SRE Users: Do you need monitoring capabilities for NCAA Div I-AA and lower divisions?

[Slugger]

For those that don't care about the details, just answer the poll question. For those that are curious, read on...

Ok, now that I'm in charge of the livepvrdata service as well, I've discovered some interesting things.

Namely, the current support for all things NCAA is handled by monitoring espn.com. Unfortunately, espn.com does some real weird and interesting tricks with AJAX and other "neat" technologies that renders their web pages nearly useless as a reliable source. Basically, when you request an espn.com scoreboard page you get a version from espn.com that is cached on their servers and may or may not be current. Then when your browser loads the page it then gets the very latest updates for all the games on the page using AJAX, etc. Obviously, since I'm just fetching the raw HTML from espn.com, I'm not able to "update" it through their AJAX process. So when using espn.com, monitors aren't always getting the freshest, most current status information. This leads to games possibly being extended for way too long. What lead me to start investigating this is that yesterday's football games seemed to extend for up to 15 minutes too long, which I don't like to see. What I discovered is that most games seem to finally end about 7-15 minutes late. This isn't ideal, but not the end of the world - I mean the whole game is still being recorded. Then I take a look at the HTML data I'm receiving for yesterday's games from espn.com: According to the raw HTML, there are still 6 football games in progress that started last night. Of course, when you load the scoreboard in a browser it tells you all the games are over, but the cached raw HTML from espn.com still tells me the games are in progress.

These espn.com web pages are so useless I've come to discover that livepvrdata stopped using them for the pro sports. From some code comments, the only reason espn.com is still used for NCAA is because it's the only source available that has access to the most games - namely Division I-AA, Division II and Division III.

I've found some other more reliable sources for NCAA, but they all seem to only provide access to Division I-A. So before I go gutting the NCAA monitors, I'm curious to know, just how many people actually record/monitor games from these lower divisions? If support was lost, would it be the end of world?

Ultimately, I'm going to have to dump the espn.com monitors for NCAA and move to something else. I'm more or less gauging interest in the lower divisions to see if I need to continue searching for lower division support or if I can proceed with the new source I've already found with Div I-A support ready to go.

Comments welcome...

[Spartan]

Hey Slugger, once upon a time, I wrote a plugin for gbpvr called sportsscores.
Here is what I wrote on the wiki at that time:

Most data feeds are obtained via http://cbs.sportsline.com while CFL comes from http://www.tsn.ca and soccer data comes from http://soccernet.espn.go.com.

I want to say that I had best results using the mobile versions of those websites, but it's been a few years. I dont think that helps for non-IA schools though...