The Blue Alliance: The FRC Data Hub

What The Blue Alliance is

The Blue Alliance (TBA) at thebluealliance.com is the community-run database of nearly everything that happens in FRC: event schedules, match results, team histories, rankings, awards, and computed statistics. It is the single most useful free tool in scouting because it gives you official, accurate data for every match without you having to collect it.

What you can pull from TBA

• Match schedules for an upcoming event, so you can pre-load your scouting app and plan which matches to watch.
• Live and final results for every match, including the breakdown of how each alliance earned its points and ranking points.
• Qualification rankings and the values used to sort them.
• Event-specific statistics like OPR, DPR, and CCWM (covered in the next lesson).
• Team history: how a team has performed at past events this season and in prior years.

The TBA Read API

TBA exposes a free Read API (v3) so your own tools can fetch data automatically. You request a free API key (an "auth key") from your TBA account, then call endpoints to get JSON for events, matches, rankings, and stats. Common uses:

• Auto-fill your scouting spreadsheet's match schedule and official scores.
• Cross-check your scouted contributions against official alliance scores (the accuracy check from the previous module).
• Pull OPR/DPR/CCWM into your own analysis alongside your scouting averages.

Even if your team never writes code, the website alone is enough to do serious analysis. Many teams keep a laptop on TBA during an event to watch rankings update and confirm results.

How to use TBA in a scouting workflow

1. Before the event: open your event page, read the team list, and skim each team's recent results to set expectations.
2. Before each match: check your opponents' and partners' recent matches and current ranking.
3. During the event: watch rankings live to predict who will be alliance captains.
4. Before alliance selection: combine TBA stats with your scouting data to finalize your picklist.

TBA vs your own scouting

TBA gives you official outcomes (scores, rankings) and derived team-strength estimates (OPR and friends). What it cannot give you is the why and the things the scoreboard never records, especially defense, reliability under pressure, and driver skill. TBA tells you a robot's alliances scored a lot; only your scouting tells you that robot personally scored most of it, or that it spent half the match playing great defense. Treat TBA as the authoritative backbone you hang your own observations on, never as a replacement for watching robots.