Getting Started
Alright so I decided I wanted to dig into the 2014 Ohio State roster for a project. Figured it’d be simple to pull up names, jersey numbers, stats—basic stuff, y’know? Went straight to Google and typed something like “Ohio State football team 2014 players”. Bam, tons of links pop up but half were dead ends or wanted subscriptions. Annoying as heck.
The Grind
Started clicking through random sports sites I remembered from back then. ESPN’s page looked promising at first, but their 2014 archive was totally gutted. Just blank spaces where player names should’ve been. Tried NCAA’s official site next—big mistake. Felt like walking through digital quicksand with all those broken redirects.
- Found an old PDF roster: Saved it real quick before the link died. Opened it up… 58 pages of tiny text. Print layout nightmare. No search function either.
- Manually copied data: Spent like 45 minutes alt-tabbing between the PDF and Excel. Messy formatting meant numbers bled into names, positions got scrambled. Copied Decker’s whole row as “K Taylor78OL” instead of separate columns. Rage-quit twice.
- Dove into Wayback Machine: Pulled up Ohio State’s 2014 athletic site snapshot. Page loaded! But… stats were images. Couldn’t highlight/copy anything. Just stared at Cardale Jones’s blurry 157 passing yards screenshot.
Finally Scraped It Together
Remembered some janky web scraper tool I used years back. Fired it up, punched in the Wayback URL, and crossed my fingers. Took 20 tries adjusting settings—first it grabbed sidebar ads, then only header text. Finally got the table structure right. Exported as CSV and popped it open… columns still overlapped. Had to manually fix Bryant’s “DL#90” splitting into “DL” and “90” across cells. Took another hour cleaning typos like “Bosa, Joe y” instead of “Joey”.
Ended up with this Frankenstein spreadsheet. Had Braxton Miller’s #5 QB stats next to Eli Apple’s #13 DB tackles. Knew it was trash but slapped “FINAL” on the file anyway. Sometimes you just gotta accept mediocre results when free sources fight you. Lesson learned: archived data from 2014? Better bring patience and whiskey.
