About this site

CollegeAthleteInsider publishes under its own name, not a person's. It is owned by an independent publisher. How this site is made explains how the articles are made: from public data and the sources named in each piece, under the owner's direction. No article describes anyone's personal experience of the game. Where a piece says "we", it means the site.

The site exists 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. The third option is the whole site: show the metric, show how it's built, and be honest about where it stops working.

CollegeAthleteInsider is not affiliated with the NCAA, a conference, a school, or a data company, and none of them has any say in what is published. Every rating and chart here is built from public data, with the math walked through rather than hidden in a black box.

Editor

C. B. Zakarian (a pen name) is the owner and editor of CollegeAthleteInsider.com. C. B. Zakarian holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems, with a focus on data science, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016), and is an assistant professor.

C. B. Zakarian decides what CollegeAthleteInsider.com publishes and when, and the figures on each page are checked against the sources it names before publication. Pages the editor has reviewed in full show the date of that review, and errors are corrected when they are found.

How the numbers are made

Every statistic here traces back to a specific, repeatable data pull. Each data-driven piece has a companion Python script that recomputes the article's figures from the cached source responses every time the site is built, and warns loudly if a published number stops reproducing — several of those scripts run more than fifty checks against the prose. The articles name the script and the dataset behind each number so you can see which computation produced what.

Be clear about what that is and isn't: it is the site's own verification, not yours. The scripts and the cached API responses sit in the site's build repository and are not published, so nothing here asks you to take a download on faith — and nothing here is something you can re-run from this site. What you can check is the method. Every data piece states its source, its retrieval date, its sample, its filters and its formula, and the Python tutorials print their code in full on the page. If a figure doesn't survive that description, email and it will be fixed or explained. The one rule that doesn't bend: no made-up numbers. If a figure can't be sourced, it doesn't go in. There are no "roughly" stats here standing in for ones that couldn't be found.

The public sources the site leans 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, referenced for context.

Which seasons you'll actually see: the football census pieces — margins, home field, overtime, bye weeks, the FCS buy game, week one — all measure the 2024 season, because 2024 is the last full football season the site holds a complete cached pull for. There is no 2025 football in that cache, so nothing here measures the 2025 season, and it is better to say so than to leave you to assume otherwise. The 2026 pieces run off separate, dated pulls of the season now in progress, and the basketball work runs as recently as the 2025-26 season. Every data article states its season and its retrieval date in the first paragraph or the sources block; none of them claims to be the most recent season available.

What the site is skeptical of

Two things deserve more suspicion 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 the site does not 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 a number is too thin to mean anything yet, the article says so instead of dressing it up.

What the site won't do

No republishing of 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 they are mentioned and linked, but the analysis itself is built only from genuinely public data. And no touting: no picks, no plays, no "best bet of the week," no sportsbook sponsorship, and no affiliate links to a book. Point spreads and prices do appear here — a spread is the market's own estimate of a game, and turning one into a win probability is standard sports statistics, which is what the win-probability calculator does. They appear as inputs to a model or as a claim being measured, never as a recommendation to wager. This is analysis, not a tout sheet.

A note for athletes and families

Some of what the site covers — NIL, revenue sharing, the transfer portal, roster limits — lands directly on athletes' lives, so it is explained 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.

Get in touch

Corrections, questions, and good-faith arguments are all welcome at contact@collegeathleteinsider.com or through the contact page. If a number here looks wrong, say which one and point to the data; it will be fixed or explained.