[R] Data source for American college football rankings?

Douglas Bates bates at stat.wisc.edu
Tue Sep 29 14:56:41 CEST 2009


An interesting, and topical, example of multivariate data for
classroom illustrations are the American college football rankings.
Starting at the end of October (or "week 8", the 8th week of the
football season) a set of rankings called the BCS (Bowl Championship
Series) will be published.  This is a composite ranking based on two
subjective polls, the Harris and USA Today polls, and a trimmed mean
of 6 objective scores, the so-called computer rankings.  The Harris
and USA Today polls are currently available along with several others
(the best known and most often quoted is the AP poll but, for
complicated reasons, it was replaced in the BCS rankings by the Harris
poll).

I enjoy using these as classroom examples but I haven't found a web
site from which I can download the data directly and am reduced to
"screen scraping" the HTML from popular sites like ESPN.  Does anyone
know of a site from which one can download the current poll results?




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