[R] Data source for American college football rankings?

[Douglas Bates]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Douglas Bates <bates at stat.wisc.edu> wrote:
> An interesting, and topical, example of multivariate data for
> classroom illustrations are the American college football rankings.
> Starting at the end of October (or "week 8", the 8th week of the
> football season) a set of rankings called the BCS (Bowl Championship
> Series) will be published.  This is a composite ranking based on two
> subjective polls, the Harris and USA Today polls, and a trimmed mean
> of 6 objective scores, the so-called computer rankings.  The Harris
> and USA Today polls are currently available along with several others
> (the best known and most often quoted is the AP poll but, for
> complicated reasons, it was replaced in the BCS rankings by the Harris
> poll).
>
> I enjoy using these as classroom examples but I haven't found a web
> site from which I can download the data directly and am reduced to
> "screen scraping" the HTML from popular sites like ESPN.  Does anyone
> know of a site from which one can download the current poll results?

To follow up on my own posting, these data are interesting in part
because they are presented as tables in many, many places and almost
never presented graphically.  Some graphical analysis from the
rankings on October 21, 2007 is shown in

http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/BCS-2007-10-21.pdf

It's not often that an example that many students find interesting can
be used to illustrate trimmed means, various correlation measures,
scatterplot matrices, parallel coordinate plots, principal components
and biplots.