Football Loving Geek

Like any good football loving geek (I was nicknamed the Michael Vick of Intramural Football at my college BTW), I was intrigued by our current situation involving USC, LSU and OU.  I personally think that Michigan is going to beat USC and OU will beat LSU, so I really am not going to get flustered over that aspect of the polls.  But really has me interested is the statistics part of things.  Now, I never strived in my statistics courses (I called the courses sadistics 101), but you throw football into the mix and suddenly I want to bust out the TI-83 and come up with my own computer rankings to rule them all.

If you follow football, you probably know the computer rankings were required to drop the margin of victory data from their rankings.  Meaning a win of 3 points is just as good as a win of 28 points.  This I understand.  It keeps certain teams from running up the score on Southern North Carolina Polytech A&M State to help them in their computer rankings.  Of course, this also means a loss of 28 points is just as bad as a loss of three points.  I figure any team that can't prevent a team from running up the score on them doesn't even belong in consideration for BCS quality games.  But a team that gets blown out vs a team that losses in three overtimes might have something to say about the “quality losses.”

This of course has led me on the great search for college football stats available in XML format (hell, I'll take CSV.  Not with a smile, but I'll take it).  Really I just need the scores of the games to write my brilliant system that will save college football as we know.  Anyone know of a source?  The NCAA.org seems to have the data, but in PDF format.