About & Methodology — CollegeAthleteInsider

C. B. Zakarian

C. B. Zakarian is an independent analyst who writes about what he can measure: ball sports and the player-run economies inside Roblox. He builds every model, chart, and calculator here himself from public data, shows the working, and never invents a number. When the data can't answer a question, he says so. On CollegeAthleteInsider, that means college football and basketball by the numbers, plus a plain-English read on the NIL-era rules.

I started this because most of what gets written about college sports falls into one of two buckets. Either it's a number with no context — a team is "elite" because it ranks 4th in something, and you're left to take that on faith — or it's a take with no number at all. I wanted a third option: show the metric, show how it's built, and be honest about where it stops working. That's the whole site.

I'm not affiliated with the NCAA, a conference, a school, or a data company. This is a personal project. When I publish a rating or a chart, I built it myself from public data, and I'd rather walk you through the math than ask you to trust a black box.

How I work

Every statistic here traces back to a specific, repeatable data pull. The data-driven pieces have a companion Python script in the project's /scripts folder — re-run it and you should get the same table or chart I did. The one rule I won't bend: I never make up a number. If I can't source a figure, it doesn't go in. There are no "roughly" stats here standing in for ones I couldn't find.

The public sources I lean on:

CollegeFootballData.com — a free, community-run API (you'll need your own key) for football schedules, results, and advanced ratings like SP+.
sportsdataverse — the open-source hoopR (men's) and wehoop (women's) college-basketball data, built from public sources.
ESPN's public endpoints — schedules, scores, and box scores for worked examples and trends.
NCAA.org and NCAA.com — official records, rules, and the NET ranking.
Bart Torvik's T-Rank — a free, public basketball ratings site I reference for context.

What I'm skeptical of

Two things get my guard up faster than anything else in this field. The first is recruiting hype. Star ratings are a real signal in aggregate, but the certainty people attach to a single 18-year-old's ceiling is mostly theater — and I won't profile or rank individual high-school recruits, who are minors, regardless. The second is the small sample. Half of what passes for analysis in October is noise: a stat off six games, a "clutch" record built on three close finishes, a turnover margin that's mostly luck and will regress. When I think a number is too thin to mean anything yet, I'll say so instead of dressing it up.

What I won't do

I don't republish proprietary or paywalled datasets — no KenPom tables, no recruiting or NIL valuation figures lifted from services like 247Sports, Rivals, or On3. When those are relevant I'll mention and link them, but the analysis itself is built only from genuinely public data. And there's no betting content here: no picks, no odds, no sportsbook talk. This is analysis, not a tout sheet.

A note for athletes and families

Some of what I cover — NIL, revenue sharing, the transfer portal, roster limits — lands directly on athletes' lives, so I try to explain it plainly and without the hype. But nothing here is legal, financial, or eligibility advice. The rules change fast and vary by school and state; for your own situation, talk to your compliance office. The full disclaimer spells this out.

One author, several sites

I'm C. B. Zakarian. I write a family of data sites — sports analytics on one side, Roblox's trading economies on the other — all built the same way: public data, open methods, real charts, no invented numbers. The range isn't as odd as it looks; a Pythagorean win expectation and a virtual pet's trade value are the same problem in different clothes — noisy public numbers that reward careful measurement. Every site carries my name because I'd rather stand behind the work than hide behind a brand.

Get in touch

Corrections, questions, and good-faith arguments are all welcome. Reach me at contact@collegeathleteinsider.com or through the contact page. If you think a number here is wrong, tell me — and point me to the data. I'll fix it or explain it.