Fumblerooski
August 9th, 2008 | Published in Sports, django | 6 Comments
For reference purposes, you may want to study this old commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Recommended, but not necessary, is this definition.
It’s August, which means that college football is just around the corner. College football is why I don’t volunteer to teach any classes in the fall. It’s why I occasionally compensate my better half for missed Saturday afternoons (although thanks to ESPN 360, I’m not nearly as bad as I was pre-child). So I love college ball, and I love data. That’s where Fumblerooski comes in.
Let me say from the get-go that this is not nearly a finished site. It’s not even halfway there. I’m posting about it now because I’d like to invite people with similar interests to help me build out a site that puts the numbers behind college football front and center. Yes, I have ideas - APIs, for example - but alone Fumblerooski will only ever be so good, and certainly not good enough. That’s why the code behind the site is on github.
The basics: it’s running Django trunk (so, yes, that’s the 1.0 beta candidate right now) and uses MySQL as a backend. Right now I have game results dating back to 1987 for most major schools and spottier coverage for minor ones. In addition, the NCAA releases game-by-game statistics for players and I have some scripts for processing that data, although there’s plenty of room for improvement. Folks who dive into the code may also notice that I started a recruiting dataset as well, but I think that area is well-covered, so it’s not a priority for me at this time. At the moment, Fumblerooski is running on a Joyent 1/2 gig Accelerator with nginx as the Web server.
Most of my work so far as gone towards building out team information. Take my alma mater, Pittsburgh: you can see the results of a given season, check out a series (you can reverse it if you’re one of those WVU fans) or see details of an individual game. The drive chart, which is a fairly recent NCAA addition, is dynamically fetched (and no, I can’t do anything about the colors).
I envision at least two types of contributors: one would help on the coding side with new features (I have plans for aggregate player stuff, but want to wait to see what gets into Django). Another type could be with information: fleshing out coaching details, for example. In my wildest dreams, Fumblerooski gets a severely-needed makeover as well. Any takers? Feel free to sign up at github, or fork the code, or whatever. You can also contact me if you’d like to help in other ways.
Oh, and the name? It was the best football-only term available, but I also got the blessing of Nebraska alum Matt Waite.
August 9th, 2008 at 8:58 pm (#)
One little thing: It looks like the ‘Coach’ field is filled in from the current year, even though you’re looking at a past year. For instance, I don’t think Dave Wannstedt was coaching Pitt in 1988 (http://www.fumblerooski.org/college/teams/pittsburgh/1988/)
August 9th, 2008 at 9:09 pm (#)
Heh, right you are. That was our own Mike Gottfried. Something for the todo list!
August 12th, 2008 at 2:05 pm (#)
How about cataloging the games you’ve personally attended? Or letting users log in and tag that themselves.
August 12th, 2008 at 3:38 pm (#)
Oooh, I like that. Sounds to me like a django-hotclub joint, no?
August 12th, 2008 at 4:31 pm (#)
What about a conference link? Pitt people would be interested in other Big East schools. Missouri people would be interested in the Big 12.
I’d like to be able to sort lists dynamically. For example, I wanted to see if Missouri had ever played Navy in the years included in the data. Since the data was sorted by number of times played, it was kinda hard to find. Easier for me to pop a CTRL-F.
I’ll look for a coaching history database somewhere we could scrape from.
August 12th, 2008 at 7:44 pm (#)
So glad to hear you are running on Joyent’s Accelerator. Let us know when the site is up and running, we love football too!