CFBD Blog

Rockstars or Flop-stars? Examining Recruit Ratings and NFL Draft Success

College football recruiting is quickly becoming a billion-dollar business. Since the NCAA's ruling in the summer of 2021, there's been an explosion of valuations and incentives for young men and women across the country to trade their name, image and likeness (NIL) for brand advertising. Local businesses, from car dealerships

Talking Tech: Analyzing Feature Importance in Neural Networks

Probably the biggest issue I come across working with artificial neural networks is that they are a bit of a black box.

Getting Started with CFB Analytics

The 2022 season is about to be upon us and you are looking to get into CFB analytics of your own, like creating your own poll or picks simulator. Or maybe you've largely used spreadsheets and are looking to graduate to something that gives more capabilities and flexibility. Perhaps you've

Lessons from picking the 2022 CFB Season

As we reach the end of the 2021-22 college football season (the national championship game is unfolding on my TV as I type this), I wanted to take a look back at my performance in the College Football Data predictions contest. Minimum 400 games picked (not counting the NCG, but

Talking Tech: Building an Artifical Neural Network to Predict Games

In this edition of Talking Tech, we're going to be diving into some machine learning. Specifically, we're going to be looking at my preferred method for building predictive models for just about anything: the artificial neural networks, or ANN for short. The name may sound intimidating, but ANNs aren't really

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