152: CFB TXT

Introducing a college football data resource, plus an update on the elevator of mediocrity that is Carolina football.

About a month ago, I was trying to watch the Philadelphia Phillies play the Baltimore Orioles using my paid MLB.TV subscription. As I selected the game, I found the following message:

In-Market Entitlement Required

Your current package does not entitle you to this content. Link your MLB.TV account to a participating pay TV provider . . .

Baltimore is over 300 miles away from where I live in North Carolina. My home state doesn't even have an MLB team, yet I’m not entitled to this content?

This publication isn’t about sports broadcasting rights, but it’s a good example of the reality of trying to do almost anything on the internet or via a paid subscription service today.

Things are too damn hard.

Over the past month, I’ve been tinkering with putting together a resource of college football data. I want to look up a team’s schedule, record, conference record, and general data about the sport. And I want to look it up on my phone without any ads or pop-ups or gambling advice.

So, I’ve put together cfbtxt.com

It’s a plain-text site that surfaces 2025 college football data. The idea is to provide a quick way to find schedules, results, power ratings, and conferences without anything getting in your way.

The majority of the data comes from the College Football Data API. I’m using the public power ratings, F+, that combine SP+ ratings by Bill Connelly with FEI ratings from Brian Fremeau.

You can find past results and the future schedule. You can filter by matchups between two conferences, for example, only two games between the Big Ten and SEC remain for the 2025 regular season:

You can also see individual team pages with FEI ratings, the schedule with results, and other teams with similar schedules too.

You won’t find any live scores or individual game stats yet. If you’re looking for live scores, check out gameonpaper.com. And if you want a TV schedule, try lsufootball.net/tvschedule.

The site is far from perfect, but it will get better and the goal is to add more details/data over the course of the season.

It’s something I wanted to try to build after being frustrated with the current state of everything. My promise is you won’t see any messages around not being entitled to this content.

Speaking of entitlement, let’s check in on Carolina football.

Elevator of mediocrity update

Last week, I wrote about how North Carolina football has been trapped in an elevator of mediocrity over the past 25 seasons.

So far, it looks like head coach Bill Belichick has a ton of work to do to get out of that elevator. TCU embarrassed North Carolina 48-14 on Monday night.

The game was not competitive for the majority of the second half. It turns out having no idea what to expect might not always be a good thing.

I was curious about where the loss ranked in Carolina football history from a point differential perspective. I would argue the JMU loss last season was more embarrassing, but it was only a 20-point loss.

Here are the worst home losses since 1980 using point differential. This shows the season when the loss occurred and the final record for that season too.

Given these numbers, if Carolina wants to avoid a losing season, it would be wise to not lose at home by 30 or more points again (1989 and 2002 were not fun seasons!).

The circus continues tomorrow as Carolina plays at Charlotte at 7 pm. You can find the full Carolina schedule using cfbtxt.com too.

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Thanks for reading this far, and happy Friday. A recommendation this week is Pat Garofalo’s Boondoggle newsletter.

Boondoggle also might be a good word to describe Carolina’s football investment, but this week’s edition is about how sports tourism doesn’t provide the economic impact that is promised. Louisiana is spending $7 million to bring a LIV Golf event to New Orleans in 2026 and $5 million is going directly back to LIV.

🤟 Anyhow, enjoy the weekend and please let me know if you have any suggestions to improve cfbtxt.com 🤟

Editor’s note: the idea behind the site was inspired from - plaintextsports.com - maybe one of the most useful places on the internet.