Our first college discovery tool is live. It's the Team Game Finder, which gives you the ability to search through team stats from a single game or across multiple games. This will be an especially useful tool to use this week, as you can use the Team Game Finder to build out your bracket.
The Team Game Finder allows you to search for team stats from this year's batch, useful for comparing matchups or identifying Cinderellas. It also has the power to search the entire history of March Madness, letting you see every time a 15-seed upset a 2-seed or every time an ACC team faced an opponent from the Big Ten.
Other questions you can answer in the Team Game Finder include:
- What was the biggest blowout win by a women’s team in the NCAA Tournament?
- What was the best total point differential in a season for a men’s team in home games?
- What was the most games in a season against Top 10 ranked opponents for a women’s team?
- What was the most losses in a season by Men’s National Championship winner?
If you're already subscribed to Stathead Basketball or All Sports, the college basketball tools are included with your plan! If you're a college hoops fan who has never tried Stathead before, great news! Your first month is free, so you can try it for the entirety of March Madness on us.
]]>These groupings are available under the 'Round' dropdown when you choose 'NCAA Tournament' as your game type. They are:
EARLY ROUNDS: These include any games that occurred before the Round of 16. They are essentially the games that occur in the opening week of the modern tournament.
First Four (& Pre-64) Round: Any games that occur before the field is trimmed to 64 teams:
Round of 64: Any games that occur in rounds in which the field starts with more than 32 teams, but no more than 64:
Round of 32: Any games that occur in rounds in which the field starts with more than 16 teams, but no more than 32:
REGIONAL GAMES: These include Round of 16 and Round of 8 subgroupings, and also Regional Third Place games (which were a part of the Men's tournament from 1939-75).
Round of 16:
Round of 8:
FINAL FOUR: These include any games when the field is down to four teams or fewer: National Semifinals, National Finals and National Third-Place Games (which were a part of the Men's tournament from 1946-81).
National Semifinal:
National Final:
This dataset includes coverage of games played, points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, field goals made and attempted, 3-point field goals made and attempted, and free throws made and attempted. Among the statistics we are not including in this update (but which we hope to expand in the future) are minutes played, games started, personal fouls, turnovers and offensive/defensive rebounds. Without minutes played we are also unable to calculate most advanced statistics for these seasons at this time. However, we are able to calculate True Shooting Percentage and Effective Field Goal Percentage since we have the needed shooting statistics.
These new statistics can seen on player pages, school pages, conference season registers, conference leaderboards and national leaderboards.
We have acquired this data from Sports Data Research, which does excellent work and has provided us with similar historical college football data in the past. The current data is largely built off of the scans that schools sent to the NCAA after their seasons and were subsequently scanned to NCAA.org. There are often issues with these scans: difficult to decipher numbers, typos, handwritten errors, smudges, missing players, missing games, etc. For instance, on this sheet you'll notice players with FG percentages that don't make sense and a player with 2 points but no made FG or FT. We have been able to correct these, but it is sometimes not possible to do so. Additionally, It was common practice for the team's main rotation players to appear on these sheets and then other players would get blended into a row labeled 'others' with their statistics all combined. Some stat sheets list very players, such as this one. We have elected to not put these 'others' rows onto our site. Generally speaking, errors are the exception to the rule, but they can be difficult to correct without access to game-level data. Sports Data Research and Sports Reference will be working to improve this data over time.
We would also like to thank the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference for their grant which enabled us to purchase this data. We appreciate their common commitment to expanding access to women's sports data and thank them for their generous gift to support us in this mission.
As previously mentioned, we will be expanding this data in the future. This will go beyond things like cleaning and expanding data for the seasons we already have. We will also be adding player and team statistics back to the first year of NCAA involvement with women's college basketball (1981-82). Once we get back that far, it would be great to add AIAW data, as well, but that will require some further planning. Currently, we have women's NCAA basketball schedules back to 2002-03. We will continue working with Sports Data Research and the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to extend that coverage back to 1981-82, as well. We also plan to add opponent statistics (on a season level) back as far as possible. The existing data for the early and mid-80s is generally of a lesser quality compared to what you find today, but we are committed to unearthing and displaying as much of it as possible.
Lastly, we would like to mention that there are three schools that team stat sheets do not seem to exist for:
2000-01 Alabama A&M, 2000-01 Texas Southern and 1989-90 Bethune-Cookman. If you happen to have access to these statistics, we would love to add them, so please let us know.
About Sports Reference LLC:
Sports Reference’s family of websites is the internet's leading, easy to use resource for current and historical sports data, biographical information, and advanced statistics. It first launched with Baseball-Reference.com in April 2000 and Sports Reference LLC was then formed in December of 2007. Along with Baseball Reference, Sports Reference’s websites also includes Basketball Reference, Pro Football Reference, Hockey Reference, FBref (Soccer), Sports Reference College Basketball, Sports Reference College Football, and lastly, their subscription based suite of sports research tools, Stathead. Sports Reference aims to democratize data so that users can enjoy, understand, and share the sports they love.
Replacing the old Seasons filter, you'll now see a new widget titled Timeframe. You can still run the search by season like before, but there are also two brand new options:
This widget is now in three kinds of Stathead tools:
There are an incredible amount of questions that you can now explore with this new widget. Just some examples include
Which football players have scored the most goals in the last 30 days in all men's competitions?
Who had the best ERA from 8/15/2023 to 9/14/2023?
What NBA player had the longest streak of 30 point games in the last 45 days?
What NHL player had the longest streak of games with a point in the last 365 days?
What NFL player had the most fantasy points from Thanksgiving to Christmas this year?
If you haven't had a chance to try Stathead, now is the time! Your first month is on us
]]>AS: All Star
NBA1, NBA2, NBA3 (or WNBA1, etc): All-NBA/WNBA First, Second or Third team
DEF1, DEF2: NBA/WNBA All-Defense First or Second team
MVP-1: MVP voting rank (1 means the player was the MVP, 2 means they were runner-up, 3 means third place, etc)
DPOY-1: Defensive Player of the Year voting rank
ROY-1: Rookie of the Year voting rank
MIP-1: Most Improved Player voting rank
CPOY-1: Clutch Player of the Year voting rank
6MOY-1 Sixth Man of the Year voting rank
LeBron James's and Breanna Stewart's pages are great places to see a sampling of this information.
]]>Often called 'Yards Lost Attempting to Pass' at the time (since the term 'sack' had not yet been coined), the yardage was tracked, but not the number of 'attempts' for lack of a better term. In other words, from 1947 through 1959, we know how many Sack Yards Lost (or Yards Lost Attempting to Pass) each passer had in each game, but we do not know how many times they were sacked until 1960. The exception to this is the AAFC, which has both Times Sacked and Sack Yards Lost from 1947-49. We would like to thank Pete Palmer and Ken Pullis for their work in putting this information together. It complements earlier pioneering work by T.J. Troup on this subject, which remains the source of most of our 1960-68 Times Sacked data.
Our all-time leaderboard for Sack Yards Lost now includes players back to 1947. Glenn Dobbs, in the 1948 AAFC season, was sacked 35 times for 452 yards in 14 games for the Los Angeles Dons. Only Randall Cunningham (1986), Jeff George (1991) and Bryce Young (2023) have topped that figure since. The new data vaults Y.A. Tittle into the top 10 all-time (wedged between Tom Brady and Cunningham), but Fran Tarkenton remains the all-time leader by over 1,400 yards. This new data source also allowed us to clean up some material from the 1960s. For instance, Tarkenton, the all-time leader in Times Sacked, is now credited with 570, rather than 572.
]]>In 1922, the American League MVP returned, followed by the return of the NL MVP in 1924. The rules for the AL MVP drew criticism since voters had to vote for one player (and only one player) from each team, player/managers (popular at the time) could not receive votes and no player could win the award more than once. So, for instance, Babe Ruth won the AL MVP in 1923, and then was not eligible to win subsequent awards for a number of years. The NL used a separate set of rules for selecting its MVPs, which were better, but imperfect.
In 1928 Mickey Cochrane was AL MVP in a season in which Ruth and Gehrig were the no-brainer top candidates, but each was ineligible on account of having been previous winners. This robbed the award of some meaning. And so on May 6, 1929 the AL decided to not award an MVP in the 1929 season. The NL would later come to the same conclusion, but decided to award an MVP in 1929, but then not have one in 1930. So the 1929 season has an official NL MVP, but no AL MVP. And the 1930 season has no official MVPs. The leagues have officially awarded MVPs since 1931, leaving these three awards as missing links.
Baseball Reference, like the American and National Leagues, has never printed AL MVPs for 1929 and 1930, or an NL MVP in 1930. However, thanks to the research of SABR member Bill Deane, we are now including information on unofficial MVPs for these league seasons. This was also spurred by a site user pointing out to us that Joe Cronin's 1930 AL MVP is engraved on his plaque in Cooperstown.
These awards were voted on by two separate committees in each instance, with each roughly replicating previous voting rules. In essence, these votes used the same/similar procedures, each using one voter from each league city and then publishing the results in newspapers and announcing the winner. The only difference is the lack of the stamp of officialdom. In 1929, Lew Fonseca was voted unofficial AL MVP by the BBWAA, while Al Simmons was voted the winner by The Sporting News. By combining the results of these two polls, we arrive at Fonseca as the unofficial winner. Full combined voting results can be seen here. It's interesting to note that Fonseca benefitted from the rule preventing a writer from giving a vote to more than one player from any given team, as the Philadelphia A's greats (Jimmie Foxx, Jimmy Dykes, Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, etc.) split the vote. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth, ostensibly the best player in the World in 1929, received votes in the BBWAA poll, but not in the TSN poll.
Cronin swept both of the writers' polls for the 1930 AL Award, despite Al Simmons having more first-place votes. The one vote per team rule hurt Simmons, as some writers put Lefty Grove or Mickey Cochrane on their ballot, while Cronin drew all of the votes for his team. In the National League, Bill Terry was voted MVP by The Sporting News, while Hack Wilson was the winner of the BBWAA poll. Combining the two makes Hack Wilson the unofficial 1930 NL MVP. Frankie Frisch and Terry led in first-place votes with six each. Full voting results for 1930 can be seen here.
While the voting methodology used in 1929 and 1930 had many of the same warts that plagued earlier versions of the awards, ultimately we decided it was merely a technicality that they didn't receive 'official' awards and that the truest version of history would be to present these awards on the site given that they were voted on at that time and in a similar manner as previous awards. So we have updated the site to include these awards for Lew Fonseca, Joe Cronin and Hack Wilson, while also noting that they are "unofficial."
]]>You can see, for instance, that the West has the upper hand thus far in 2023-24 after the East won the series for each of the last two seasons. Before those two seasons, the West won the series in 12 straight seasons and 21 of the previous 22. You can also see how dominant the East was from mid-50s through the 60s, and also for all of the 1980s.
One technical point to bear in mind with this data is that before the 1970-71 season, the NBA was split into Eastern and Western 'divisions' instead of 'conferences.'
]]>This change is due to the hard work and dedication of the SABR Biographical Research Committee, which continually makes new discoveries about players in the early days of the game, in particular. In this case, a mistaken identity involving a player who caught one inning for the 1900 St. Louis Cardinals has been resolved. Previously, it was thought that this catching appearance was made by Henry Edward Stein. However, it has been discovered via the Sporting News archives (which all SABR members get complementary access to as a membership perk) that the appearance was actually made by Tom Stanton. Stanton also appeared in one game for the 1904 Chicago Cubs, and thus already had a player record. This is why we now show 23,114 all-time major league players instead of 23,115.
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