[fin7710]

I am a senior CS major at Union College and I am doing my senior thesis on stat prediction in the football. More specifically, I'm creating a program to predict the first 3 years of a player's NFL stats based on their college stats. The problem I am having is that it is very hard to find historic NCAA data for individual players.

So, does anyone know where I can find historic NCAA D-1 football data from before 1995? A database would be great, but even if its just a website I'm sure I can get the data off of it.

[Bette]

I cant help you out with your question but I am sure someone here can.


Just off hand, I'd say it would be hard to predict future stats from college. But I would be very interested to know what you find out. Dont forget us when you get your thesis done.

[fin7710]

I'm trying to do is predict stats for RBs and QBs. For running backs, Rushing Yards, All-Purpose Yards, Rushing TDs, Yrds/Carry, and % of games started over 3 years, and Passing Yards, Passing TDs/Ints, Completion %, QB rating, and % of games started over 3 seasons for QBs. I'm building a program and using 3 different machine learning algorithms to train it and then testing to see which is the most accurate. In reality, I don't expect this to work accurately. If it was this easy, someone would have done it a long time ago. Really, the process is more about building the program and learning rather than making an accurate prediction. But I love football, so it keeps me interested.

Post thesis I think I'm gonna put this on a website and keep messin with it so maybe, someday, it could be somewhat accurate.