dot-ncaa_is_interstitial: *Detect a stats.ncaa.org Akamai interstitial challenge*

In baseballr: Acquiring and Analyzing Baseball Data

Detect a stats.ncaa.org Akamai interstitial challenge

Description

Some stats.ncaa.org routes (e.g. ⁠/teams/{id}/season_to_date_stats⁠) are gated behind Akamai Bot Manager. When challenged, the server returns HTTP 200 but the body is a short interstitial shell (a bm-verify meta-refresh, an akamai_validation.html iframe, or a request_quota_reached.html notice) rather than the data page. A static request cannot solve the challenge, so we detect the shell and degrade gracefully instead of silently scraping a page that has no data tables.

Usage

.ncaa_is_interstitial(body)

Arguments

body	A character scalar: the response body (HTML) as text.

Value

TRUE when body looks like an Akamai interstitial, else FALSE.

baseballr documentation built on Aug. 27, 2026, 1:07 a.m.