Where the numbers come from.

College Football Data (CFBD) is the backbone of the site. It supplies schedules and results for every FBS through DII game, advanced stats (EPA, success rate, PPA), season-level player usage and box scores, coaching histories, NFL Draft outcomes, bowl and postseason results, and recruiting class data. We use a paid Tier 2 key ($5/mo) — CFBD asks that sites using their data credit them, which is why they appear prominently here and throughout the site.

SP+ / FPI / Elo / SRS ratings are pulled from CFBD's ratings endpoints and used as external benchmarks to calibrate the CFB Index model — not as the model itself.

ESPN's public site API supplies stable athlete IDs, roster data for 26,000+ athletes, and team logo/color assets for 641 teams. ESPN doesn't publish a formal public API but exposes this data through their own site's JSON endpoints — no credentials required.

CFBD supplies recruiting profiles, transfer portal entries, and returning production metrics going back to 2018.

Four distinct market signals feed the site:

• VegasInsider — real-money sportsbook futures odds (DraftKings, Caesars, FanDuel, BetMGM, Bet365) for CFP championship, conference titles, win totals, and Heisman. The most liquid market signal we have.
• Polymarket — real-money prediction market covering roughly 24 top programs and major award markets. Treated as a belief signal, not a sportsbook line.
• Kalshi — regulated U.S. event contract market. Overlaps Polymarket on CFP and some conference markets.
• Manifold Markets — play-money prediction market with broader team coverage than real-money alternatives. Used as a belief proxy, labeled accordingly.
• CFBD game lines — consensus spread and over/under from major sportsbooks, supplied through CFBD's /lines endpoint.

Market data is used as a probabilistic signal, not as financial advice. All implied probabilities are clearly labeled as market-derived estimates.

The fan-intelligence layer reads what fans are actually saying about each program. Sources include:

• Reddit — fan discussion from r/CFB and team-specific subreddits, accessed via the Arctic Shift public archive API. Only publicly posted content; no private messages or removed posts.
• Campus newspapers & beat-writer feeds — RSS feeds from student papers and beat reporters covering individual programs. Approximately 50+ feeds active across FBS and FCS programs.
• Independent message boards — 12 boards covering major fan communities, via public RSS feeds.
• Google News RSS — public news headlines for team and player topics.
• YouTube — public video metadata and comment threads for CFB channels.
• Bluesky — public posts from CFB accounts via the AT Protocol firehose.
• Podcasts — Locked On CFB network and selected sports-radio shows, via public RSS. Optional ASR transcription via Whisper for episode content.
• Substack — public CFB newsletters via public RSS feeds.
• Wikipedia — pageview and edit-activity signals as a proxy for fan interest.

All discourse data is sourced from public posts only. Sentiment and cohort analysis is our editorial read of the aggregate signal — not a quote attributed to any individual.

CFBD venues — latitude, longitude, altitude, dome status, surface type, and capacity for approximately 840 college football venues. Used for geographic context and weather routing.

Open-Meteo — keyless ERA5 historical weather archive. Fills game-day weather (temperature, precipitation, wind) for games where CFBD's own weather data has no entry. Dome games are excluded.

On3 NIL valuations — modeled estimates of player NIL market value, scraped from public On3 player pages. Always labeled as On3's estimate, never presented as a confirmed contract figure. Per our editorial policy, NIL valuations are used as labeled statistics only — not as narrative hero numbers.

247Sports composite — recruiting star ratings and composite scores via CFBD's recruiting endpoints, which aggregate the major recruiting services.

A few sources that might seem obvious are intentionally excluded:

• PFF — no consumer API; redistribution barred by terms.
• X / Twitter — pay-per-read API since February 2026, no free tier.
• Sports-Reference — ToS prohibits programmatic scraping.
• All-22 film — no legal free source exists.
• TikTok — academic credentials required for data access.