I love watching college basketball and football
I love watching games, but I don’t follow any particular teams and I don’t have the time to watch every game. I usually just try to watch the games where both teams are ranked, but it isn’t always easy to find them. That’s why I wrote a python program to webscrape ESPN to get the information I need.
Thankfully, ESPN has a schedule of games for both college basketball and football, and they are very similar. Because of this, I wrote a python script that can read both, with only a few variations depending on the sport it is looking at. The webscraping was easier than normal, because ESPN formats the schedule into html tables, and has plenty of descriptive tags to help identify everything.
I run the script each day at 12 EST, and I include the teams, which team is the home team, the time, and which network is showing the game. In the end, I just wanted a really easy way to know which games to watch, and the extra information just makes it easier to get the game on.
I made a twitter account, @RankedMatchup, to tweet out the important games. Not only do I follow it from my personal account, but I also get notifications on my phone when this account tweets anything. This way, I get the alerts on my phone right after they get tweeted. Couldn’t be easier.
For a sneak preview, here is @RankedMatchup: