First of all, watching my Boilermakers be in what appears to be a free-fall as they have lost 6 of their last 11 games has been tough to watch. Knowing how good that Braden Smith, Trey Kaufman-Renn and Fletcher Loyer have been over the last 4 years has made me want this senior year to go better for them than it did. There is certainly no reason to be embarrassed about being one of the top 15 teams in the country. But when you start the season as the pre-season #1 team in the country, you are thinking about winning championships and not simply being a ranked team. Obviously, they still have time to fix things. At this point for the Boilers, the only games that really matter are the ones after March 10th (since I suspect that the seniors would love one last chance at a Big 10 tournament championship).

After Ohio State totally beat up my Boilers in a game the Buckeyes clearly needed for their post-season hopes, I felt that I should at least start making progress on getting the basketball box scores – since that typically takes a couple days.

So, I wasn’t too happy to find that after pulling a day of games that I was getting errors accessing the NCAA stats website. Based on some of my research, it looks like they have instituted new rules about accessing their site that blocks web-scrapers like the one I have written. I am very disappointed in this, since I have been doing this for years so that I can build my handicapping models. It also means that I can’t see some of the links I provide to all of you that list some of the statistics like the WAB and NET rankings. It looks like there might be some paid versions that do it, but I don’t know that I have the time or the desire to pay the costs for that solution.

So, I need to set some expectations. Since the NCAA clearly doesn’t want me to use their site for this, I will look for another option. But that means that I might simply not have the time to re-write my data collector. I will apologize in advance to all of you who use the summaries that I create – I really hope that I can find an alternative, but with only 13 days before the tournament, it just might not be realistic.

For those of you who simply like the blog, the bracketology and the crazy handicapping (and of course, the basketball pool itself), do not worry – I will still provide most of my normal pages of the website. It simply might not have the research page with the statistical based cheat sheet that I provide.

Thinking about this makes me sadder than when my Boilers lost on Sunday. I might simply have to watch the awesome game tonight between #2 Arizona and #6 Iowa State. Since #1 Duke is beating NC State by 27 points, I can probably find something better to watch until the Big 12 battle comes on.