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.

We're a little past the halfway point in the college football season, and things are heating up. The real contenders have separated themselves from the pack and the playoff committee is already making baffling choices in its voting. Read the rest of this entry

There have been 33 grueling Saturdays since the Alabama Crimson Tide defeated the Clemson Tigers in Glendale to claim the 2015 College Football Championship, each emptier than the last. Going to the movies? Hanging out with friends and family? Leaving the house? No thanks.

Fortunately, our nightmare has come to an end and the 2016 college football season finally kicks off this weekend! Technically, it already kicked off last weekend, if you are a fan of the California Golden Bears, Hawaii Warriors, or games played 5,000 miles away from either of those campuses. And while there are a number of juicy storylines to follow, from Nick Saban's quest for his 5th title to Jim Harbaugh's attempt to follow-up his excellent debut season with the Michigan Wolverines, one of the most interesting ones is the race for this year's Heisman Trophy. Read the rest of this entry

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.
Read the rest of this entry

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.
Read the rest of this entry

See SportsLogos.net for historical and current sports logos

Chris Creamer does amazing work at SportsLogos.net and I've been wanting to work with him for quite a while to put examples of past and current logos on our sites.  So when our 2016 redesign got underway, we worked out an agreement that we could use copies of his aggregated logos on our site.

We also realize that many historical logos show offensive representations of various ethnic groups and peoples that were commonplace in their time and in American society. These representations are wrong now and were wrong then. We present them, as we do all of our facts, to educate and illuminate, and these prejudices have been an unfortunate part of the history of the sports we all enjoy and love.

Obviously, we do not own these logos and cannot give you permission to use them. We use them under a fair use argument. We use small resolution images, which do not impact the economic viability of the logos for their owners. And we provide them for educational purposes only. It's up to you to know the relevant intellectual property law and, since I'm not a lawyer, this is clearly not legal advice.

Enough with the disclaimers. Check out some old-time teams for some old-time logo goodness.

Update: on March 23, 2017, we decided to remove logos prior to the seasons for which we have logos. For example if no logo was shown for 1892 Beaneaters we displayed their 1900 logo. This is mostly an issue for MLB, but could also arise elsewhere.

We have decided to remove the team and player Elo Rating pages. We had high hopes for the raters when we launched them but over the years they have too often become a test tube for online campaigns to elevate Dallas Cowboys or push down Los Angeles Lakers to a degree that we don't have any faith that they represent actual general user opinions on the relative quality of players or teams.

These pages will be removed as we launch our redesigned sites this summer beginning with hockey in a week or two.

The range of outcomes when taking a QB with the first or second pick in the NFL Draft is enormous. This year's Super Bowl, a matchup of 2 QBs drafted with the 1st overall pick in their respective Drafts, showed just how high the ceiling can be for teams who draft a QB early. And, on the other hand, the Rams drafted a QB with the #1 pick just six years ago; now they've traded six picks, including two in the First Round, for the chance to do so again.

With the LA Rams and Philadelphia Eagles trading a lot for the right to pick first and second, it's exceedingly likely the first two players off the board will both be QBs. If either franchise nails the pick, they could be on the same path that took the Carolina Panthers to the Super Bowl this year. If they miss, we'll probably be seeing them back here in a few years. Read the rest of this entry

We recently added a point differential search option to the School Game Finder in the Play Index at College Football Reference. So you can now search for things like college football's biggest blowouts since 2000. You can also see that 2013 Florida State has the best cumulative season point differential since 2000. And that 2008 Florida has the most double-digit wins in a season since 2000. We hope you enjoy these new search capabilities.

Today, we finalized the purchase of basketballreference.com from the folks at Rotowire (thanks guys!). This really doesn't do much for you as an end user, but I thought I'd also mention that there are some domain name tricks that can help you.

The main one is that each site has a shortened url of 5-6 characters that can save some typing on your end. This is especially useful on your phones.

bbref.com => baseball-reference.com
bkref.com => basketball-reference.com
hkref.com => hockey-reference.com
pfref.com => pro-football-reference.com
cfbref.com => sports-reference.com/cfb
cbbref.com => sports-reference.com/cbb
olyref.com => sports-reference.com/olympics