charitably described as limited and functional and with now over 2/3rd's of our visits coming from handheld devices, we clearly needed to up our game there.

This led to complete review of what we have on our sites and how we present that data on desktop and how we can make that usable on a small screen. It's not easy and after months of design, user testing and work, we have an approach that we believe will serve both desktop and mobile users better than they are now. This is the first in a series of posts we'll publish about our redesign.
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If you are a friend of Sports Reference, you'll know that sponsorships, which launched in July of 2002, were our second revenue generator (the first being just asking for money). For those who want to know, Charles Saeger sponsored Scott Erickson on July 21, 2002 to kick things off. For a number of years, sponsorships were our main revenue generator and paid all of the bills. Since 2006, however, sponsorships have become less and less of our overall revenue, now representing less than 4% of our annual revenue.
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