Load college football provider player id aliases from the SportsDataverse data repo

Loads every player id another source uses for an ESPN college football athlete, with the ESPN team the athlete was on and the seasons the id held. Use it to map an NCAA (stats.ncaa.org), CBS, Yahoo or Fox player id onto the ESPN athlete_id. stats.ncaa.org roster ids are new every season, so an NCAA player has one row per season. Unmatched provider ids are not included. Published to the cfb_groups release tag on the sportsdataverse-data repo.

See load_cfb_team_aliases() for team ids and names.

Usage

load_cfb_player_aliases(..., dbConnection = NULL, tablename = NULL)

Arguments

...

Additional arguments passed to an underlying function that writes the data into a database.

dbConnection

A DBIConnection object, as returned by DBI::dbConnect()

tablename

The name of the data table within the database

Value

Returns a cfbfastR_data tibble with one row per player alias, or NULL after appending the rows to tablename when dbConnection and tablename are both given.

col_name	types	description
league	character	League key, always cfb.
athlete_id	character	ESPN athlete id.
athlete_id_source	character	Id system of athlete_id: espn.
source	character	Source of the player id: ncaa, cbs, yahoo or fox.
source_player_id	character	The source's own player id.
team_id	character	ESPN team id of the team the athlete was on when matched.
source_team_id	character	The source's own team id when it gives one (the season's stats.ncaa.org team id), else NA.
valid_from	integer	First season (fall year) the id is on that team, inclusive.
valid_to	integer	Last season (fall year) the id is on that team, inclusive; a gap or a change of match method splits the window into two rows.
match_method	character	How the id was matched: the source leg's own method (NCAA name_jersey, name, last_jersey, jaro_winkler; CFB rosters name), crosswalk (a leg that names none), propagated (carried from the same id's match in another season) or override (a hand-verified fix).
match_confidence	numeric	The leg's own confidence where it gives one (the lowest in the window; NCAA tiers score 1, 0.95, 0.9 and 0.85), else NA.
evidence	character	The asset or file the row came from.

Author

Saiem Gilani

Examples

# \donttest{
  try(load_cfb_player_aliases())
#> ── college football provider player id aliases from the SportsDataverse data rep
#> ℹ Data updated: 2026-11-06 08:26:15 UTC
#> # A tibble: 421,766 × 12
#>    league athlete_id athlete_id_source source source_player_id team_id
#>    <chr>  <chr>      <chr>             <chr>  <chr>            <chr>  
#>  1 cfb    100009     espn              ncaa   4242411          12     
#>  2 cfb    100009     espn              ncaa   4555821          12     
#>  3 cfb    100009     espn              ncaa   4948498          12     
#>  4 cfb    102597     espn              cbs    3171029          344    
#>  5 cfb    102597     espn              cbs    3171029          264    
#>  6 cfb    102597     espn              ncaa   7021730          344    
#>  7 cfb    102597     espn              ncaa   7289213          344    
#>  8 cfb    102597     espn              ncaa   7752435          344    
#>  9 cfb    102597     espn              ncaa   8059016          344    
#> 10 cfb    102597     espn              yahoo  ncaaf.p.316907   344    
#> # ℹ 421,756 more rows
#> # ℹ 6 more variables: source_team_id <chr>, valid_from <int>, valid_to <int>,
#> #   match_method <chr>, match_confidence <dbl>, evidence <chr>
# }