Sports Reference Blog

We've updated Baseball Reference's Playoff Odds page to add a new stat! There's now a column showing the percentage of time that a team earns a bye!

With the new Postseason format, two teams earn a bye straight to the LDS. While the record of how those teams have done after the bye is mixed, teams still spend much of the regular season jockeying for those spots. Now, you can see your team's odds of going straight to the LDS.

Ever wondered how effective Jerry Rice was with Joe Montana throwing him the ball? How John Elway performed in the 4th quarter? Who the best short-yardage rusher was in the 1980s? What defense could never get off the field on 3rd down in the late '70s? No? Well, we're happy to announce that we've got answers for you anyways! We are thrilled to announce that Pro Football Reference now has play-by-play and related statistics/splits for all regular-season and playoffs games (with the exception of four minutes and 47 seconds of a single game) all the way back to 1978, which was the first season of the NFL's 16-game schedule era. This sort of comprehensive, digitized play-by-play is not available anywhere else in the public realm. We are very proud to be able to democratize this data and present it to our users.

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Exciting news! We've updated our list of No-Hitters and Perfect Games to include all known major Negro League no-hitters. Major credit to our data intern Nate Mikkelson for cleaning up and organizing the data that allowed for this update!

For more information on our Negro Leagues data, and what counts as a major Negro League, head to the site.

Thanks to the work of the SABR Biographical Research Committee (and specifically to the efforts of Justin McKinney) we have added a net of one new player to major league baseball in the 1870s.

In the May/June newsletter, SABR noted

We had listed Fred William Hotchkiss Crane as playing for the Elizabeth Resolutes in 1873 and the woebegone Brooklyn Atlantics in 1875. Justin McKinney determined that these were two different players. The Elizabeth newspapers said that this player was William Crane. He had played with Elizabeth in 1872 and was called into service when Frank Fleet missed the train. For the 1875 Brooklyn games, the New York Clipper specifically stated that this was not Fred. It was Thomas Crane who had previously played with the Silver Stars. In summary, Fred Crane loses his major league status with William Crane as the 1873 Elizabeth player and Thomas Crane as the 1875 Brooklyn player. The good news about all this is that Justin was able to find William Crane. There was a William Crane of appropriate age who lived in Elizabeth and died in 1897. His obituary said that he was “an enthusiastic baseball player.” It is pretty nice to get confirmation that he was a ballplayer when he only played one game in 1873. A family tree on Ancestry provided the details of his birth.

Accordingly, we no longer list Fred Crane as a major league player and we now have pages for William Crane (1873 Elizabeth Resolutes) and Thomas Crane (1875 Brooklyn Atlantics)

While College Basketball Reference has the most expansive women's college basketball statistical coverage that you will find anywhere, there was previously 34 team seasons for which we were unable to unearth rosters and/or statistical coverage. Thanks to the assistance of Scott Vallery and our Summer 2025 intern Anne Friedman, we have been able to cut that number in half by adding rosters and/or statistics for 17 of these team seasons. They are, as follows: Read the rest of this entry

We've rolled out a cool update to Immaculate Grid! Now, you can use a link to share your personalized, completed grid with your friends, your group chat, and your social media followers. No more spoilers, no more screenshots, and no more hassle! Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to the sleuthing of Justin McKinney of the SABR Biographical Research Committee, a 'new' major league baseball player has been discovered. Previously, Joe Miller was listed as playing for (and managing) the Washington Nationals in 1872. This Miller later played with Keokuk and Chicago in 1875. McKinney's research determined that the Miller who played for the 1872 Washington club was actually William Miller, though. Furthermore, Joe Miller was not the manager. The manager was actually Bill Lennon, the team's catcher. The Bio Committee is still searching for more details on William Miller (like when and where he was born and died, his batting/throwing handedness, height/weight, etc).

Thank you to our friends at SABR for uncovering and sharing this discovery!

As of June 24, FBref has shut down the Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German versions of our website. The English language version of FBref will be unaffected by these changes and will be the default for all users.

We've made the decision to remove the foreign language versions of FBref, as these websites require a great deal of resources to maintain, and have not driven significant additional revenue. Additionally, free translation services have reached the point that a majority of our users will still be able to translate the English-language version of FBref into whatever language they need.

For our foreign language users, merci, gracias, danke, grazie, and obrigada for your support of our site. If you have any questions about these changes, feel free to reach out to our customer support team.

After many years of searching, we are pleased to announce that we have tracked down our white whale, of sorts: the 1980 Iona vs Holy Cross game in the First Round of the NCAA Tournament. For this game, we had never been able to track down full details on much of the box. Notably, we were missing FGA, Rebounds and Assists for most players. The box score looked like this:

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We have added a new feature to College Basketball Reference: a comprehensive list of every game-winning buzzer-beater in women's NCAA Tournament history. Details on methodology can be found here. Entering the 2025 Final Four, there have been 47 qualifying shots in the history of the women's tournament, with the last one being Ohio State's Jacy Sheldon in a 2023 Round of 32 game against North Carolina. Read the rest of this entry