BRIDGE PRE-SSN RESOURCES

Would be great if this thread took off with folks pooling knowledge and helpful capping resources .. Not that we need a bunch of full on tutorials like below but it will be very easy to scrap the idea if all we're attracting is lookers and no participators.... right?!.. 
Schedule prep and analysis .. 

https://collegefootballdata.com/exporter/games?year=2023&seasonType=regular

Vitally important part of pre-ssn is creating and analyzing the schedule as a tool for spot analysis which if you take the time and set it up right and use your brain a little you will have, IMO, the single most valuable tool in your arsenal that you'll not only use all year but one that most sportsbooks are waaayy too dumb or lazy to create themselves .. The RSWs and GOY lines they drop early on will be more/less calc'ing a prob %'s and spreads using SP+, adding HFAs, and then maybe some adjustments for the most overtly obvious tricky spots .. in reality a schedule spot can become distressed for various reasons and we're way ahead of the game if we identify all these situations just using a basic schedule in excel .. if you know someone who went like 23-3 smashing RSW's like we did LY and they didn't cook up a 99.99% pure grade pre-ssn spot schedule then let me know who that was so I can get some lotto numbers from him lol ..  

The linked site above is an awesome resource btw its a series of canned raw data reports they scraped from websites and made available to us .. you need to be a little familiar w excel but its very easy take what they provide and get information out of it .. Theres also plenty of stuff that I haven't found any real value in but is interesting and maybe something cool can get made out of it?... understand too they are scraping data and not refining it so there are errors or missing data in some of their reports but the schedule download is maybe as perfect as they should have.. however you have to do some formatting steps or its really not useful, I note these in the following posts .. 

Schedule prep and analysis cont'd .. 

Create the basic schedule .. 

Go to the website scroll to bottom hit query and can download it as a csv spreadsheet .. need to then 'save as' and choose excel .xlsx file because csv files don't save changes .. 

The schedule lists all games (once) with home team listed first (or if neutral I believe the geographically closer team) .. add filters and sort by team and you'll see each team's 6 or so home games .. obvi what we want is to see each team's full schedule which denotes home/away/neut games and in date order ..

 - Add column and note all games in the report are 'Home'. Then copy the entire list and paste it at the bottom. For only that new section you need to flip flop where the teams are listed ..  now for the new section instead of 'Home', mark all these as 'Away' .. they have a column already that notes which games are neutral so filter on those and mark all those accordingly as Neut.. Be aware some Neut games are really defacto home games, like Air Force playing Army in Denver, etc.. i'd call that a home game lol

other important mods:
- The website has not updated the team's conferences for realignment. just manually fix these for both the team and opponent column .. its various teams from INDY, CUSA, B12 and AAC.. there's a column in there already denoting which games are 'conf games' and you'll want to also fix that based on the changes ..

- Date field is unworkable for us and need to create a new one  - im sure there's an easier way but I parse the date into 3 diff fields year, day, month then using a formula =DATE plug in the correct fields and hardcode the results .. very annoying.. but we can't do the next mod with the date field they provide .. 

- Bye weeks are not noted - With our new date field sort the schedule by date then team so each team is listed chronologically .. add a column and calc the days since last played using formula = the current game date minus the prev game's date which will give us days off since last game 7, 14 or whatever it is .. copy/hardcode the results, delete results on week 0/1 and for any FCS teams since those will look wacky .. importantly .. do the exact same thing for the opponent teams .. sort by date and by the OPPONENT team field and calc the days since last played the same way .. 

Do that and you have the most basic schedule needed before we can do anything interesting with it .. 

Schedule prep and analysis cont'd .. 

The real value of the schedule we want is that we see not only the schedule quirks for the team were browsing but for each of their opponents .. this way when browsing say Kent State's schedule you will see all their bye weeks but then say holy sh!!!!t 4 of their conf opponents are coming off a full bye or extended 11 day break and that 3 of those are on the road and most come real late in the year when divisions are always up for grabs... then you'll see E.Mich has ZERO conf opponents coming off a bye .. nice for them!

There's a ton of those sorta unfortunate spots we can glean out of the schedule, some easy to add using excel skills like consecutive road games and some like weirdo sandwich spots are better figured out manually reviewing .. and again the real value is not just seeing the team's ugly spot but seeing the opponents as well so every spot note has to be noted twice essentially .. 

But yeah good to know all 151 B2B roadie spots and what opponents a team faces in that kinda spot, right?! .. or the 9 B2B2B roadies .. or see poor Arkansas technically has 4 straight conf road games if you count their neutral with A&M .. and follow that up at home vs Miss State who will be coming off their bye week.. PURE FILTH!! .. we have Co.State playing football 11 straight weeks w game 11 ending in a roadie to hawaii .. sure thing loss? .. idk my schedule says Hawaii will be on their 7th straight game and off a totally miserable mid-november trip to laramie .. horrific spot for both teams .. speaking of Laramie, T-Tech goes to Wyo in week 1 then faces Oregon the following week fresh off an FCS opponent.. think I like Ducks in that one .. 
App State maybe the worst schedule I've found a total suicide mission this year ... @UNC, ECU (Old FCS rival!), then a nice long trip @WYO  then B2B @ULM whose off a full bye then monster home game vs Coastal then back on the road @ODU, then S.Miss at home .. Appy does have a 10 day and 11 day break in that first stretch but their last 4 opponents all have extended time off 10+ days and 2 have full byes .. and there's no other time off for appy after that and the schedule really heats up home vs Marshall, @G.State, @JMU, and G-So at home in the big rivalry finale .. you see a few rough spots in that stretch let me know lol ... Like Im not saying its a sure thing 3-9 year here but that wouldn't surprise me its pure insanity and think best case is they make a bowl .. 

Other handy stuff from the cfbdata website

Xfer portal activity by year ..
https://collegefootballdata.com/exporter/player/portal?year=2023

Think they scrape 247 since they have their talent ratings on there but I believe its only if they modified the rating at the time they xfered, idk could be wrong .. they def don't have all the HS talent ratings .. FBS and FCS xfers seems pretty complete insofar as capturing whenever someone enters the portal .. unsure at Dii or further down .. either way there's about 1750 players floating around and good to know the coming and going  .. there are some errors like it still says G-McCall is sitting in the portal when he backed out of it months ago .. I think the records for those who have completed an xfer to a new school are pretty reliable .. 

Recruiting by year .. 
https://collegefootballdata.com/exporter/recruiting/players?year=2023&classification=HighSchool

I found this to be pretty accurate there might be a few guys w/out a school but easy to check those if they've picked one or at least for the really high rated players .. according to the modeler folk, the last 2 recruiting classes are what correlates to on field success .. they don't scrape JUCO's anymore unfortunately but then again JUCO recruiting is becoming a bit of a lost art form for obvious reasons .. 

2022 Games and Results .. 
https://collegefootballdata.com/exporter/games?year=2022&seasonType=regular

Gotta relive last year a little bit to get a handle on how things might tend to go this year .. This schedule is great because it gives us quarterly scoring by team in the game .. so from this we can easily calc a team's H1, H2 results .. some teams like Mich very clearly slow rolling H1 before turning it on, good stuff to know .. also by adding up the Q scores and comparing to the total points we can find any OT games as there will be a different total ... which games went to OT is another thing we just don't find on other resources .. 

Coaching situations .. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_NCAA_Division_I_FBS_football_coaches
https://247sports.com/Article/2022-College-Football-coaching-carousel-updates-power-five-jobs-top-candidates-rumors-194705920/

Besides creating and analyzing spots on the schedule I'd say analyzing the coaching situations is our other best way to find an advantage when we consider RSW's, conf futures or playing / fading a team early in the ssn... and its for the same reason... Coaching makes a huge impact on results and there's not a model friendly way to make an assessment on it .. It's possible models use some consistency factor w an HC after a few years and then take that away when things change but I'd expect models to not find many statistically valid factors to use for HC's and very unlikely for coordinators .. bookies are obvi gunna make adjustments for big splash hires or major departures but only reason to do that is for an anticipated market reaction to a coaching change and i'd expect the vast majority of coaching situations to not impact their numbers .. 

The wiki list above is great and I copy that down each year and compare to PY noting any changes .. very easy to get in excel and maneuver it .. Wiki to their credit is also on top of the changes and get those updates in there timely and seems to be a pretty reliable list .. very easy to creep on the bios and coaching histories than googling around .. The 247 list has a bunch of other coaching changes for reference and goes beyond coordinators .. good to see whose got mass changes coming and I'd pay closer attn to position moves for OL and DBs because of the highly coordinated nature of those units..   

Here's a little coaching change nugget that stuck out on the Wiki page .. 

Buffalo DC listed as vacant and what happened is they lost their DC Brandon Bailey after 1 year w them and right before spring camp.. the obvi first thought is Buffalo is in a bad spot here since the pickins are gunna be slim for a replacement .. how bad is that gunna be for them idk, Linguist is supposed to be a D guru specializing in pass coverage and that lines up w their success this year but they really stunk w out Bailey there F+ had em 109th in '21 and 66th LY .. an EPIC jump esp in pass D and were #7 in takeaways .. quick digging we see Bailey was the youngest DC in FBS last year picked up after 3 yrs on Mike Elko's team at A&M where he was w Linguist and was a DC in Dii and a HS DC before that.. 27 years old on a METEORIC RISE ..... So ..... Why in the world is he leaving his epic start in Buffalo and really hanging his pal Linguist out to dry to captain the 126th ranked Georgia Southern defense???!..

We see Bailey did graduate from G-So and was a student assistant coach there and maybe has family there.. but seems the move here is that Helton is now sitting on some decent HC watch lists the way he made them competitive LY when just about every indicator pointed to sure thing dud .. so have to think Bailey sees the career prospects of hitching his wagon to wherever Helton goes as being his best move.. I would say it is tough to imagine that Bailey doesn't improve their situation on D although the indicator for that may be from their portal .. would check in after spring ball because they did have a few guys worth keeping around and Bailey and Linguist did grab like 7 P5 defenders LY who were looking for playing time .. we see guys stick around and an infusion then I like their chances to be reasonably decent in the SUN next year ..

As for Buffalo it seems like they can't catch a break .... They lose Kyle Van T to G-So last year and 4250 yards later we can be pretty certain that Buff doesn't have anyone that can coach on offense and even if they happen upon a total gem at QB again they'll still be a dud on that side .. maybe Linguist takes over the D himself for the spring but a few of the stars are graduating or going pro and maybe they find a DC but I would def watch their portal activity from here and if we see guys heading for the exit after spring ball then it would def seem like maybe an ugly situation brewin that I doubt the books will have picked up on when they drop the first MAC win totals .. 

Appreciate this 

Good stuff!  I like the paradigm!  Thanks Bridge!  The pre-season rags will be rolling out soon!  

@LonghornHoosier

Yeah no doubt .. and they're all in such a rush to be first on the news stand that we can count on the first wave to be particularly weak .. still gotta get those and there's always a few nuggets in there ... 

My suggestion is to get Phil's digital mag .. still send the actual mag but we'll get the mag for about a week before the cfb horde gets theirs .. Phil always has a few surprise teams on his radar that aren't on the madison ave mags esp in G5 .. I landed a couple good shots at the books last year before the odds dropped when folks got their hard copy .. best find LY was Troy I think 12-1 for the conference and RSW like 5.5 and sealed the deal on a couple other RSW's and they all adjusted pretty quick once everyone got their mag.. t'was well worth it!!!