CollegeFootballData API Review 2026

CollegeFootballData (CFBD) is a college football data API that you can start on with a free key. It covers games and scores back to 1869, play-by-play, team and player stats, rosters, recruiting, polls, ratings and advanced metrics such as PPA and win probability. You authenticate with a bearer token, and the API sits at api.collegefootballdata.com.

It's a data API first, and it also publishes betting lines for college games. A REST endpoint, /lines, returns the lines per game from each provider, with spread, over/under and moneyline. That makes it a good companion to an odds feed when you need the football data around a price.

The same platform runs a college basketball API, and one subscription covers both.

The OpenAPI spec lists 93 paths in 21 groups, including games, plays, drives, teams, rosters, coaches, rankings, recruiting, ratings, metrics, stats, draft and betting. The data availability page gives the coverage by dataset (verified September 2026):

• Games, scores, records and matchups: 1869 to the present.
• Drives and raw plays: 2001 to the present, with coverage that varies by game.
• Betting lines and against-the-spread records: 2013 to the present, with provider and field coverage that varies by game.
• Weather: 2001 to the present, for some games.

The advanced layer is where CFBD stands out. It serves predicted points added (PPA), opponent-adjusted team and player efficiency (WEPA), SP+, Elo, FPI and SRS ratings, pregame and in-game win probability and CORE ratings, each with a methodology page. A live play-by-play endpoint, /live/plays, caches results for up to five seconds.

Odds are a side feature. The lines are historical and per game, with no player props or live odds in the spec, so pair CFBD with a sports odds API for prices and props. For pro football and other sports, see the sports data API guide.

CFBD sells access by monthly call quota, and each tier adds features. Every tier, the free one included, has the historical data, stats, recruiting, betting lines and advanced metrics. The paid tiers run on Patreon. They add opponent-adjusted metrics, weather and the live scoreboard (Tier 1), live play-by-play (Tier 2) and a GraphQL API with subscriptions (Tier 3 and up).

The terms are unusually friendly. They allow commercial use on every tier, including paid, ad-supported and affiliate products, and the tier sets only the quota. You can cache responses, train models and publish your own derived work. You can't resell the raw data as a dataset, a bulk download or a substitute API, and you can't expose your key in public code.

Every plan is a monthly price for a call quota (checked November 2026):

• Free: 1,000 calls a month, no card.
• Academic (.edu email): free, 3,000 calls a month.
• Tier 1: $1 a month, 5,000 calls.
• Tier 2: $5 a month, 30,000 calls, with live play-by-play.
• Tier 3: $10 a month, 75,000 calls, with GraphQL.
• Tier 4: $15 a month, 125,000 calls.
• Tier 5: $20 a month, 200,000 calls.
• Tier 6: $30 a month, 500,000 calls.

The calls are shared with the college basketball API. If you pass your monthly limit, the key may stop working until the next month, so watch your usage with the /info endpoint.

Request a free key on the CFBD key page. You enter an email address and pick a primary use, and the key arrives in your inbox. The free tier takes no credit card (checked November 2026).

The free tier gives 1,000 calls a month. A .edu email address gets the Academic tier at 3,000 calls a month. Paid Patreon tiers run from $1 to $30 a month.

Send the key as a bearer token: Authorization: Bearer <key>. Keep it in an environment variable and call the API from server-side code, because the terms bar putting a key in a public repository or a browser bundle. A call with no valid key returns HTTP 401 with a message that points you back to the key page.

This sample calls GET /games for Michigan's 2023 season, the example in the docs (checked November 2026). It sends the key in the bearer header and prints a few fields from each game. The response is a JSON array. Each object carries fields such as week, homeTeam, homePoints, awayTeam and awayPoints, which come from the OpenAPI spec. We hold no key, so we haven't run this call.

import os

import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://api.collegefootballdata.com/games",
    params={"year": 2023, "team": "Michigan"},
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['CFBD_API_KEY']}"},
    timeout=15,
)
resp.raise_for_status()

for game in resp.json()[:5]:
    print(game["week"], game["homeTeam"], game["homePoints"], game["awayTeam"], game["awayPoints"])

The official cfbd package on PyPI wraps the same endpoints if you prefer typed clients.

The limit is a monthly call quota, and it's shared with the college basketball API: 1,000 calls on the free tier, 3,000 on Academic, then 5,000 to 500,000 across Tiers 1 to 6 (checked November 2026). The docs state no per-minute limit. If you pass your quota, the key may stop working until next month. Call /info or /info/usage to see your remaining calls.

Official clients exist for Python (cfbd), TypeScript and C#, and the cfbfastR package for R is third-party. The docs offer a full OpenAPI spec at /api-docs.json, an llms.txt and a Getting started page, with a GraphQL API from Tier 3. The CFBD blog carries usage examples. We found no status page. The spec lists admin@collegefootballdata.com as support.

CFBD fits builders who need college football depth at a low price.

• Modelers who want play-level data and ready-made efficiency metrics for a spread or win-probability model.
• Students and researchers, who get 3,000 free calls a month.
• App and newsletter builders who want a cheap, commercial-friendly feed of schedules, ratings and stats.

It doesn't offer live odds or player props. For those, start in the API directory, and use CFBD for the football data behind the price.

CFBD publishes a full OpenAPI spec, llms.txt files, official Python and TypeScript clients and clear terms, and its top paid tier costs $30 a month. That's a strong package for a data API at this price.

A free key takes an email address, so request one and pull a season of games before you decide on a tier.

Last updated: 5 November 2026 · How providers get listed