I’m always on the hunt for new data sets from the college game, but as time goes on the hunt becomes more challenging. Every game produces a box score and a play-by-play listing, and we’ve extracted almost all of the meaningful information we can from those two things. Sadly, we’re probably still years away from getting the kind of player tracking data that has unlocked new avenues of research in the NBA.
Sometimes you have to make your own data, and over the past month I’ve been tracking game length for a selection of games across the land. That’s mostly from power conferences where live scoring updates are reliable and allow one to establish precisely what time a game began and ended. This is not the kind of thing that is going to split the atom but is nonetheless something that piqued my curiosity because I’m not aware of anyone tracking this at the college level.
Let’s start with the basics. Based on my collection of 423 games over the past…
