Right, let’s talk about digging into ACC football stats. It wasn’t for any big project or anything, more like a personal itch I needed to scratch a while back. I got really into watching the games one season, I think it was when Clemson and FSU had that big matchup, and I just got curious about the real numbers behind the commentary.
So, I started looking around. First place, obviously, was the official ACC athletics site. Seemed logical. They had scores, standings, some basic leaderboards, you know, the usual stuff. But I wanted more detailed things, maybe like drive efficiency, or specific player stats broken down differently than they showed. Getting that sort of granular data wasn’t easy, not in one neat package anyway.
I remember spending a few evenings just bouncing between different sports news sites. You know the big ones. Each had bits and pieces. One site might have good team defensive stats, another had decent individual player game logs, but pulling it all together was messy. It felt like every site had its own way of presenting things.
My little experiment
I got this idea, probably a dumb one in hindsight, to try and compile some stats myself into a spreadsheet. Just for one or two teams I was following closely. I thought, how hard could it be? Famous last words, right?
- I started pulling data from game box scores.
- Tried copying tables from web pages, which was a disaster formatting-wise.
- Ended up manually typing a lot of numbers. Quarterback ratings, rushing attempts, tackles… you name it.
It took way longer than I expected. Just doing a couple of games felt like a chore. You find errors in one source, then cross-reference with another… it becomes a rabbit hole. I was mostly just using basic Excel, nothing fancy. No complex formulas, just trying to get the raw data lined up.
Here’s the thing I realized: Collecting and organizing this stuff consistently is a massive job. You see those polished stats on TV or major websites, and you don’t really think about the effort behind making them accurate and available. It’s easy to take it for granted.
Did I end up with some groundbreaking analysis? Nah. My spreadsheet was pretty basic, probably full of fat-finger errors. After a few weeks of messing with it on and off, I kind of just stopped updating it. The season got busy, other things came up. But it was interesting. It gave me a much better appreciation for the folks who do sports data for a living. It’s not just watching games; it’s a lot of tedious digging and organizing.
So yeah, that was my little adventure with ACC football stats. Didn’t really lead anywhere profound, just a reminder that sometimes the simple things you see are built on a lot of unseen work.
