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Monday, August 01, 2005

College Basketball Data

The college basketball game file posted on my site is freely available for anyone to use with three requests on my part. (1) Give me some sort of acknowledgment on your site. (2) Let me know you are using the data and why you are using it. I am always curious. (3) While I do not expect you to actively quality control the data, if you do find errors or somebody reports an error to you, please pass it along to me.

Now a little bit about the format. The home team is listed last. Games not played on a home court are denoted by a letter after the last team’s score. A capital ‘N’ indicates a game played on a neutral court. For a game where the listed home team is not playing on its home court, yet still getting a home court advantage, a lower case ‘n’ is used. For my ratings system, I apply half of the stated home court advantage to the home team listed in ‘semi-neutral’ games. Because these distinctions are made solely at my discretion, I have included the site of the game in these cases, so you can use your own judgment if desired.

I do use some logic on how to classify a game. If a game is played at the home team’s home arena, then it is always classified as a home game. This seems obvious, but there are a few cases where these could be considered neutral games, mainly during post-season tournaments. Semi-neutral games are indicated where a game is not played at a team’s home arena, but is still close enough to the team’s home so that they will benefit from some home court advantage. Usually these cases are obvious, but in some cases there can be debate. Rare exceptions are made where a team plays away from its home arena, but they still are considered home games in the database. These cases occur when the home team is playing very near its home against a team traveling a considerable distance. Also, a few teams regularly play home games at more than one arena (Connecticut and DePaul are two examples).

There are some other letter codes that are used to classify a game.

T - Conference tournament game
P - Postseason game
S - A game between two conference teams that is
    not a conference game

Additionally, I include how many overtime periods (if any) were played. This will be indicated by a number after the last team’s score.

All games involving at least one of the teams in my ratings are included.

Posted on 08/01 at 05:27 PM
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