Statistics through Monday, 01/09/2012,  are now available.

Since we’ve moved into November, the Pledge Drive is now complete.  For the month of October, 58 donations were made for a total of $1,274.88.  Thank you so much for your donations and support of cfbstats.com.

I also want to thank everyone who visited the website last month.  October was the biggest month ever for cfbstats.com in terms of visitors, with 128,209 visitors viewing 1,382,270 pages.

I created cfbstats.com to provide college football statistics for the FBS that are not freely available anywhere else, including leader boards with split and situational statistics for teams and players.  Thanks to you, cfbstats.com ranks either first or second in Google, bing, and Yahoo! searches for college football statistics.

In addition to building and maintaining the site, I’ve spent thousands of hours on collecting the data that is presented here.  I don’t have a company that provides me with statistics and I don’t get them from the NCAA.  I compile the data from the official game box scores from each of the FBS schools.  That’s nearly 5,000 games so far.

Since launching the website in February of 2006, the cost of operation, including paying monthly for a web hosting provider, has come out of my own pocket.  So I’m asking now for help to defray the cost.   I’ve chosen the month of October for the first-ever pledge drive at cfbstats.com.  If you find the site useful, either because you love stats, want to settle an argument, or use it for work, please consider a donation.  No amount is too small.

Donations can be made with a credit card via PayPal by clicking on the Donate button below.  You do not need a PayPal account to make a donation.  If you’d rather not use a credit card but still would like to donate, please contact me and I’ll provide a mailing address.  My email is marty@cfbstats.com.

I’m glad so many of you love college football statistics as much as I do.  Thank you for your support.

Marty

After Cameron Newton‘s touchdown pass on Auburn’s opening drive of the SEC Championship game, CBS showed the stat that Newton is a perfect 19-for-19 passing in Auburn’s game-opening drives this season.  After shaking off my disbelief at that stat — and wishing I had discovered it first — I wondered if any other quarterback in recent years has been perfect in his team’s game-opening drives for a season.

My play-by-play data goes back to 2005, and no other quarterback has been without an incompletion on opening drives for a season during that time (minimum of 10 opening drive pass attempts).  The closest players were both in 2009, when Ryan Griffin of Tulane was 18-of-19 and Kyle Padron of SMU was 16-of-17.

I also wondered how Newton’s passing efficiency rating on opening drives compares to other quarterbacks.  Here are the leaders this season in passing efficiency on their team’s opening drives (minimum of 15 pass attempts).

 Player              Team            Yr  Att  Comp  Yds  TD  Int  Rating
+-------------------+---------------+---+----+-----+----+---+----+-------+
 Cameron Newton      Auburn          JR	  19   19   300	  3   0   284.73
 Tim Jefferson, Jr.  Air Force       JR	  15   10   269   3   1   269.98
 Wesley Carroll      Florida Int'l   JR	  19   15   243   4   1   245.32
 Colin Kaepernick    Nevada          SR	  35   27   360   4   1   195.55
 Jeff Godfrey        UCF             FR	  28   21   263   3   0   189.26
 Andrew Luck         Stanford        JR	  46   35   413   5   0   187.38
 Scott Tolzien       Wisconsin       SR	  23   20   259   1   1   187.20
 Andy Dalton         TCU             SR   37   24   347   5   1   182.84
 Dan Persa           Northwestern    JR	  30   25   273   2   0   181.77
 Ryan Mallett        Arkansas        JR	  37   23   382   4   1   179.15
 Nick Fanuzzi        Rice            JR	  25   19   224   2   0   177.66
 T.J. Yates          North Carolina  JR	  39   32   397   1   0   176.01
 Brian Anderson      Marshall        SR	  25   17   198   3   0   174.13
 Kyle Parker         Clemson         SO	  24   15   197   3   0   172.70
 Taylor Martinez     Nebraska        FR	  22   15   191   2   0   171.11
 Ross Jenkins        Louisiana Tech  SR	  25   17   187   3   0   170.43
 

Since 2005, the QB with the highest passing efficiency rating on opening drives with a minimum of 15 attempts is Steven Moffett of UCF in 2005.   He was 19-for-22 for 406 yards and 3 TD’s, for a rating of 286.38.

Stanford had three straight touchdown drives of 85 or more yards in the first half of its 48-14 win over California.  That gives Stanford nine touchdown drives this season of 85 or more yards, which is tied for second in the FBS.  Here are the FBS leaders this season in touchdown drives of 85 or more yards.

                     TD Drives
  Team               85+ Yards
+------------------+-----------+
  Michigan              10
  Nevada                 9
  Stanford               9
  TCU                    8
  Boise St.              7
  Michigan St.           6
  Mississippi St.        6
  Ohio St.               6
  Penn St.               6
  San Diego St.          6
  Utah                   6
 

This weekend’s games include three games between teams on this list: Boise St. vs. Nevada, Michigan vs. Ohio St., and Michigan St. vs. Penn St.  The Big 10 is obviously well-represented on the list.  Also notice that TCU and Boise State are right there next to each other like they’ve been in the BCS standings much of the season.

Last Saturday’s game between Georgia and Auburn has stayed in the spotlight due to accusations of dirty play by Auburn defensive lineman Nick Fairley and the ejection of two other Auburn defensive lineman at the end of the game.  Overall, the game was marred by twelve personal foul and unsportsmanlike conduct penalties, with the teams responsible for six apiece.

The twelve personal foul and unsportsmanlike conduct penalties tie that game with two others for the most penalties of those types in a game since 2005, which is as far back as I have individual penalty data.  For personal fouls, I’m including all varieties of personal fouls, including chop blocks, face masks, roughing the passer, etc.

Here are the games with with the most personal foul and unsportsmanlike conduct penalties since 2005.   The numbers include every personal foul penalty where a flag was thrown, even if it was offset by another penalty.  Often times, a personal foul will be called against both teams on a play and they will offset each other.   For the purpose of this list, it counts as two personal foul penalties in the game, even though no yardage was marked off by the referee and they don’t count in the game’s official penalty totals.

                                                   PF & UC
 Visit Team        Home Team         Date         Penalties
+-----------------+-----------------+------------+-----------+
 Georgia           Auburn            11/13/2010      12
 Troy              La.-Lafayette     11/28/2009      12
 Western Ky.       Bowling Green     09/29/2007      12
 Idaho             Hawaii            10/30/2010      11
 Morgan St.        Maryland          09/11/2010      11
 UAB               Florida St.       09/08/2007      11
 Virginia Tech     Florida St.       12/03/2005      11
 Ohio              Buffalo           10/29/2005      11
 Virginia          Boston College    10/08/2005      11
 Baylor            Texas A&M         11/21/2009      10
 UAB               Troy              09/19/2009      10
 Southern Miss.    SMU               11/29/2008      10
 Fla. Atlantic     La.-Monroe        10/25/2008      10
 Miami (Ohio)      Bowling Green     10/18/2008      10
 Brigham Young     TCU               10/16/2008      10
 Western Ky.       North Texas       11/24/2007      10
 Florida St.       Duke              10/14/2006      10
 Colorado          Miami (Fla.)      09/24/2005      10
 Hawaii            Michigan St.      09/10/2005      10

Individual long play leaders are now available in the following categories:

Long Scrimmage Plays
Long Rushing Plays
Long Passing Plays
Long Receiving Plays
Long Punt Return Plays
Long Kickoff Return Plays
Long All Purpose Plays

The individual leaders are broken down nationally or by conference.  I added team long play leaders a few weeks ago.

One reason I created cfbstats.com was to provide stats that are not available on any other website.  To my knowledge, there is not another website where you can freely find statistics like Kellen Moore’s passing statistics on 1st down or which team leads the nation in the number of plays of 50 or more yards, among many others.

I would like to request that if you use stats from this website in your broadcast, website, newspaper, game notes, etc., that cfbstats.com be cited as the source of the data.  Some of the traditional college football statistics on cfbstats.com can also be obtained from other sources, so I don’t expect to be cited for that data, though it would be appreciated.  However, if you use statistics that can only be found on cfbstats.com like those I mentioned above, I would appreciate a reference to cfbstats.com as the source of the data.

When you cite this website, please refer to this website simply as cfbstats.com.  For an online reference, I would appreciate a link to the home page of cfbstats.com or a link to the page containing the specific statistic mentioned in the article.

Like anybody that creates a website, I would like as many people as possible to be aware of and use cfbstats.com.   Citing this website when you use the data helps increase the awareness.

Finally, to those college football writers, bloggers, and websites that support and regularly cite cfbstats.com, thank you very much.

After removing some splits from the site last week, I found out that the “vs. Winning/Non-Winning” splits were more popular than I thought, so they’ve been brought back to life.   As I said, the “vs. Winning/Non-Winning” splits were hard to let go, so I’m okay with bringing them back.  I like the splits that I have on the site now and don’t have any further plans to change them.  Thanks to everyone for their feedback.

I’ve made some changes to the splits shown on the site — two splits were combined, four splits were removed, and four splits were added.

The “on Road” and “at Neutral Site” splits have been combined into a single “on Road/Neutral Site” split.  I don’t think the “at Neutral Site” split by itself was all that useful since a small percentage of games are played at neutral sites, and only a handful of teams play more than one neutral site game each season.  I think most people just want to know how teams perform when they are at home vs. when they are not at home.  The “at Home” and “on Road/Neutral Site” splits now provide that information.

The “Grass Field” and “Turf Field” splits have been removed.  Playing surface splits are not as relevant as they maybe once were.   Artificial surfaces like FieldTurf that are widely used today are nothing like the AstroTurf abominations that prevailed in the 70′s and 80′s at stadiums like the Vet in Philadelphia.   Artificial surface technologies have advanced enough that I don’t believe the playing surface — grass or turf — has a significant effect on the outcome of a game.

The “vs. Winning” and “vs non-Winning” splits have also been removed.  These were a little harder to let go, but I prefer the new splits to these and these have limitations that I’ve noted before.  I also had server space to consider and wanted to keep the total number of splits about the same, so these had to go.

The splits that have been added are “vs FBS (I-A)”, “vs FCS (I-AA)”, “vs BCS AQ”, and “vs BCS non-AQ”.   These splits were the most-often requested.  The first two are self-explanatory, and allow you to filter out the statistics for FBS teams in games against FCS teams, which are usually (but not always) a mismatch.

The “vs BCS AQ” split shows the statistics against BCS automatic qualifying conferences — ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC — and Notre Dame.  The “vs BCS non-AQ” split encompasses the rest of the FBS conferences and independent teams.

For now, these changes only apply to the 2010 season.  The other seasons still show the old splits, but the new splits will be phased in over time.