Where the data comes from. At every college football game, the home team’s stat crew sits in the press box and types in every play as it happens: down, distance, who ran or threw, where the ball went, who made the tackle. That’s the official record the NCAA uses. The schools and conferences send it out, and ESPN publishes the full play log for every game at a public web address that anyone can open in a browser. We read every one of those plays. Nothing here is behind a login, scraped from a paid service, or guessed.
See it yourself. This is the raw feed for Alabama State at Southern on Aug 29, exactly as we receive it: ESPN game summary 401868324. Search the page for “pass complete short right” and you’ll see the sentence a stat crew typed that becomes one square of a pass chart.
What we add. ESPN shows you the box score. We compute what isn’t in a box score: whether each play kept the drive on schedule (success rate), where the ball goes (pass chart and run direction), what a team does on 3rd and short or in the red zone, how often the quarterback is under pressure, and an opponent-adjusted rating that compares every team on the same scale regardless of who they played. Player totals (yards, catches, tackles) are ESPN’s own box score numbers; targets and direction splits are ours, because nobody else tracks them.
What we can’t see. The crew logs what happened, not what the defense was in. Coverage, personnel groupings, motion and blitzes aren’t in the text. That takes film. We also depend on each school’s crew: some log “pass complete short right,” some log “pass complete.” When a team’s chart looks thin, that’s usually why.
The rating. Net Efficiency (NetEff) is offensive success rate minus defensive success rate allowed, adjusted for opponent strength by running the numbers through every game an HBCU team played until each team’s rating accounts for who it played. To measure opponents properly, we rate every FCS game each week, about 500 this season, so a non-HBCU FCS opponent is judged on its whole schedule. FBS opponents are rated together as one group, and Division II opponents as another, because we see each of them only once or twice; as groups, D2 opponents rate about 19 points below average and FBS opponents about 22 above. The result is a comparison among the 21 HBCU teams, shown in percentage points. It’s not a poll, and it says nothing about how an HBCU team compares to Georgia. A team moves only when its numbers move.
On-Schedule Rate. Our second number. A snap is on schedule if it’s any 1st down, 2nd and 6 or less, or 3rd or 4th and 3 or less. On-Schedule Rate is the share of a team’s offensive snaps that are on schedule, minus the same share for its opponents, opponent-adjusted the same way as NetEff. The idea builds on Bill Connelly’s standard downs and passing downs. It tracks NetEff closely (a correlation of 0.85 across the 21 teams this season), and where the two disagree is usually the story.
What counts. Every game an HBCU team played this season is in the model. Non-HBCU FCS opponents like Furman or Campbell are rated on their full schedules, because we rate every FCS game, not just HBCU games. FBS opponents are rated as one group and Division II opponents as another, since we only see each of those teams once or twice: an 87-0 win over a D2 team counts as beating a team well below average, and a loss at an SEC school counts as losing to a team well above it. NetEff ranks only the 21 HBCU teams.
Coverage this season. Every rush and pass logged by the home stat crew for all 106 completed games this season involving a Division I HBCU (13,361 plays), pulled from ESPN’s public game feeds. Direction, depth, target, pressure and tackler come from the play text itself, so completeness depends on each school’s crew. 93% of plays carry a direction. Ratings use three seasons and are adjusted within the pool of HBCU games, so NC A&T, Hampton and Tennessee State are rated on their games against this pool and their shared non-conference opponents. Plays with no down logged are excluded. Not affiliated with ESPN, the SWAC, the MEAC or any school. On Schedule · onschedulehbcu.com
Pass chart depth and direction are as logged. “Short” and “deep” follow the crew’s call, roughly under and over 15 air yards. Havoc = tackles for loss, sacks, interceptions and fumbles lost per play.