The Scenario
You are a college football travel blogger. Your content calendar has a big feature planned: "Stadium Tour USA" — every FBS stadium ranked by capacity, with location, surface type, and a verdict on whether it is worth the drive. You need the raw data in a Google Sheet before you can write a single word of the feature.
The CollegeFootballData.com API has venue data for every FBS program. It is Wednesday morning. Your post goes live Sunday.
The bad version:
- You search for the venues endpoint, find it, hit it
- You get back 130+ stadium records in JSON with field names like "grass" as a boolean instead of a "Grass / Turf" label
- You spend two hours formatting the response, writing "Grass" or "FieldTurf" based on the boolean, cleaning city and state into one column
- You end up with a functional sheet but you are behind on the actual writing
- The post goes live Monday, a day late, and your newsletter subscribers notice.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI interprets the API's surface boolean and formats the table the way you want it.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all college football venues from College Football Data and write stadium name, team, capacity, city, state, and grass/turf type into this Google Sheet sorted by capacity descending.
SheetXAI pulls all venues, converts the surface type into a readable label, and writes a clean table sorted from the largest stadium to the smallest. Your feature research is done before noon.
What You Get
A clean venue table sorted by capacity descending:
- Stadium name — official venue name for every FBS program
- Home team — which program plays there
- Capacity — the sort key, from "The Big House" down
- City and state — for travel planning and the road trip feature angle
- Surface type — "Grass" or "Turf" written as readable text, not a boolean
The top 10 by capacity is the first sidebar in the post. The surface type column lets you filter for "natural grass only" stadiums for the sub-feature on atmosphere purists.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Venue data has gaps and analytical follow-up questions. SheetXAI handles both.
When some stadiums have no capacity recorded
A handful of programs — often newer FBS members — may have incomplete venue records.
In this Google Sheet, flag any row where the capacity column is blank or zero with "Capacity Unavailable" in a new column. Do not remove those rows — keep them in the full list but exclude them from the ranked sort.
When you want to group stadiums by region for travel planning
Your tour has a regional structure: Southeast, Midwest, Big 12 country, West Coast. You need a region label per stadium.
Add a "Region" column to this Google Sheet based on the state column. Use these groupings: Southeast = AL, GA, FL, SC, NC, TN, MS, KY, VA; Midwest = OH, MI, IN, IL, WI, MN, IA, MO; Plains/Big 12 = TX, OK, KS, NE, CO; West = CA, OR, WA, UT, AZ, NV, HI; Northeast = PA, NY, NJ, CT, MA, MD; Other = everything else.
When you want to filter to grass-only stadiums above 60,000 capacity
The natural grass filter is a key editorial decision for the "traditional college football experience" angle.
Filter this Google Sheet to stadiums where surface type is "Grass" and capacity is 60,000 or more. Copy those rows to a new tab called "Grass Cathedrals" sorted by capacity descending. Add a column with the state's timezone (Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific) for travel scheduling.
When you want the full research table with distance calculations
Your travel planning needs driving distances from a home base. You want the full venue table plus a rough distance estimate from Columbus, Ohio.
In this Google Sheet, add a column called "Approx Drive from Columbus OH" that estimates the driving distance in hours from Columbus, Ohio to each stadium's city and state. Use rough regional estimates rather than exact GPS routing — within 1 hour of accuracy is fine. Round to the nearest half hour.
The pattern: the raw venue pull is the research foundation. Every editorial question builds from it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull all FBS venue data into a sheet. The CollegeFootballData.com integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For more, see how to pull team season stats or the CollegeFootballData.com in Google Sheets overview.