Okay, so yesterday I was tasked with figuring out how to get the latest injury reports for college football teams. My boss wanted a quick way to see who’s out, especially for some of the bigger BC games. Here’s how I went about it.
First thing I did was hit up Google, right? I started with super generic searches like “college football injury report” and “NCAA football injuries.” A lot of what I found was just noise – articles about specific injuries, old news, or stuff behind paywalls. Basically useless.
Then I got a bit more specific. I tried adding team names, like “BC football injury report” (since that’s what my boss cared about). That narrowed it down a bit, but still mostly got articles about injuries, not the actual reports themselves. I needed the raw data, you know? Like a list of players and their status.
Next, I started digging around team websites. Figured the official source would be the best bet. The BC Eagles site actually had a section for game previews, and sometimes they’d mention key injuries. It wasn’t a complete report, but it was something. I also looked at some of the bigger sports news sites like ESPN and CBS Sports. They often have injury updates, but again, it’s usually embedded in articles and not in a clean, report-like format.
Here’s where it got a little tricky. I remembered seeing some Twitter accounts that focus on sports injuries. So I searched around and found a few that seemed legit. These accounts often retweet official announcements or break news about injuries. It was quicker than scouring multiple websites, but still required some manual filtering to get just the BC info.
I spent a solid hour or so hopping between websites, Twitter, and news articles. What I ended up doing was creating a simple spreadsheet. I’d copy and paste the player’s name, injury, and status (out, questionable, etc.) from whatever source I found. It was clunky, but it was the best I could do in the short amount of time I had.
My takeaway? There’s no easy, single source for comprehensive college football injury reports. You gotta be willing to dig, and you gotta be prepared to do some manual data entry. I’m thinking next time I might try setting up some kind of web scraper to automate the process a little. But for now, the spreadsheet did the trick.
- Started with general Google searches
- Narrowed it down with team-specific queries
- Checked official team websites and major sports news sites
- Found some useful Twitter accounts
- Created a manual spreadsheet to compile the data
Next Steps
I’m thinking about learning some web scraping tools. That way, I can automate this process in the future, and maybe even build a small web app for my boss to view the reports easily. It’s all about making things easier, right?
