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Items for deletion/merger

I've nominiated two items for deletion/merger:



Please comment. Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 06:50, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Series record column in rivalry pages

Many rivalry pages have a column listing the series record as it is each year. I tried to add one to World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party but it continually gets reverted. I also tried removing the one on Army-Navy Game but that also got reverted.


Which approach should we be taking, having the year-by-year series record or not? --96.32.129.220 (talk) 04:12, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know that a consensus was ever reached on this issue or even if the matter has ever really been discussed with regard to a standard. My feeling is we can probably do without the running tally of series record in those yearly result tables. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:31, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


JW, the vast majority of the series record tables in the 100 or so rivalry articles do not include the year-by-year cumulative series record. User 96.32.129.220 just deleted the year-by-year cumulative series record from about 10 rivalry articles. With those deletions, I believe that none of the rivalry articles include the year-by-year cumulative record. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:40, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
Absolutely false. Half of the articles containing any sort of year-by-year records tables did included cumulative series records, at least prior to your edits removing them and the now blocked IP's systematic edits citing non-existing consensus or WP:CFB style guidelines. I went through Category:College football rivalries in the United States and counted 55 with cumulative series records prior to your edits and 55 without (and the "without" total included listing in formats different than the typical tables such as the Big Game, as well as those including those with a note column, eg. List of Harvard–Yale football games). CrazyPaco (talk) 02:52, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Crazypaco, thank you for your effort, but you need to double-check your fingers and toes. I have counted the 142 articles listed in college football rivalries category twice, once last night and once again this morning. There is also a 143rd non-duplicate rivalry game buried in one of the subcategories that does not appear in the main category. It takes 45 minutes to an hour to do a proper pencil-and-paper count of these 143 rivalry games. Here are the actual totals:


  • fifty-six (56) have series record tables, but do not include cumulative series records for each year in the series;
  • forty-nine (49) have series record tables, and include a cumulative series record for each year in the series;
  • one (1) oddball has a series record table and includes the cumulative series record by decade;
  • twenty (20) football rivalry articles include no series record table of any kind;
  • twelve (12) are parent rivalry articles that list multiple-sport rivalries (e.g., all North Carolina-NCSU sports), multiple rivals of the same school (e.g. Notre Dame football rivalries), multiple rivalries of the same type (e.g. HBC rivalries), parent articles from which a separate game list has been split (e.g. Harvard-Yale), or all NCAA football rivalry articles on Wikipedia; none of these parent articles includes a year-by-year series record table for football;
  • three (3) are single-game articles that include no series record tables; and
  • two (2) are user sandbox articles that have never gone live in Wikipedia namespace.


That is a total of 143 separate rivalry game articles in the category. Fifty-six of the 106 articles that include a year-by-year series record table do not include a yearly cumulative series record in the table; 49 do include a yearly cumulative series record; the one oddball includes a cumulative series by decade. Those are the totals. Please feel free to check my count before either of us provides any more inaccurate information. For the record, this count is based on all articles as they stood before the IP user engaged in his crazy spree; thanks to your reversions, none of the IP user's deletions currently stand. The current majority practice (56 to 49) is not to include the cumulative series record in the yearly entries. For the sake of accuracy, I have struck the "vast majority" text in my comment immediately above yours. I should have performed a comprehensive count before making the comment; I did not. Mea culpa. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
I know I made one mistake in counting Florida vs. Georgia Football Classic in the category that included series records, which it did have in one previous version, but I now see that was inserted and subsequently deleted outside the recent changes and it best fits in the "without" category. I also counted the oddball article with the cumulative series record total in the "with" category because I counted several other articles with similar oddball listings by decade that didn't have cumulative records in the "without" category. The other four discrepancies I have no idea about, and I loath to repeat that exercise for such a minor difference. Thank you for your thorough count. CrazyPaco (talk) 10:34, 24 November 2011 (UTC)


It appears that some are in favor (one editor who suggested that it could be included on UGA-UF with a footnote to indicate the discrepancy in the records of UGA and UF, and another editor who reverted my removal of the content on the Army-Navy article) and some are not, which would clearly mean there is no consensus. I, as one of the editors under this IP address, suggest that it may be important for some rivalries but not others. For example, for UGA-UF there have been periods of dominance by each team for 19-20 years at a time while for UGA-Auburn the series as a whole has been very closely matched throughout, and a running count of the series record would be useful info in both cases. But for others it might not be very useful especially where there may be forfeited games, etc. involved such as Kansas-Missouri which is one that I recently removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.32.129.220 (talk) 07:28, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


IMO the running total should be included if only for the fact that it will help prevent people from having to count up the wins and losses when updating the total series in the infobox or in the article text. The article is sort of self-referencing with the running totals. — X96lee15 (talk) 19:14, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


X96, no one should be "counting" anything; every records table should be properly sourced and footnoted to NCAA records, team media guides, or another reliable CFB source such as College Football Data Warehouse. We CFB editors, as a project, need to tighten our practices and stop allowing unsourced text in our articles per WP:V and WP:RS. As for sourcing the rivalry records tables, line-by-line footnotes should not be necessary; one footnote at the bottom of the table should be sufficient, unless the table information was compiled from multiple sources, and then each source should be cited. There are way too many unsourced fancruft additions, opinions, editorial comments, and NPOV violations that are added to and survive in these CFB rivalry articles. When everyone properly sources content, many content disputes evaporate and we are left with much better written and factually verifiable articles. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:33, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
True. But we all know there are many stats that are not sourced in the manner. Especially rivalry records, which are probably only really updated in a RS once per year in the schools' media guides. You're 100% right though, all the articles should be sourced better than they currently are. — X96lee15 (talk) 20:17, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
X96, I'll readily concede that the best sources do not update until after the CFB season concludes, but I think we can trust most of fellow editors to add one win or one loss to the previously sourced overall series win-loss total. Most of these rivalry records tables should probably be sourced to the current media guides of both teams, in addition to CFDW or the like. Most major teams' media guides are available on-line in PDF or similar form, and CFDW updates within a month of the season's end. Perhaps it's time we take another step forward. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:37, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


I think the record should be included in a column. Any long standing rivalry has periods where one team dominates over another, interspersed with parity. Such a column shows the evolving series record easily. The longer college football rivalries are well over 100 games and are not easy to count. —Ute in DC (talk) 00:40, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Agree with Ute. Running records should be able to exist at the consensus level of each article. They do no harm. This is unnecessary WP:CREEP. CrazyPaco (talk) 06:12, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


Ute, you're a smart guy, and I would like you to consider what we are doing globally, not locally on articles of particular concern to you. I'd like to share my reactions to the present minority practice of including the cumulative record as an additional column for each year in the rivalry . . . (1) First, including the cumulative series record is unnecessary; nothing shows the history of winning streaks, alternating home-and-away wins, etc., better than the existing two-color schemes representing wins by each of the two teams to the rivalry. The cumulative win-loss column is a redundant option. (2) Second, in virtually all instances, the cumulative win-loss-tie is unsourced and unsourceable. When a WP editor compiles the cumulative record on his own, it constitutes original research per WP:OR, and is subject to being removed per WP:V and WP:RS. As a rule, every fact in the article, including the records table should be sourced and footnoted (see my comment to X96lee15 above). (3) Third, these expanded rivalry records tables are duplicative of the existing season records of the respective teams, and to which the rivalry tables should be linked. The rivalry records tables should be short, sweet, and to the point: date, winning team, combined single-column score, and location. When kept to these essential data, these records tables may be presented in a relatively small space by using a two or three-column format that allows the reader to quickly scan for the result he is seeking. (4) Fourth, these rivalry articles are one of the backwater swamps of the WP:CFB project, where individual editors, many of whom are SPAs, run wild, and the larger project exercises very little oversight. I have found examples where these "expanded" records constituted virtually all of the substance of the article, to the detriment of the written series history section and the notable game section. Several SPAs have added wildly inconsistent and unsourced game notes as yet another column to fill the perceived "space." This is nuts. We should be focused on well-written text, supported by simple, easily understood graphics, with both text and graphics sourced and footnoted; unsourced graphics should not be allowed to swallow entire articles to the point where most of the text appears in the records table.


At the end of the day, Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a sports almanac. By definition, that means we emphasize encyclopedic knowledge, not fancruft and random trivia. Just because someone has the time to compile ever-expanding records tables, with original research statistics, does not mean that we as a project should accept every addition. Bottom line: the existing two-color scheme of the rivalry records table already does a better job of answering the question you raised above. Once again, we need to pare our records tables to the encyclopedic essentials, not turn them into the Macy's Christmas tree, where we include every imaginable option. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 01:53, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


Fundamentally, I disagree that this is original research. The cumulative record is listed in reliable sources. It's not original research to do the basic math required to subtract one or more games to find out what the record was after a specific game. See WP:CALC, which explicitly allows for basic math to be performed. —Ute in DC (talk) 02:01, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


Ute, taking a sourced cumulative win-loss record through the 2010 season, and adding an additional 2011 win or loss to it, is within the scope of WP:CALC. Compiling 120+ unsourced cumulative win-loss records is WP:OR. That, however, is a secondary argument. My main problem with the inclusion of the cumulative record is that it's unnecessary trivia that distracts from the core data, and to reiterate, any encyclopedic value in understanding the history of streaks, etc., is already graphically embedded in the two-color scheme of the rivalry records tables. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 02:36, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


See, I don't view the record as trivia. That may be the one piece of information I most look for in a rivalry page. The score of a game in 1922 means less to me than that at one point team X led a series by 10 games, but later, team Y overtook the series lead. The color scheme gets you part way there—a reader gets an impressionistic sense of how a series has changed—but the raw number is what I'm really after.


I would also like to point out that the Georgia-fan IP user, Special:Contributions/96.32.129.220, has found about 50 rivalry articles (and counting) that had this information. Some of those rivalries are among the most visited rivalry pages such as Notre Dame–USC rivalry, Army–Navy Game, and the Iron Bowl. A lot of editors have independently decided this was useful information. —Ute in DC (talk) 03:40, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


Is there some reason we need to force consistency across all these articles? Conceivably the record is important to some of these articles and not to others. I can tell you that virtually no source on Florida-Georgia contains this statistic, so there's absolutely no call give it such a prominent place in the article. Conceivably, sources for other rivalries do include a running series record, and it would be acceptable to include in those articles on that basis. Honestly, these article have much bigger problems than this (such as a pervasive lack of basic sourcing and an insistence on titling the articles with silly nicknames, in contradiction to the guidelines).--Cúchullain t/c 15:59, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


Cuchullain, everything should be made as standard and as consistent as possible. That's a core virtue of Wikipedia. Simple arithmetic and counting do not constitute original research. Explicit sourcing of the running record count here is irrelevant. Locking fundamentals like this issue down will allow everyone to move on the "bigger problems". One thing that would help a lot with these rivalry articles would be to build some templates to standardize the infoboxes and the yearly results tables. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:10, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


JW, performing 200+ calculations to derive the cumulative series record in the 100-game series described above by Ute is not within the WP:CALC exception. In the absence of reliable and verifiable sources per WP:RS and WP:V, we are compiling original research statistics per WP:OR, just as surely as if we were calculating QB efficiency ratings or earned run averages derived from other statistics. Can anyone explain a logical difference between performing 200 calculations to compile the year-by-year cumulative series record, and then doing the same thing for games played on the home field, as a visitor and at a neutral site? How is that different from compiling QB efficiency ratings? As I originally pointed out to X96lee15 above, adding one win or one loss to the sourced 2010 series record is within the CALC exception; compiling an entire unsourced series record table is not.


I am also curious to hear how we propose to deal with rivalries that have disputed records such as Florida–Georgia (a 1904 game claimed by UGA predates the 1905 founding of UF), and Kansas–Missouri (one claims a forfeiture, the other a legitimate on-the-field win); rivalries in which one of the teams has forfeited games such as Alabama–Auburn; and rivalries wherein the NCAA has vacated wins of one of the teams such as Notre Dame–USC, Michigan–Ohio State, etc. Displaying one cumulative series record or the other is to take sides without the benefit of a source, and simultaneously violates a neutral point of view per WP:NPOV and Wikipedia's core sourcing policies of WP:V and WP:RS. Displaying two cumulative series records side-by-side may help alleviate the NPOV issue, but may in fact put two sides of a disputed record on equal footing when one argument has a historically stronger basis—just one of the many problems that can arise when we agree among ourselves that these records tables do not need to be sourced and footnoted. Moreover, the dueling, side-by-side series records are graphically hideous and confusing to the reader. These are not issues that are easily dealt with in the space of a series record table that seeks to present historical data in a clear and simple graphical format; these issues require textual explanation and context, and, yes, they also require sources because, by definition, they are already subject to disputes in the real world.


I conclude by quoting Wikipedia's verifiability policy: "To show that it is not original research, all material added to articles must be attributable to a reliable, published source appropriate for the content in question, but in practice you do not need to attribute everything. This policy requires that all quotations and anything challenged or likely to be challenged be attributed in the form of an inline citation that directly supports the material." [emphasis mine] In practice, every fact should be sourced and footnoted, especially in CFB articles, which are more prone to factual disputes and NPOV violations than most other subjects that do not involve the Middle East or the Balkans. The best way to end (and often prevent) such disputes is to include a sourced footnote. Allowing the compilation of such unsourced CFB stats is something we will regret later. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 18:06, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


For an example of where original research statistics tables will take us, please see the discussion below regarding the new table regarding top-25 matchups of Big 10 teams. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:08, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


I just don't see how adding or subtracting 1, even if done multiple times, is anything other than "routine calculation" of WP:CALC. We're talking really basic arithmetic here. If an article has a source that shows each teams' wins and losses, then the article has complied with Wikipedia's verifiability policy. —Ute in DC (talk) 20:25, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


Ute, any time you take a source, massage the source's data, and then present the data in a form materially different from the original source relied upon, you are engaged in data analysis and original research. The WP:CALC exception does not contemplate hundreds of calculations to massage the data into a new form, even if they are "routine calculations." WP:CALC does not contemplate multiple calculations and compilation of derived data, and its presentation of the derived data in a completely new and different form. In fact, you are not adding or subtracting 1, in order to compile these tables in the absence of a source, you are engaged in analysis by categorizing the games and then tabulating the number of wins, losses and ties in the series. Your "simple arithmetic" argument belies what is actually being done; you are taking a source's existing data and deriving new data from it.


You attended grad school/law school; you understand the difference in rephrasing a source to avoid plagiarism and copyright problems, and compiling new data from existing sources to draw new conclusions. WP:CALC is intended to permit year-to-year updates, conversions of heights and weights, or calculation of a person's age from a sourced birth date. WP:CALC was not intended to permit the wholesale compilation of unsourced statistical tabulations. The wholesale massaging of sourced data to derive new and different statistics, as you are suggesting is permitted by the WP:CLAC exception, is not materially different from what TonyTheTiger is doing with his new statistical tables of ranked matchups of Big 10 teams—it's not different in kind, only in degree (please see discussion below).


Putting aside your reliance on the WP:CALC exception for dozens or even hundreds of "routine calculations" in compiling this data, I would be grateful if you would answer the questions I asked above. Specifically, if you intend the addition of year-by-year cumulative series records to be a mandatory part of all CFB rivalry articles, how do you propose to handle disputed series records, series records impacted by NCAA-mandated forfeits, and series records impacted by NCAA-mandated vacancies? And in the absence of footnoted V/RS sources, how do you propose to support your presentation of those records subject to disputes, forfeits or vacancies? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:06, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


I agree with Ute that WP:CALC allows us to apply simple math to statistics drawn from reliable sources. For example, I might in an article on "Joe Blow" note that he was a starting linebacker for XYZ Team from 1981 to 1983 and point out that XYZ had a record of 33-2 (or outscored opponents 333 to 22) when Joe Blow played for XYZ. I arrive at that by adding the 3 entries in the record for XYZ Team as reflected in a reliable source. That is not original research. It's performing simple math, as permitted by WP:CALC. Nothing wrong with it, and it is often valuable information in biographical articles. Cbl62 (talk) 02:08, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Dirtlawyer, I think IP editor 96.32.129.220 was on the right track when he listed both records in a disputed rivalry. That's a solution that complies with the neutral point of view policy. That discrepancy is one of the things I find most interesting about the Florida–Georgia rivalry. As for forfeits, that counts as a win for one team and a loss for the other so that's not a problem, unless the forfeit is in dispute like the Border War (Kansas–Missouri rivalry). In those instances, that's just a subset of the disputed record that can be handled in the same manner. As for the vacated win, I admit the NCAA really threw us for a wrench there, since that changes the record for one team, but not the other. In my opinion, we should list the record as if it had not been affected by a vacated win, and footnote the record.


All the editors may not agree with my proposed solution, but there are other solutions we could reach consensus on. The fact that the way forward is not clear-cut is not a reason to scrap this information all-together. —Ute in DC (talk) 04:38, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


I agree that all article content must be sourced, in many WP articles people like to insert unsubstantiated commentary and other content, not just in CFB but in other areas as well such as reality TV. This is a problem all over WP, especially because of how visible this site is to the public. If there are sources including the running series totals I have no objection to including them. If there are discrepancies in records such as forfeits/vacancies then I don't see why we can't show both sides. --l a t i s h r e d o n e (previously User:All in) 00:16, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Okay, CALC says routine calculations can be included "provided there is consensus among editors that the arithmetic and its application correctly reflect the sources." In this case, there aren't any sources for series records for some of these rivalries. Compiling raw statistics into a set that doesn't appear in any reliable sources is a pretty cut-and-dry violation of WP:SYNTH. If there's a source establishing that this particular statistic is notable, CALC would allow us to update it with new sources, but constructing it whole-cloth is original research.
Again, this statistic may be significant to some rivalries, as there are sources including it for some of them. But it's clearly not significant to all of them.--Cúchullain t/c 15:00, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


The College Football Data Warehouse offers records by opponent, e.g. here. I would think many media guides would also have similar tables. This ought to establish a reliable source for any NCAA Division I head-to-head matchup. Jweiss11 (talk) 15:12, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Even that doesn't give a running series record as appears in our articles, as in Georgia vs. Florida. In that rivalry, the media guides don't include one either.--Cúchullain t/c 15:28, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


A series record should be enough of a source, from which WP:CALC can be used to list the series as it was for each year --l a t i s h r e d o n e (previously User:All in) 16:37, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Taking raw data from a source and using it to create a set that doesn't actually appear directly in that source is synthesis. We shouldn't be including things in a Wikipedia article if it appears nowhere else.--Cúchullain t/c 16:50, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


I agree that WP should not include synthesis, or content that appears nowhere else. I disagree that an overall series record is synthesis. If it is sourced, then it is clearly relevant and notable for inclusion. And if the current series record is relevant, then clearly the current series record as it was in the past is relevant as well (unless we arbitrarily choose 2011 as a year from which to source series records??) --l a t i s h r e d o n e (previously User:All in) 17:27, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Almost any one year's series record could be sourced to a newspaper article, game program or similar from that particular year. A running series record total does not imply a conclusion or advance a position. Synthesis is a stretch, IMO. CrazyPaco (talk) 10:34, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
I agree with "A running series record total does not imply a conclusion or advance a position." Especially when both series records are listed for disputed series such as in this edit [1] --l a t i s h r e d o n e (previously User:All in) 20:40, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
If this statistic were notable for every rivalry, you'd expect to see it in the sources. At least in the case of Florida-Georgia, I don't think I've seen such a think outside of Wikipedia, which is the opposite of how we should be operating.--Cúchullain t/c 14:12, 28 November 2011 (UTC)


Waiting for consensus

At this point I have been edit-warred against by users from both sides of this issue. Oh well. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.32.129.220 (talk) 01:03, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Please wait until you have consensus before making any big changes. I know Wikipedia can be frustrating in that you have to wait until consensus is established, but making large scale changes before then is just going to lead to edit wars. —Ute in DC (talk) 01:39, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
96.32.129.220, hold off on making additional changes until consensus has been reached. — X96lee15 (talk) 03:14, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

is there really any reason i should care about being blocked? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.32.129.220 (talk) 03:47, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Don't be a dick. — X96lee15 (talk) 03:51, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
You won't be able to edit after being blocked. With your passion, I think you have the potential to be a valuable contributor. I hope you choose to make constructive edits. Please stop deleting information before we have a consensus. —Ute in DC (talk) 03:53, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
Been there, done that. The only reason I edit Wikipedia at all anymore is because it is one of the most-viewed sites on the internet. It has often taken way too much effort trying to improve WP articles in certain areas, much less getting them up to WP's own standards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.32.129.220 (talk) 04:42, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
Note that this anonymous IP was banned for not waiting for consensus, engaging in WP:WAR, and repeatedly violating WP:3RR. CrazyPaco (talk) 07:29, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
Well, hopefully we can progress without having to waste a lot of time on cleanup now. I trust we will see this discussion through.--Cúchullain t/c 16:00, 22 November 2011 (UTC)


Rivalry navboxes

Since as of now most college sports rivalry articles are for college football (Category:College football rivalries in the United States has 140 articles, Category:College football rivalry trophies in the United States has 93 articles, Category:College basketball rivalries in the United States has 30 articles, Category:College basketball rivalry trophies in the United States has 3 articles and Category:College ice hockey rivalries in the United States has 8 articles), I am opening the discussion here. With the proliferation of rivalry articles, we will eventually find rivalry navboxes growing. Here are two issues I am finding:

All sports or just football:
Some conferences have football-only rivalry navboxes: See {{Pacific-12 Conference football rivalry navbox}}, {{Southeastern Conference football rivalry navbox}}, {{Big Ten Conference football rivalry navbox}}
Some conferences have all-sports rivalry navboxes: See {{Atlantic Coast Conference rivalry navbox}}, {{Big 12 Conference rivalry navbox}}, {{Ivy League rivalry navbox}}
Conference only? (I admit to having just expanded the Big Ten to be like the ACC in this regard, but now realize that there may be an issue)
Some conferences include non-conference rivalries: See {{Atlantic Coast Conference rivalry navbox}}, {{Ivy League rivalry navbox}}, {{Big Ten Conference football rivalry navbox}}
Some only include conference rivalries: See {{Pacific-12 Conference football rivalry navbox}}, {{Southeastern Conference football rivalry navbox}}, {{Big 12 Conference rivalry navbox}}
Unless we are going to have both all-sports and non-conference games included in the navboxes, then we should have individual school navboxes such as {{Michigan Wolverines rivalry navbox}}. However in the case where a school does not have any non-football rivalry articles, this might be redundant with the school's football team navbox.


Comments welcome.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:11, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

serious question - do many users want to browse a bunch of various rivalries or do they just look at specific rivalries because they are either interested in one of the teams involved or just looking for history on that rivalry in the moment? I kind of think it's the latter. Rikster2 (talk) 14:45, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
Personally, I think these are as useful as the navboxes you might find at the bottom of an article such as 2011 Rose Bowl. People digest sports team content in various ways and we should accomodate reasonable linkages. I think it is as likely that they may bounce from one rivalry game to another as one bowl game to another.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 15:37, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
As noted above, I think the proliferation of articles on "second-tier" or non-major rivalries is a bad idea. For that reason, I think the creation of navboxes that serves to encourage yet more such articles to "complete" navboxes is not a good idea. Cbl62 (talk) 16:50, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
I am certain that you are saying you are against individual school navboxes. Are you saying that you want the conference navboxes deleted?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:54, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
You asked, so here's my somewhat non-responsive rant: What I'm really against is the proliferation of rivalry articles. When you get beyond the truly major rivalries (the ones with sustained coverage over a lengthy period where the coverage is actually about the rivalry, and not just game coverage), rivalry articles strike me as failing GNG, not being encyclopedic, and being a poor use of the time that a group of talented editors have to devote to Wikipedia. While I wouldn't want someone imposing their priorities on me, it just seems like the College Football project should have much higher priorities, e.g., making every College Football Hall of Famer's article a good article, improving other important player and coach articles, eliminating or sourcing unsourced biographies on living players, improving individual season articles for the major programs, etc. Sometimes, we get overly focused on the pride of authorship in creating new articles instead of improving existing ones. As DL noted somewhere above, there is a lot of embarrassing garbage that falls within the scope of our project. Rather than creating more stubs, we should be trying to raise the quality of what we already have. Cbl62 (talk) 17:15, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
I now understand your opinion here to be a malplaced extension of your arguments in the thread above about whether rivalry articles should exist. Let's assume there are going to be some rivalry articles. This section is an attempt to discuss 1) whether there should be conference rivalry navboxes; 2) whether these should only include football; 3) whether non-conference games should be included; and 4) whether there should be school rivalry navboxes. This section is not a section to discuss whether there should be rivalry articles. In short, I think I am saying I am just ignoring your comments in this section as being malplaced. If you want to comment on navboxes here do so. This is not the section to discuss articles.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 17:36, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
You started this string by saying, "Comments welcome." I guess you meant comments welcome if you agree with me, but "I am just ignoring your comments" if you disagree. To restate my comment clearly and concisely, I favor deleting all rivalry navboxes. Like Rikster, I think a category does the job fine. Cbl62 (talk) 06:34, 25 November 2011 (UTC)
do we need a rivalry Navbox if the category exists? Seems like the category does the job. Rikster2 (talk) 19:11, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
If you want to TFD all of them go for it. However, if we are going to keep them, we need to make them consistent. I prefer to keep them. Like I said above I think having navboxes between rivalry games is akin to having them for bowl games. I think the bowl games are shaping up with all the proper templates at the bottom for consistency. The rivalry game navboxes are a hodgepodge of inconsistency. If we are going to have them, lets have an agreement about what format. If we want to scrap them all that is also consistent. But keeping them in their inconsistent form is not good. I don't buy the category argument because I don't surf nearly as much via categories as I do via navboxes. I can't speak for the average reader, but I prefer a navbox because the information is right there instead of in a remote repository.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:25, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
P.S. see WP:NOTDUP.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:32, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
I am looking to contribute to consensus here, not just go around TfDing stuff like a hockey guy. My view is that navboxes aren't needed for rivalries because most users aren't looking to browse college rivalries. If consensus were to agree then, yes, I would advocate TfDing the existing rivalry templates. I am not suggesting deleting the navboxes for the sole reason that they are duplicative with categories, I am suggesting that categories are sufficient for those few readers who wish to navigate those articles (like you) Rikster2 (talk) 19:40, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
I don't know that I am comfortable speaking for most. Do you feel that there is any more reason to navigate bowl games than rivalry games. If a reader is reading a rivalry game article, he is there because rivalry games interest him, especially if he has gotten to the bottom of the article and is not there by accident. For the reader who reads a rivalry game article to the bottom of the page or to the reader who just likes rivalry games, I think the navbox is useful. I don't see how your argument is different than the HOCKEY argument, which is that noone wants to navigate via navbox across most subjects.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:56, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
you shouldn't speak for most. You should be quiet and let others respond. It may not be until tomorrow, though because today is Thanksgiving. Rikster2 (talk) 20:00, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
Maybe we should TFD them all and see if they survive. Then, if they survive focus the discussion on a consistent format.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 20:04, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Per the strict topic of rilvarly navboxes that Tony has brought up, here are my thoughts:


  • I'm not sure that we need a strict rule on football-only vs. all-sports. One of the defining features of the Big Ten, for example, is all of the football trophy games within the conference. So in the case of the Big Ten, a football-only navbox may be warranted. The same doesn't seem to be true for the ACC, where in fact some of the rivalry articles themselves are framed as multi-sport, e.g. North Carolina–NC State rivalry.
  • If there are articles for inter-conference rivalries for given conference, I say include them and separate intra and inter-conference games with groups in the navbox, a la Template:Big Ten Conference football rivalry navbox. If there are no notable inter-conference rivalries for the teams of a conference to speak of, well, then this is a non-issue.
  • What we should not be doing under any circumstances with these rivalry navboxes is including red links, e.g. Penn State–Temple football rivalry, which, as Cbl suggests, will encourage the proliferation of more borderline-notable rivalry articles.
  • School specific rivalry navboxes like Template:Michigan Wolverines rivalry navbox are not a good idea. What this constitutes is a brand new class of navbox, which may indeed promote the creation of similar navboxes for other schools. In general, we need to be wary about launching brand new classes of navboxes like this so that we can control navbox bloat. On the subject of school-wide navboxes for Michigan and other schools, I think we're much better off with an athletic department overview navbox, a la Template:Florida Gators athletic program navbox. Rivalries may or may not make sense for inclusion there.


As for Cbl's more general comments, I agree with him. Creating new types of navboxes and new articles for borderline notable subjects should not be our priority when so much of the meat and potatoes of our project (teams, seasons, head coaches, Hall of Fame players, etc) is undeveloped or of poor quality. Jweiss11 (talk) 07:24, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

So for articles like Michigan–Michigan State ice hockey rivalry, Braggin' Rights, Duke–Michigan basketball rivalry, etc. and whatever non-football or multi-sport rivalry articles may be forthcoming, we want to exclude them from the Big Ten rivalry navbox regardless of what other conferences are doing? Is there any other navbox policy where we handle the major conferences differently?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:21, 25 November 2011 (UTC)
Generally speaking we should have parallelism between the conferences as much as possible when it comes to standard structures like navboxes. If you look as the other classes of conference navboxes (by team, coach, mascot, fight song, etc) you'll see pretty strict parallelism. But the rivalries may be a special case here because the articles themselves lack parallelism , i.e. some are multi-sport while others are single-sport. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:54, 27 November 2011 (UTC)
Suppose multi-sport rivalry articles are the more proper way to format rivalry content. Aren't we perpetuating a permanent inconsistency by having football rivalry templates. That suggests that a person attempting to expand the football content to multi-sport content would be discouraged from doing so in several conferences. Suppose that single sport articles are more proper. Then we are perputuating multi-sport articles in other conferences by having the wrong type of conference template. It seems to me that we need to determine whether the encyclopedia is better served by multi-sport or single sport rivalry articles. Then endorse that type of navbox and try to get the articles refined in that direction.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 01:58, 27 November 2011 (UTC)
(Copied from Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2011_November_27#Template:Infobox_college_rivalry) You are actually missing a point in the current state of navbox articles. I interpret your argument as we can not standardize navboxes because some conferences do rivalry articles for each sport and some conferences do multi-sport rivalry articles. This is not the whole truth. If you look at the two of the three broader templates (ACC & IVY) you will see that those templates include single sport articles across various sports as well as multisport articles (i.e., all types of rivalry articles on one template). The Big 12 only has football and multi-sport. Those facts would not preclude consideration of broadening all templates to include all types of rivalry articles, which is what I think might be the right way to go. You are saying we can't discuss parallelism because some conferences have multisport articles. However, if you want to consider including all rivalry articles on templates, that is not a problem. I.E., to add Michigan–Michigan State ice hockey rivalry, Braggin' Rights, Duke–Michigan basketball rivalry, etc. to templates would not require changing articles. It would just require clasifying the football only templates more broadly. Have you given thought to that?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 14:38, 28 November 2011 (UTC)


JaMarcus Russell

Can someone with patience please attempt to explain to the IP at Talk:JaMarcus Russell#Response to Claim of Vandalism: Requesting Review by Moderator why individual seasons are in fact notable and should not be trimmed down to a mere sentence? Eagles 24/7 (C) 18:47, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Catholic University football naming convention

Resolved
 – All speedily renamed to incorporate "University" as part of naming convention. Jrcla2 (talk) 03:17, 27 November 2011 (UTC)


There's a cluster**** of naming conventions being used for Catholic University's sports categories:


Catholic University of America (school article)

Category:The Catholic University of America
Category:Catholic Cardinals (sports)
→The primary athletics article is titled Catholic University Cardinals
Category:Catholic University Cardinals baseball (all its subcats use this format)
Category:Catholic University Cardinals men's basketball (all its subcats use this format)
Category:Catholic Cardinals football (all its subcats use this format)
→The primary football article is titled Catholic Cardinals football


I was going to speedy rename the overall sports category until I realized there's a discrepency with the football categories as well. These could all be speedied per C2C/C2D, but they cannot be speedied since there is clearly no consensus on how these articles and categories should be named.
I propose naming all of the articles and categories as Catholic University Cardinals. Incorporating the University makes the names less ambiguous (Catholic Cardinals is also a religious term). Plus, it's not unprecedented to use "University" or "College" (see Boston University and Boston College for example). Thoughts? Jrcla2 (talk) 20:10, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


I agree with your naming suggestion, Jrcla. That having been said, I can't get the image out of my head of the Catholic Cardinals, in their red cassocks, running the option against Army. Somewhere, Leahy and Rockne are smiling. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:24, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Clearly the Catholic Cardinals would be coached by Jerry Sandusky. Too soon? Jweiss11 (talk) 20:55, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Never too soon, in my opinion. Well played. Jrcla2 (talk) 21:17, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Eew! Seriously, Weiss? The Cardinals would be way too old to play for Jerry. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:19, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I've speedied them, hopefully I don't receive any objections. Jrcla2 (talk) 22:31, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Noticed this the other day. Glad you took the lead on figuring out a convention, which sounds good to me. DeFaultRyan 18:53, 29 November 2011 (UTC)


All-Conference teams

Typically the Big Ten Conference announces the all-conference teams the Monday after the regular season ends. Now, that there is a championship game, do I have to wait an extra week?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:37, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

I guess not. Hard at work on Kenny Demens, Ryan Van Bergen and J. T. Floyd. Go Blue!--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 14:32, 29 November 2011 (UTC)


Team seasons not on Conference championship game template

Why don't the Category:American college football conference championship game navigational boxes have a list of the team season articles for the championship teams? I know you can get to them through the game articles in one or two clicks, but it seems like the winners should be on the templates. Don't we have articles for most team seasons for major conference champions?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:34, 29 November 2011 (UTC)


Please no. Clutter. Clutter. Clutter. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:45, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
What do you mean clutter. Clutter is non-existent on team season articles. It is a total non-issue. Can you point me to a team season that has more than say a half dozen templates?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 06:05, 29 November 2011 (UTC)


That's right. We don't have a bad clutter problem on team pages...yet. If you add teams to the conf champ games navboxes, then the next logical step is to add teams to the bowl game navboxes as well. The problem, more specifically, with adding teams to the conf champ game navboxes is that it introduces a largely unprecedented two-step navigation. For example, if I'm on 2006 Florida Gators football team, why do I need a navbox option to go to all the SEC Champ Games, even the ones that no other Florida team played in, e.g. 2011 SEC Championship Game. What is the connection between 2006 Florida Gators football team and 2011 SEC Championship Game? The later is a game that follows in a series from a game played by the former. Rather tenuous and convoluted, don't you think? Jweiss11 (talk) 06:27, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
I rarely do bowl game articles, but I would advocate them being on the team season articles as well. P.S. you are missing the linkage. If you are researching championship teams the 2006 Florida Gators football team is related to the 2011 SEC Championship team the same way the 2006 home run champ is related to the 2011 home run champ or the 2006 yellow jersey winner is related to the 2011 yellow jersey winner. Thus, they should share a template, IMO. Have you been talking to the Hockey guys or something? In fact, they are related in a very similar way to the way the teams on the {{BCS National Champion navbox}} are related.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 07:04, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Okay, yes 2006 Florida Gators football team is related to the the 2011 SEC Championship Game winner (LSU or Georgia), the same way the 2006 and 2011 home run champs are related to one another. But you're suggesting that the SEC Championship Game navbox pack the games and their winners together. That would be like packing all the AL seasons and AL home run champs into one navbox. It sounds like maybe what you want is a separate SEC champion navbox, analogous to {{BCS National Champion navbox}}. On that, I'd day we don't need conference champion navboxes. We need to control the proliferation of new navboxes. Jweiss11 (talk) 08:15, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Conference championship team navboxes would be to {{BCS National Champion navbox}} what {{Chicago Tribune Silver Football navbox}} is to {{Heisman Trophy}} or {{Big Ten Conference Men's Basketball Player of the Year navbox}} is to {{Wooden Player of the Year men}}.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 14:25, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
I think we need to be wary about creating new navboxes. We should work on improving the content of all these articles first. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:22, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Whether the articles need to be improved is not a relevant concern in terms of whether navboxes should link them. The question is whether we should have navboxes for conference championship games parallel to the national championship template like we have templates for many other conference accomplishments that parallel national accomplishments.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:16, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Rivalry articles

A lot of attention has been focused of late on "rivalry" articles. For the biggest "rivalries" in college football (Florida-Georgia, USC-UCLA, Oklahoma-Nebraska [historically, at least], Stanford-Cal, Harvard-Yale), everyone would agree separate articles are warranted. But with over 140 rivalry articles (see Category:College football rivalries in the United States), haven't we gotten carried away? Are there really 150 college football rivalries (with more articles being created with some frequency) that are so notable that they warrant separate articles? Just how is it we decide which rivalries are sufficiently notable that they are worthy of separate article treatment? Do we have a guideline or archived talk page discussion where consensus was reached? Is there a minimum number of meetings to qualify for separate article treatment? Are we going to allow articles about the main rivalries for every FCS, Division II and III school? (IMO, FCS, Division II and III rivalries, with VERY rare exception, are not sufficiently notable.) The following are, IMO, examples of rivalry articles run amok where there are no reliable sources to establish that the rivalry is sufficiently notable: Kentucky–Mississippi State football rivalry, Illinois–Missouri football rivalry (24 games in 115 years), South Florida v. UCF (4 meetings and sourced largely to blogs), Alabama–Penn State football rivalry (1 meeting before 1975, 2 meetings since 1990), Sacramento State - UC Davis, Boston College–Virginia Tech rivalry. I think there ought to be guideline or rule of thumb. At minimum, I think we should require sources to be cited in rivalry articles establishing that the rivalry has been the subject of sustained coverage in major metropolitan newspapers, major college football websites, or books (beyond just routine game coverage). I would also favor limiting such articles to rivalries that are (or historically were for some sustained period of time) played on an annual basis, excluding pairings between teams that have simply met from time to time. A stricter standard (maybe even a negative presumption) might be appropriate for rivalries below the FBS level. Thoughts? Cbl62 (talk) 03:16, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Cbl, as you know, the standard for inclusion in Wikipedia is notability (not verifiability as suggested below). Regardless of objective notability, it's a relatively rare FCS rivalry, and an even rarer Division II or III rivalry, that has enough quality secondary sources to support a properly written and sourced rivalry game article. Most of these smaller college rivalry articles presently exist as a records table with mostly unsourced text; and the history of the rivalry (including the series record table) could easily be included into the main team articles, thereby providing needed substantive content to the main articles.


After reviewing all of the CFB rivalry articles in the last 48 hours, I can also tell you we have a real problem with the duplication of text, tables and other substance of the main rivalry articles with articles about the trophies awarded in those rivalries. My opinion: we do not need to have separate series record tables for the main rivalry article AND the related trophy article. The separate trophy article, to the extent the trophy actually satisfies the WP:GNG notability guidelines, should be purged of game commentary, series record tables and the like, and restricted to the trophy's background, history and other significance. By allowing the inclusion of duplicate rivalry series record tables in the trophy articles, we have created de facto duplicate articles for the same rivalry in many instances. That's just plain goofy. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Verifiability as a rivalry is sufficient to me, for example, see the recent creation of Duke-Michigan basketball rivalry based on sources specifying that the matchup is a rivalry. Beyond that, I see no need to further limit which articles are created, as many rivalries are contested on an irregular basis such as Notre Dame's second-tier rivalries with teams such as Boston College, Georgia Tech, and others. I agree that most rivalry articles below the FBS level are not needed. --l a t i s h r e d o n e (previously User:All in) 03:34, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
If it's a "second-tier" rivalry, I don't think it warrants a separate article. Beyond verifiability, articles need to satisfy notability. Cbl62 (talk) 04:21, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
I agree with Cbl62, but I'd also like to see a "list of college football rivalries" to catch the "smaller" ones--Paul McDonald (talk) 04:26, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Paul, there is already a comprehensive "list of" article for CFB rivalries in existence. It desperately needs major clean-up work. If you're looking for something new on which to work, here's a job opportunity. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Yes, here's that list: List of NCAA college football rivalry games. It definitely needs some work. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:19, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
This is an encyclopedia with the responsibility of summarizing secondary sources. Almost every FBS school tries to claim a few rivals. Plus with all the conference shuffling their are newly-dormant rivalries being replaced by newly-founded rivalries like Nebraska-Iowa and such. As a Michigan fan, I don't think much of many lesser rivalries, but I think Indiana claims Michigan as a football rival (or so says their football template). Probably some Indiana sources would back this up although no Michigan fans really care about such a rivalry. Every second tier power conference school claims a few rivals. These are largely in the lower rungs of rivals, but games that should be included in the encyclopedia nonetheless. I would not be surprised to see 300 rivalry games at some point in the future.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:37, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Right. I don't think we want to be picking and choosing which rivalries qualify. All articles must meet WP:GNG. If there are any rivalry articles that fail this requirement, then yes, they should be nominated for deletion. There are 120 teams in the FBS alone, with hundreds more in other divisions and subdivisions. With nearly every team having a rivalry or two, it's no surprise that there are so many articles. —Ute in DC (talk) 05:01, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Yes and no, Ute. If you can't properly source a small college rivalry with quality secondary sources per WP:V and WP:RS, it's probably also going to fail WP:GNG. Just because something exists, and some people care about it passionately, does not mean it's notable for Wikipedia purposes. For college rivalry games to be notable, there have to be quality secondary sources other than the school newspaper and yearbook, and the coverage must be specific to the rivalry, not just routine coverage of the individual games. (Please see the "basic criteria" section of WP:NSPORTS.) If we properly applied these WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS standards to all existing rivalry and rivalry trophy articles, we would probably AfD or merge 30+% of them. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


P.S. for the power conferences, the interdivisional rivals are some sort of official rivalry status.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:04, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Tony is correct when he says that many of these rivalries have "official" status within their respective conferences. For example, the Kentucky–Mississippi State rivalry cited by Cbl62 above is a permanent cross-division rivalry within the SEC; such "official" status may or may not make particular rivalries notable for Wikipedia purposes pursuant to WP:GNG. With the advent of divisional play in the Pac-12 and Big 10+2, they now have similar cross-division rivalry arrangements to the SEC.


The bigger problem is that we have allowed anyone who wants to create a separate CFB rivalry article to do so without any critical review. Personally, I would propose a general rule that any "rivalry" game article that includes fewer than ten games actually played be redirected and have its content merged to the teams' main article pages. BTW, here are two strong candidates for immediate AfD review:


1. War on I-4, dormant after being played four times; and
2. River City Showdown, dormant after being played twice—not sure if this qualifies as a "rivalry" by any definition.


As we start to focus on the embarrassing condition of the vast majority our CFB rivalry articles, it would probably behoove us to compile some comprehensive stats in this area to share with all CFB project editors. On that basis, we can start to make some informed decisions, impose some standards, and start to clean up these messes. And, once again, the key to the clean-up should be strict adherence to the sourcing requirements of WP:V and WP:RS. If you don't have time to add V/RS footnotes to the article, please don't bother creating another unsourced embarrassment to the CFB project. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:09, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


War on I-4 redirects to an Arena Football League game that has been played 48 times. Are you sure that's the title of the article you were thinking of? River City Showdown has no citations whatsoever. That may indeed be a candidate for deletion, but I don't think it's a "rivalry game" as such. It appears that this was supposed to be an annual game similar to the Chick-fil-A College Kickoff, but that it was only played twice. —Ute in DC (talk) 20:42, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


Ute, the first AfD candidate is actually "The War on I-4 (college football)." Both it and the River City thingy are presently categorized as "College football rivalries in the United States." And, yes, I agree with your comment, but I'm not the guy who categorized the River City thingy as a "rivalry." It's just more non-notable CFB cruft that needs to be torpedoed. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 22:07, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


I nominated River City Showdown for deletion. If anyone wants to comment either for or against its deletion, the discussion page is here. —Ute in DC (talk) 23:00, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
While I tend to fall on the "keep" side of most college football AfDs, I believe that half of the college football rivalry articles could probably be deleted. I really think we need standards that limit such articles to the truly notable rivalries that receive sustained coverage over a substantial period of time (and where the coverage is actually about a "rivalry" and not just game coverage). Ute has started the process by nominating the River City Showdown. Time permitting, we should dig deeper through the the college football rivalries category and nominate a couple others for deletion. That should stir more focused debate on which rivalry are really appropriate. Cbl62 (talk) 17:24, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
Rivalry articles will run the gamut from top tier Stanford-Cal, USC-UCLA, Auburn-Alabama, to the bottom of the barrel 2nd tier variety. This is no different than College basketball conference POYs. Many of these players are a mere footnote in college basketball history. However, we have templates begging us to create such articles. I think we should just go by GNG and create whatever passes.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 17:42, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment: I do agree that some criteria has to be applied to prevent the creation of rivalry articles ad nauseum. I think that, in general, a rivalry should have to be renewed twenty times, preferably including a streak of ten or fifteen consecutive years with a renewal, to get a Wikipedia article. I also think that at some point, the rivalry has to be one of the three most important games on a team's regular season schedule (this need not be for the entirety of the rivalry, nor need it be at the present time). It would be recommended, but not required, that there be some lore around the game, such as a trophy, a ritual, or a neutral site. I would not under any circumstances say that it has to be D-I to have a rivalry page...many D-II and D-III rivalries have been renewed more times, and mean more to some people, than many D-I rivalries (for example, my college, D-III Occidental (CA), has had a rivalry with Pomona that has been renewed over 100 times and awards a trophy called "The Drum" to the winner). In terms of nomenclature, I would prefer the name the rivalry most often goes by (provided it's not ambiguous), rather than imposing a false nomenclature on all articles Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 20:49, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
    • We can not require consecutive years. With expansion of conferences to 12 and 14 (and maybe eventually 16) teams many rivalries will not be played every year.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:14, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
      • Lemme clarify: I didn't require it, I said "preferably". Also, the 10-15 years consecutive doesn't have to be the last 10-15. Army-Notre Dame passes it because it was played throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s. And in reference to the superconference argument, most of those rivalries were played annually before the superconference existed Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 21:31, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


Conference coach of the year

Why doesn't WP:CFB have an analogue to WP:WPCBB's Category:American college basketball conference coach of the year navigational boxes?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 03:54, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


Tagging the helmet and uniform images

Just an FYI, the helmet and uniform images should be tagged with {{WikiProject College football}} (helmet example / uniform example), so the next time any of you are on the team articles, if you could just throw that tag on those talk pages for inclusion in this WikiProject that'd be cool. Grazie. Jrcla2 (talk) 14:45, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


Yes, indeed. In fact, if you see any untagged college football images, don't hesitate to tag them. We now have well over 2,000 images tagged for the project (see Category:College football articles by quality), up from not more than a couple hundred or so earlier this year. Thanks to everyone who's uploaded and/or tagged. Jweiss11 (talk) 20:05, 1 December 2011 (UTC)


Rivalry AFDs

In light of the discussion that not all rivalry pages may be significant, I have nominated tow rivalries for deletion. They are Drake–Dayton football rivalry and Northern Iowa–Southern Illinois rivalry. The discussion can be found @ Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Drake–Dayton football rivalry Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 21:26, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

List of historically significant Michigan Wolverines football games

Hmm. File this one under "potential can of worms": List of historically significant Michigan Wolverines football games. Jweiss11 (talk) 06:02, 29 November 2011 (UTC)


-- Not sure either but I'd suggest seeing how it develops. Just created today. Current list is missing some big ones, including the snow bowl and the 1948 and 1998 Rose Bowls. Cbl62

I'll be bold and start the deletion process on it--if I'm wrong to do so, we'll find out soon enough! Looks a little like fandom to me.--Paul McDonald (talk) 17:38, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:All-American college football players - necessary?

I don't think that Category:All-American college football players should exist. Yes, these players were named All-American college football players, but that's not really a sufficient reason (IMO) to warrant a huge category with tenuously related players. I want to know what everyone's thoughts on CfD'ing it would be. If the consensus is to keep it, then it should at least be called Category:NCAA Division I College Football All-America players per C2C/C2D criteria. Jrcla2 (talk) 15:44, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


Jrcla, I respectfully disagree. IMO, receiving first-team All-American honors is a far bigger deal than being named conference POYs, game MVPs, tournament MVPs, etc. Being named a consensus All-American is probably a bigger deal than receiving most national player position awards, and certainly reflects a far broader base of input in the selection process. If you want to propose limiting the category to only first-team selections, I would support that–in my own use of the category, I have never added the cat to the articles of players who were not first-team selections. I have no objection to renaming the category. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:53, 30 November 2011 (UTC)
Strong Keep and rename.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:00, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


(EC) I don't think our bosses would appreciate us spending half of our average work days on Wikipedia (as long as the work gets done and done well I suppose :)). Anyway, I'm just wondering if all of the players in the category, as it stands now, really are consensus first team All-Americans. The category was created sometime prior to October 2009 and for all we know, many players who may have received one honorable mention AA nod were included by less-informed editors. It would require an article-by-article sweep to weed out any incorrectly categorized players (assuming the consensus is to keep the category). Jrcla2 (talk) 16:02, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


Further thought re: renaming – Is this for FBS only or are consensus first team AAs at the FCS level also included? If it's only FBS, then it should be something like Category:NCAA Division I FBS consensus All-America players. Jrcla2 (talk) 16:04, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


Ah, Jrcla, there's a big difference between generic "All-Americans" (honorable mention, third-team, second-team, first-team, consensus, unanimous), "first-team All-Americans" (first-team, consensus, unanimous), and "consensus All-Americans" (consensus, unanimous). If I had my way, only those players who received at least one first-team All-American selection would be included in the category. Restricting the category to only consensus All-Americans is too restrictive, IMO. We should already be drawing this distinction in the text of our player biographies, and we should be including footnoted sources for the text per WP:V and WP:RS (and per WP:BLP for living players). No first-team All-American footnote? Then the player is excluded from the category until a proper footnote supporting the first-team All-American selection is added. Also, if we are going to restrict the category in some such fashion, an explanatory note needs to be added to the category page to which editors may be referred when the inevitable talk page dust-ups occur. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 16:29, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


I know more than a layman does about college football, but I'm far from well-versed, so I'm wondering what your suggestion for the re-named category title should be. Agree with notion that a short, albeit concise and thorough, explanation is needed at the top of the category. Jrcla2 (talk) 16:45, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


Jrcla, I'm no expert on category naming, but maybe something like "NCAA Division I FBS All-Americans." BTW, do we really have a lot of FCS-level All-American biographies? I don't work much on small college teams, so I really don't know. It would seem to me that we should look at whether FCS first-team All-American honors impart notability under WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS. How much coverage do these FCS All-Americans get? In the past, I've advocated imparting de facto notability to first-team All-Americans, but I was really thinking in terms of Division I FBS players (previous NCAA designations were major college, University Division, and Division I-A), not Division I FCS players (previously Division I-AA).
Create FBS and FCS cats. Don't try to enforce first-team only. It would be a mess.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:19, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Don't agree with the idea of not trying to enforce first team only. The real mess would be when any Joe Blow who received "Oshkosh Times All-American" distinction gets included. There needs to be a cutoff, and a first team selection is definitely the appropriate threshold. Jrcla2 (talk) 18:24, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

  • The problem with trying to enforce an FBS/FCS division is that those names only came into use in 2006, and the division itself (I-A and I-AA) occurred in 1978. There are a lot of All-Americans from before 1978, for whom a categorization into FBS, FCS, I-A, or I-AA would be inappropriate. I do think it's reasonable to limit the category to individuals who were named first-team All-Americans by a major selector. cmadler (talk) 20:08, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
    • First team will be hard to police in terms of non WP:CFB regs. I concede FBS/FCS or I-A/I-AA split is not feasible.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:11, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
      • First-team is trivially easy: just name the category appropriately. cmadler (talk) 16:32, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
        • Actually, it's very easy to police, guys. The NCAA updates its online PDF list of consensus All-Americans every summer. And virtually every Division I team includes a list of their All-Americans in their online PDF media guides. We also have year-by-year College Football All-America Team articles that list every first-team All-American. I am quite certain that there exist other online sources, too. Bottom line: if you can't add a sourced footnote for first-team All-American status, it should not be included in the text or infobox, and the article should not be included in the All-American category. Easy as pie. BTW, I "police" 250+ Wikipedia bios of former Florida Gators football players, 70+ of whom were first-team All-Americans. Every one of those 70+ who were first-team All-Americans has a link to the current edition of the team media guide and/or the NCAA's list of consensus All-Americans. Let's not make this any harder than it is, and let's start enforcing the WP:V, WP:RS and WP:BLP rules as intended. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 16:42, 2 December 2011 (UTC)


  • Is there any consensus to exclude honorary teams below 1st team All-American. I include all kind of other level in infoboxes. See Justin Boren, Stephen Schilling and many others. Of course, many of the guys I write about are very fringe notability professionals. I have done a ton of guys who only made practice squads like those mentioned here. Basically, I write about anyone in my wheelhouse (mostly Chicago- or University of Michigan-related) who gets an honorable mention All-Conference. I include honoraria in the infobox. When All-Big Ten was announced on Monday, I created Ryan Van Bergen, Kenny Demens and J. T. Floyd. What is policy in this regard?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:57, 2 December 2011 (UTC)


    • Tony, I personally include second-team and honorable mention selections in the player articles text and infobox; I do not include the article in the "College football All-Americans" category for any player who did not receive first-team honors from at least one selector. Regardless of whether they are included in the CFB AA category, the second-team and honorable mention selections should still be sourced and footnoted in the text if they are mnetioned. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:22, 2 December 2011 (UTC)


      • BTW, Tony, I usually don't include the selector who awarded the honor in the player infobox. I think "First-team All-American (2010)" is sufficient; including the selector name clutters the infobox, IMO. If it's a major selector like the Associated Press, I usually mention that in the text. To date, I am unaware of any specific WP:CFB policy on point. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:29, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Idea for list

Hey gang, I've got a userspace list in the works at User:Paulmcdonald/List of college football rematch games. It's nothing more than an idea now and a few entries. As I'm getting into it, I'm encounter potential issues: 1--Layout; 2--Volume (how many of these "rematch" games are there, especially back in the early part of the game's history). Any comments or ideas would be appreciated; and feel free to edit in that workspace as well!--Paul McDonald (talk) 17:35, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

XfD odds and ends

I've got a few XfD odds and ends and some other candidates:

Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 22:28, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't delete the Navy article, too much work put into it to just delete and start from scratch. Eagles 24/7 (C) 22:34, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
To recreate these tables the correct, standard way would require essentially starting from scratch anyway. Jweiss11 (talk) 22:45, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
I don't think it would be deleted via AfD anyway, as there is no policy against having an incorrectly formatted set of tables. Eagles 24/7 (C) 22:52, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
FYI, guys, I converted 94 Florida Gators season record tables (1906–1999) from the old variable-width wikitable format to the current versions of the CFB records templates in September 2010. Doing it 100% manually, it took me eleven days worth of evenings to convert all 94 seasons. That's three decades fewer than represented by the Navy Midshipmen season records. Converting the Navy season records tables will take a lot of work. Given the effort required, I would also recommend clustering the Navy seasons by decade. Better to have one article with ten season record tables with minimal text, rather than ten separate season articles with one record table and minimal text. It could be a very long time before one of our CFB editors gets around to writing the in-depth year-by-year history of Navy football.
I recently discovered another example of a complete mess of season records: the Georgia Bulldogs football seasons . . . the series of Bulldog season articles makes the all-in-one Navy article look pretty good. Some of the Georgia Bulldogs years are presented as random single seasons, some are clustered by coach, and many are simply empty sections within a larger clustered-season article without even a season records table. There are many other season articles that fall somewhere between the Georgia and Navy series. At some point, we need to start a prioritized clean-up of these articles, but I don't see myself being available to help until sometime in the new year. It's a pretty damn big undertaking. Believe me—I know from personal experience. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 23:30, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
Texas Tech Red Raiders football teams (1925 to 1980) is also going to take a lot of work. Not to mention the piles of one-off cases - lots of Auburn and Pittsburgh articles come to mind. It might be useful to start a maintenance category for tagging articles in order to keep track of them, so that we can all spread the load and graudally nibble away at them. Say, Category:College football articles needing records cleanup? This is doable if we can get a dozen editors to all tackle a couple of season tables a day. DeFaultRyan 18:06, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I just nominated two more XfDs:

Please comment. Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 06:05, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Rivalry articles that are strong candidates for AfD

I would like to nominate the following three articles for AfD (discussion and deletion):

  • Crab Bowl Trophy – rivalry trophy has been awarded once in 2010, and the article is sourced to a single on-line magazine blog. Propose to merge content to parent article, Crab Bowl Classic, and delete the separate trophy article.
  • Drake–Dayton football rivalry – newly created article with a single source referencing the series record for two FCS teams. No significant coverage of the rivalry itself by verifiable, reliable sources, separate and apart from routine coverage of individual games.
  • Drake–Iowa rivalry – newly created article with a single source referencing the series record. No significant coverage of the rivalry itself by verifiable, reliable sources, separate and apart from routine coverage of individual games.

If we have a CFB consensus to nominate these three, I will nominate other rivalry and rivalry trophy articles for AfD, but seeking feedback and consensus on the CFB talk page before doing so. There are numerous other rivalry-related articles that simply should not survive a critical application of the general notability guidelines per WP:GNG, or the more specific guidelines applicable to sports events per WP:NSPORTS. In many cases, content of non-notable rivalry articles can and should be merged to the main team articles, or, in the case of minor, non-notable rivalry trophies, merged to the parent rivalry articles. Please review WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS, and provide your feedback below. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:51, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Update: 12/06/2011. Purplebackpack nominated these three articles for AfD on November 29, and the combined AfD is pending at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Drake–Dayton football rivalry. If you have not expressed your opinion yet, please do so at the AfD page. As soon as the disposition of these three articles is determined, I will bring up another 4 or 5 potential AfD candidates for discussion here on the WP:CFB talk page. Several editors have requested that we evaluate a relatively small number of these CFB rivalry articles at a time, which allows everyone to take their time in evaluating them. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 18:19, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Support. Cbl62.
Having now taken a closer look, all three appear to be appropriate AfDs. The Crab Bowl Trophy is an easy call, though a merger into the Crab Bowl Classic might be an alternative. As for Drake-Iowa, I checked historical sources for any evidence that their games from 1896 to 1911 received coverage as a true rivalry and did not find any. As for Drake-Dayton, the two teams are in the same FCS-level league and have played every year since 1987, but I'm not finding sustained and in-depth coverage of the "rivalry." There is a sprinkling of comments (mostly in local Dayton media outlets) suggesting the teams have become rivals to some extent (see this, this, this, this, and this), but not the kind of sustained rivalry coverage that would, IMO, pass the WP:GNG standard and warrant a separate "rivalry" article. If the Drake-Dayton matchup meets the bar, then most regular pairings of conference opponents would also meet the bar, and that's taking it way too far. Cbl62 (talk) 23:41, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Support AfD on those three above. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:21, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Support AFD on the above articles. No evidence of a rivalry is presented from secondary sources.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:20, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Support AfD for these three presented. Thanks for taking the lead on this as they're too many "rivalry" articles as is that need to be trimmed back. Patriarca12 (talk) 18:46, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Support AfD for all three. cmadler (talk) 19:54, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
Support I'm with ya'--Paul McDonald (talk) 17:39, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
Just noticed that. Probably better to submit the Crab Bowl Trophy as a merge by AfD with the next group of CFB rivalry articles sent to AfD. Given the lack of opposition to the combined AfD for Drake-Iowa, Drake-Dayton and Northern Iowa-Southern Illinois, I expect an admin to close the AfD soon. Adding another article at this point will just confuse the AfD and prolong the agony for the first three articles that are likely to be gone soon. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 23:47, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Rivalry articles that are strong candidates for AfD, Part II

Thanks to the perseverance of Purplebackpack, three weak, non-notable rivalry articles (Drake-Dayton, Drake-Iowa, and Northern Iowa–Southern Illinois) have now been deleted. Thanks to Ute in DC, one weak "classic" article (River City Showdown) has also been deleted. Per the conversation above, we have already gotten the go-ahead from WP:CFB to submit the Crab Bowl Trophy for AfD, with the content to be merged to the parent Crab Bowl Classic article. Pursuant to Purplebackpack's suggestions, I would now like to get the approval of our fellow CFB editors to submit the following CFB rivalry articles to AfD:

1. AT&T Corps Classic – Not a true rivalry, game only played four times by Army and Texas A&M;

Delete. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:48, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Gots-to-Go Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 01:19, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

2. Gansz Trophy – Again, not a true rivalry between SMU and Navy. Virtually no significant coverage of the "rivalry" itself per WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS, separate and apart from routine coverage of the individual games;

Delete. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:48, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Gots-to-Go Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 01:19, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

3. Aggie-Eagle Classic – This may be a meaningful rivalry to the participants, but there is virtually no meaningful coverage of the rivalry itself per WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS, separate and apart from routine coverage of the individual games;

Delete. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:48, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Neutral to Weak Keep: I fear that a dangerous precedent about HBCU rivalries that are historic/long-standing would be set if this is deleted. Put me down as "neutral to weak keep" on those. Should at least be in a different AFD clump than 1 and 2. Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 01:19, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

4. Doehling–Heselton Memorial Trophy – Again, this may be a meaningful rivalry to the participants, but there is virtually no meaningful coverage of the trophy or the rivalry itself per WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS, separate and apart from routine coverage of the individual games.

Delete. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:48, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Neutral to Weak Keep: I fear that a dangerous precedent about small-college rivalries that are historic/long-standing would be set if this is deleted. Put me down as "neutral to weak keep" on those. Should at least be in a different AFD clump than 1 and 2. Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 01:19, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Keep. Yeah, I agree with Purplebackpack's take here. This one in particular looks like it could have legit regional notability with history going back to the days when college football was not divided into classes of play. At the least, it should get its own AfD. I think we should go after the crufty Division I stuff first and get all of the trophy/rivalry splits merged before we tackle ones like this. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:32, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Please provide your comments below with regard to each article suggested for AfD. If there is a consensus among CFB editors that these "rivalries" are non-notable, we will submit them to AfD, together with the Crab Bowl Trophy for AfD, after content merge. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:37, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Shouldn't Crab Bowl be tagged with a merge to template instead of an AFD template if merge is our intended outcome? Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 01:21, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Go ahead and tag'em both, PBB. I suggest we go ahead and be bold, and execute the merge. There isn't that much substance in the trophy article, and this will pave the way for the AfD for the trophy article. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:35, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Merge executed. Trophy redirects to Classic. Unless you want to delete the redirect, no need for an AFD unless merge is undone Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 04:52, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Problem solved. Let's keep the "Crab Bowl Trophy" redirect as a plausible search term. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 12:18, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Michigan Wolverines football fancruft?

Michigan Wolverines football was tagged with {{fancruft}}. Can some non-Michigan fans give us opinions.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:18, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

The same editor marked LSU Tigers football and Texas Longhorns football with the same tag, so this is not a Michigan-specific issue. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:23, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
The user also nominated the Michigan football helmet (File:Michigan Wolverines football helmet.gif) for deletion. Malinaccier (talk) 04:30, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
The user has a name, it's Mtking (talk · contribs). I'd read User talk:Mtking/Archives/2011/December#Montana Grizzlies pages for insight into why I did what he did. The user appears to have been goaded into tagging them as fancruft to prove a point. Are those articles a tad too in-universe. Probably, but so are basically all college football team rivalries. The editor has an apparent history of content disputes; so I think the issue is more about the editor than the articles Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 04:39, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Oh, and he also nominated the Texas and LSU helmets for deletion as well. Suggest a) voting to speedy keep them; and b) starting an ANI thread involving this guy's disruptive/WikiLawyering edits Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 04:55, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
I've removed the fan cruft tags from the Montana, Michigan, LSU, and Texas articles. Even in the case of the Montana article, given that program's lesser stature, the coverage is reasonable. I plan on dropping a message for Mtking as his user page about this. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:01, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Well, he dropped a message on my TP, claiming he was correct in nominating the helmets for deletion. As we all know this is totally off-base, could someone explain why on my page or at Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2011 December 11 Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 05:23, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
What am I suppose to be looking for at User:Mtking#Montana Grizzlies pages?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:42, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Try User talk:Mtking/Archives/2011/December#Montana Grizzlies pages Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 05:45, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Just a note from keeping an eye on the image deletion tags, LSU's is running a risk of image deletion because of people confusing the helmet and the logo. I'm not familiar enough with the policies to explain why it should not be deleted, but someone might want to answer the questions being posed over there. SCS100 (talk) 09:12, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
  • It appears to me that Moonriddengirl is correct regarding the images. There are several bits of intellectual property in each such image. One bit of IP is owned by the school, almost certainly trademarked and copyrighted if applicable (e.g. not uncopyrightable text or simple geometric shapes), and this can be covered by a fair-use rationale. The other bit of IP is copyright by the creater of the underlying helmet image (Charles Arey at the Helmet Project), and a fair-use rationale can not apply to this, because it IS replaceable (it would just take some work). "If he could be persuaded to release the basic helmet design (the one in the "introduction" section of that page) under CC-By-SA, then the only part of the image that would be non-free is the logo", for which a fair-use rationale would then be appropriate. cmadler (talk) 17:10, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Templates for deletion

Please comment. Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:19, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Consensus AA team

I have started putting together {{2011 NCAA Division I FBS College Football Consensus All-Americans}}. On offense and special teams a lot of positions did not have enough players that got 3 out of the 5 majors. Do Ryan Broyles, Robert Woods (wide receiver), Levy Adcock, Nate Potter, Dwayne Allen, Shawn Powell (American football), Joe Adams (wide receiver), and Tyler Lockett get consensus honors?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:14, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Technically, Tony, the "consensus" All-America team is determined by the NCAA after the last of the major selectors announce their 2011 All-America selections. I would check the NCAA website (awards subpage, wherever it's buried), or even give their PR office a call in Indianapolis. I have no idea when they release it, but it always appears in their updated football records book just before the next season. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 16:37, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
Several sources say that consensus status is based on getting three 1st team selections: http://www.mlive.com/broncos/index.ssf/2011/12/jordan_whites_all-american_hon.html, http://www.todaysthv.com/news/article/185377/189/Football-Adams-is-consensus-All-American, http://www.idahopress.com/sports/boise/bsf-football/potter-a-consensus-all-american/article_70996bca-27ba-11e1-87b0-0019bb2963f4.html. I will just include all the players who have three such recognitions.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 17:44, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

FCS "bowl games"

The articles for the Camellia Bowl, Pecan Bowl, Grantland Rice Bowl, and Boardwalk Bowl mention that these games are "unofficially" the titles given to the four FCS Quarterfinal games (or "Regional Finals", as each article calls them - West Region, Midwest Region, South Region, and East Region, respectively) and the results for these so-called Regional Finals are listed on each page. I can't find any sources that back-up the claim that these bowl names are still used for the FCS Quarterfinals (if they ever were) and I am certain the FCS doesn't divide its brackets into regions (if it ever has). Should all this information be removed from these pages as unsourced? This information is also present on other pages (See Youngstown State Penguins football#Postseason history, among others). I can't find any information about these bowls existing after 1980, but I didn't want to jump to conclusions. Bmf 51 (talk) 02:49, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Just because a game may use "bowl" in its name doesn't mean it's a bowl game as defined in college football. The only level that has bowl games is FBS (Division I-A). The games that happen to use "bowl" in their names at the FCS, D-II, and D-III levels, and even some in the FBS level (like Iron Bowl) aren't postseason bowl games even if they are in the postseason and have bowl in their respective names. At the YSU football article, I changed the section to "Postseason history" rather than "Bowl history". One of the problems is the infobox for college football teams. While it has a parameter for playoff appearances and overall playoff record, some FCS school articles are using the bowl parameter for the post-season parameter. The infobox doesn't let you remove the bowl wins, losses, and ties sections either. --JonRidinger (talk) 05:43, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
I fully understand everything you said, but that doesn't answer my original question. The jist of what I was asking is this: do these four games even still exist, or is the claim that they are "commonly used" as alternate names for the FCS Quarterfinals an unsourced claim? So, for the YSU article, you were correct to change the "Bowl history" section to "Postseason history", as that was indeed inaccurate. But what I'm wondering is if, for instance, the claims that YSU won the 1997 Boardwalk Bowl or that Montana won the 2011 Camellia Bowl even factual statements. Is this statement from the YSU article (or similar statements in other articles), true at all: "Note: Since 1981, the NCAA Division I FCS Playoffs Regional Championships were commonly referred to as the Boardwalk Bowl (East Region Championship), Pecan Bowl (Midwest Region Championship), Grantland Rice Bowl (South Region Championship), and Camellia Bowl (West Region Championship)".Bmf 51 (talk) 16:34, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
Also, that's currently. In the past, there were many bona fide bowl games at lower levels. Wheat Bowl, Sunflower Bowl, Boot Hill Bowl, Mineral Water Bowl ... just to name a few. A few years back, ending with the Wheat Bowl (which was played as a "pre-season bowl game" the NAIA started going with regular season matchups as "bowl games" to kick off the season, such as the College Fanz First Down Classic.--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:34, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

"How-to" write game summaries in articles

Just posted a quick essay called Write a football game summary. It is of course incomplete, but I put up a few NAIA tricks that I've discovered.--Paul McDonald (talk) 04:40, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

CBB navbox

There is a discussion on replacing the {{CBB navbox}} with the standard {{Navbox}} as is already being done with the at {{CFB navbox}} at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2011 December 19 if anyone wishes to comment. -- WOSlinker (talk) 22:03, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. Is there's a timetable for the substitution of CFB navbox? Jweiss11 (talk) 22:29, 19 December 2011 (UTC)
Okay, looks like the the substitution of CFB navbox is done. Jweiss11 (talk) 18:35, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Article and related category for deletion

East Carolina Pirates future football schedules is at an AfD here and Category:Conference USA future football seasons is at a CfD here. Input appreciated. Jrcla2 (talk) 21:10, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

"champ-participant" parameter

Yesterday and November 27 I reverted additions of this parameter to Template:2011 ACC football standings. I left a note for the IP on the talk page yesterday, but since I'm probably not going to get much out of him, I'm coming to a more centralized place: should that parameter be used if there are two clear division winners? The template doesn't say much regarding its usage, so I'm bringing it up here. Thoughts? Nolelover Talk·Contribs 16:17, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I say don't clutter up the template with unused and unneeded parameters. If there is a clear division winner, it's redundant to also mark them as a championship game participant. DeFaultRyan 16:59, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
I agree with DeFaultRyan here. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:04, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
Exactly my thoughts. Thanks guys, Nolelover Talk·Contribs 17:36, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Darnell McDonald (dab?)

Is Darnell McDonald the Darnell McDonald who broke the Kansas State Wildcats football single-season receptions record formerly held by Kevin Lockett in 1998 (later broken by Jordy Nelson)? (will also ask at WP:MLB)--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:15, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

No, the later would be this Darnell McDonald. Eagles 24/7 (C) 19:28, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
Where was he really born? Your NFL.com link and PFR conflict.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 20:13, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
Like Wizardman said at WT:MLB, he was probably born in Chicago and raised in Fairfax. Eagles 24/7 (C) 22:58, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
Since he does not show up in the Chicago Sun-Times between 92-95, he surely was not raised in Chicago. I will leave the Darnell McDonald (American football) article for another interested party.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:27, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

New infobox template for rivalries

I set up a new infobox template for rivalry articles: Template:Infobox college sports rivalry. So far I've only deployed it on Michigan–Ohio State football rivalry and Florida vs. Georgia Football Classic so we can get a look at it in play. This should help us clean up and standardize the many rivalries articles that we have across college football and college basketball. Let me know if you see any problems with the template or have suggestions for improvements. Once it's good to go, I could use some help implementing it too. Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:08, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


👍 Like👍 Like Two thumbs up, JW. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:19, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
suggestions are being made on the template talk page. Keep it in one place. None of the editors of that template will be looking here.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:35, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Wait there seems to be two different templates: {{Infobox college rivalry}} and {{Infobox college sports rivalry}}. Since neither is used by many articles yet, we should get them merged. Agree?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:47, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
If there's something in {{Infobox college rivalry}} that {{Infobox college sports rivalry}} doesn't have, we can add it to the later, which is better named for sure, and better designed, in my opinion. Then we can delete or redirect the former. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:51, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
I don't know the code. Can you do a merge proposal at WP:TFD. Let them sort it out.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:05, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
There's no reason to do a merge since {{Infobox college rivalry}} is transcluded nowhere and {{Infobox college sports rivalry}} is transcluded on a pilot basis in two places. Again, if there's an element (a field, a style point, whatever) that {{Infobox college rivalry}} has that is missing and worth including in {{Infobox college sports rivalry}}, just explain what it is, I'll figure out the code. Then {{Infobox college rivalry}} can simply be TFD'd. Jweiss11 (talk) 23:51, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Okay, I see that {{Infobox college rivalry}} is actually trancluded a few places as well. However, it's got a number of structural aspects that make it inferior to {{Infobox college sports rivalry}}. The later infobox is way more flexible for image handling. The later infobox also doesn't make use of the totally unneeded school fields that lock in ifexist calls in perpetuity even when the desired destination already exists. Also, the running list of wins is total infobox bloat. The game results section down in the body of the article can suffice to detail the individual results. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:06, 24 November 2011 (UTC)


JW, I have a small quibble with the new rivalry infobox . . . Can we rig it so that it displays the university name and the team nickname (e.g. "Georgia" AND "Bulldogs") in the team page link in the infobox? Right now, the link to the team page is only displaying the short form of the university name (e.g. "Georgia"). Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:43, 24 November 2011 (UTC)


DL, that's actually not even a code issue, but a function what the field is populated with. I had already amended the template documentation to direct users to display fight names in the team fields. Both pilot articles (Florida-Georgia and Michigan-Ohio State) have been updated. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:54, 24 November 2011 (UTC)


The sports field suggests it should be used for multisport rivalries. Thus it needs entries for the records of multiple sports, e.g. both football and basketball when appropriate. CrazyPaco (talk) 09:37, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
Things are dragging along here. I am going to TFD these for a merger of {{Infobox college rivalry}} into {{Infobox college sports rivalry}} later today.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:09, 26 November 2011 (UTC)


I like the idea of a standard navbox for these. I'm particularly looking forward to using it on Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate. Disavian (talk) 19:04, 28 November 2011 (UTC)
i think we are nailing down the code now.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 14:31, 29 November 2011 (UTC)


Where are we discussing functionality of the merged template?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 07:01, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


Tony, I think this is the appropriate place to discuss the "functionality" of the merged template, and specifically what fields and other functions we should include in the merged template after the now-pending TfD is complete. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 13:53, 30 November 2011 (UTC)
COMMENT Now that the most recent game in the Michigan–Michigan State ice hockey rivalry is a tie, it is as good a time as any to request unbeaten streak functionality in the final merged template.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:20, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
Addendum Also add longest unbeaten streak.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 05:23, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
COMMENT Can somebody tell Jweiss11 (talk · contribs) I was looking for some response here.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:48, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
Bueller Day 4 attempt to get a response from Jweiss11.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:58, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
Tony, sorry for not getting back to you before. I was busy passing out at 31 flavors last night. ;) I'm still thinking about the best way to handle the winning streaks in the event of a tie. Do we need two more fields: "Longest unbeaten streak" and "Current unbeaten streak"? A longest unbeaten streak field is pretty straight forward to deal with. But when there is a tie, both rivals have a current unbeaten streak. Should both be listed? Or Just the rival with the longer unbeaten streak? And is there then no current winning streak? Jweiss11 (talk) 02:50, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
I think two new fields would be great. In the case of the Michigan–Michigan State ice hockey rivalry the longest winning streak (18) and longest unbeaten streak (32) are very different (although overlapping) and a separate field would be helpful. In terms of the current streak, my feeling is that current win streak and current unbeaten streak should be separate. Regardless of the outcome of the next game, the win streak and unbeaten streak will be different lengths again. I think the unbeaten streak should the longer of the two, but third party feedback is welcome.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 03:37, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
Since I don't code, I am just guessing, but it seems that adding these two fields should not be very time consuming. Any comment?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 06:26, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
Can anyone else see this thread? I don't seem to be able to get answer here.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 03:37, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
Jweiss11, I see you are paying attention to this page today. What about this thread?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Tony, sorry for the delays here. I've been caught up in a number of other projects. I should have some time tomorrow to work on the infobox and address your suggestions. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:57, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:All-American college football players usage

I have been checking on Category:All-American college football players usage by running through templates in Category:American college football consensus All-American navigational boxes. All templates in 1975 and before had players that were missing the category. I have checked 1978, 1979, 1996, and 2009 and found that all players on these templates have the category. I suspect that if we check all the players in the annual article from the mid 1970s and before, we will find that many are missing the category. FYI.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:17, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I've spent some time today working on adding the AA category, transcluding the AA navboxes, and doing a little clean-up. I've made my way up to 1914, so everything up through then should be good. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:29, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

List of each school's bowl games

I am planning to create the article "List of Louisiana Tech Bulldogs bowl games" to be linked in the new standardized college football template. However, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to include just the FBS bowl games or if I'm supposed to include the school's entire postseason history. Louisiana Tech has played in 15 non-FBS postseason games, several of which were called "bowl games." Many other current FBS schools have played in lower division postseason games. Has a consensus been reached on this issue? Thanks! -AllisonFoley (talk) 07:29, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Great question. I say include them. If you want to blow this list out to "List of Louisiana Tech Bulldogs postseason games" and include the 1982 and 1984 I-AA playoff games, I'd support that as well. I think that's the direction we want to go with these lists to service the FCS teams and the teams that have moved from division to division. Jweiss11 (talk) 07:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)
Aggree, include them! Maybe in a different section (I-AA post-season games, NAIA Bowl Games, etc.). I would personally rather see the games listed on the team page instead of a separate article, but that's just personal preference for me and I certainly wouldn't want to stop your enthusiasm! Also, see this essay for some ways to enhance the list a bit more.--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:32, 26 December 2011 (UTC)
Paul's suggestion works for me. Purplebackpack89≈≈≈≈ 15:39, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:American college football consensus All-American navigational boxes

What is going on with the names at Category:American college football consensus All-American navigational boxes?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 01:12, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

First of all, thank you much for providing me my first barnstar - I hope that I earn many more down the road. In regards to the naming of the navboxes, I understand that Jweiss11 was handling that as of yesterday. Hopefully he will take care of what is left Aquamelli (talk) 02:54, 27 December 2011 (UTC)
Tony, I've renamed a lot of the navboxes to remove anachronistic applications of "NCAA Division I" (created in 1973) and "FBS" (created in 1978 as "Division I-A" and renamed in 2006). I'm still not quite sure what the best naming scheme is here though because the AA selections are not made by the NCAA itself, and the NCAA record book (http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football_records/2011/Awards.pdf) seems to indicate that selections were not always made in strict deference to NCAA divisions. This subject requires some more research, and until that is done, the naming scheme for these navboxes and the AA articles themselves ought to be considered a work in progress. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:54, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Team navboxes

The primary request for comment centers around whether templates, and primarily template navboxes, for categories of articles (here, individual college football team-related articles) that fall under one or more Wikiprojects (here the College Football Wikiproject as well as others), should be held to strict standardization, such as the naming and inclusion of categories and decisions on article inclusion within the navbox templates or whether customization of navboxes should be allowed based on the appropriateness for inclusion of particular articles/categories on a topic-by-topic basis for a particular category of articles. As many navboxes in other Wikiprojects do not hold navboxes to strict standardization, this discussion may have far reaching results on Wikipedia guildelines and policies regarding templates. Thank you in advance for any forthcoming comments. CrazyPaco (talk) 00:26, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

A few weeks ago, I started a discussion about team navboxes with a prototype for a new standard form at Template:Michigan Wolverines football navbox. After some feedback there and elsewhere, especially from Cbl62, I made some tweaks and have begun to roll out this new form. The Michgian navbox is still a good example to reference the new form.

Heretofore, there hasn’t been any standard form for these navboxes either in terms of style or content. While what I have put together is likely to continue to evolve with input from others and shifts in consensus, I believe that this new form constitutes a significant leap forward to clarify the discussion, simplify navigation for users, and make a great deal of content under the purview of this project more manageable. Some key points:

  • The team navbox is divided into five groups 1) Venues, 2) Bowls & rivalries, 3) Culture & lore, 4) People, 5) Seasons
  • Heretofore, we’ve had an uneasy mix of team overview navboxes and team season navboxes. Some teams had one. Some had only the other. Some had both types. I’ve eliminated all of the FBS season navboxes with moves or redirects. Since the seasons themselves tend to be the most numerous type of article that we have for a given team, especially as the coverage of that team develops, this makes sense. From a sheer navbox space perspective you can think of the new team navbox as a sort of enhanced season navbox.
  • The venues section presents the succession of home fields for the team with parenthetical date ranges, a la the standard we have for coach navboxes. Alternate home venues and auxiliary/practice facilities follow the main succession.
  • The bowls & rivalries section presents a link to “List of X X bowl games”, followed by each of the rivalries for which we have an article. Since the individual bowl games have their own navbox and would be bulky to list here, they are not included.
  • The culture & lore section displays, in order: team history (if a separate history article exists), team mascot(s), fight song(s), school marching band, and whatever other culture/lore elements for which we have an article.
  • The people section contains no links to individual biography articles; more on that below. What it does contain are links to any lists or summary articles that we have for people, e.g. “List of X X head football coaches”, “List of X X football players”, “List of X X football All-Americans”, “List of X X in the NFL Draft”, statistical leaders, hall of famers, etc.
  • The seasons section lists all of the team’s seasons since inception with inactive years grayed out. National championship seasons are highlighted in orange, the same shade used to note national titles in the head coaching record tables. If nat’l titles are indicated, a footer appears to note the color coding. In identifying national championships, I’ve been conservative, noting only those that both the school claims and that the College Football Data Warehouse recognizes, per College football national championships in NCAA Division I FBS.
  • The navbox is intended to present a closed loop of navigation, i.e. it is transcluded on all of the articles that it lists and nowhere else.
  • The new navbox employs more efficient coding of which I recently learned. The wrap tags ({{nowrap begin}}, {{•wrap}}, {{nowrap end}}), which are now deprecated for use in {{navbox}}, have been removed in lieu of a new parameter (listclass = hlist) that allows all the elements of a navbox group to be listed, separated, and properly wrapped with simple asterisks.

What I’ve tried to do here is remove all unnecessary adornment and celebration from the navbox. Many of these navboxes were turning into trophy cases. What they should do instead is simply present the articles that we have about the team. Initially, I was against even noting the national championships, but Cbl62 argued that they were of paramount significance and should be noted in some way even here. Purged from the navboxes are images, non-navigational data like all-time record and year of inception, “notable people/players” sections (which lack even objective criteria for inclusion), Heisman trophy winners, retired numbers, individual head coaches, current staff, and general info about the school like location, president, and athletic director.

Excluded from the navbox also are individual non-bowl games that have articles. I had included them originally, but Cbl62 argued against them in the case of Michigan. I think some, especially those so transcendent they have earned special names, e.g. The Play, might be appropriate for inclusion in the culture & lore section.

I expect there will be some pushback here, especially on the item of head coaching history. However, I think there is a strong argument for excluding them since they have their own navbox, and since we’ve decide to exclude these sorts of team-wide navboxes from biography articles. Moreover, this new navbox form ought to place more emphasis on the development of lists of head coaches, lists of bowl games, etc. which should become standard elements of a given team’s coverage. The development of such lists allows lengthy, tabular content to be standardized and migrated from the main team article, where the emphasis should be on prose about the history and aspects of the program. Those lists can also serve as navigational transit points in tandem with the main team navbox, guiding readers to more focused articles, e.g. individual bowl games, players, and coaches.

So far I’ve rolled out this new navbox to all of the Big 10 teams, a few in the SEC, all of teams that previously had season-only navboxes, and a smattering of others. I’ve gotten a couple of questions already from editors who’ve seen the new navbox in play:

Thoughts? Jweiss11 (talk) 04:31, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

  • Support. I think Jweiss's formulation is pretty good. The "culture & lore" section is the loosest group, but I think we need it. The types of things included under "culture & lore" are an important part of why so many of us love college football. As for including transcendent games in "culture & lore," it should be resisted because it's so subjective and could lead to navbox bloat. That said, I think a rare exception for something like "The Play" would be fine. In answer to Jweiss's specific questions, I say "yes" on bolding NC seasons and "maybe, it depends" on including scandals and controversies. If controversies were to be included, I guess it would have to be under "culture & lore"? One way to deal with historic games could be to add a "historic games" link in a renamed "Rivalries and games" section. Such a change is probably premature, though the List of historically significant Michigan Wolverines football games is getting better (formatting still not great, suggestions welcome). Final point: while the suggested formulation is good, we should continue to allow some flexibility to let people experiment a bit. Cbl62 (talk) 06:27, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
  • I agree with highlighting championships, but as per WP:COLOR, color should not be the sole indicator of a championships. People who are color blind will be unable to perceive it. As for scandals, I'm all for including them as long they are directly related to the team in question, we just have to consistent with all the teams and navboxes. --Jtalledo (talk) 12:28, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Overall standardization is good. I am not sure how we interpret who the legends are of a program if Heisman Trophy winners is removed. I assume bowl games are removed because they have a dedicated navbox. Not sure why rivalry games and bowl games are treated differently. I would think rivalry games should also have a navbox, but I guess we need to flesh out interest in having sport specific or multisport rivalry articles.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:54, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Fix the color issue mentioned by Jtalledo and I'll support it. I'm not clear about the "List of X X bowl games" link, though. Does this mean that every team should now have such an article? That seems like overkill. Perhaps a common-sense solution would be to allow direct links to bowl games for teams with a small number of appearances (Perhaps 5 or less? That would be 26 teams, though at least three and possibly five will play in their sixth bowl this winter.) and create list articles for those with more appearances. cmadler (talk) 16:50, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I greatly appreciate what Jweiss has done to advance the ball in this arena (if you'll pardon the dreadful metaphor). He has clearly given a great deal of thought to how the model template should appear, what should be included, and what should be excluded. Generally, I agree with most of his clean-up work and proposed solutions. That having been said, I have a handful of small quibbles and several big-picture conceptual issues that I believe deserve consideration. First, my minor quibbles:

1. The faded orange used to "shade" the national championship years among the other seasons in the list is graphically clumsy, and when paired with the wrong team colors, hideous. The solution is to either bold the year of the championship season, italicize it, add an asterisk or other superscript character tied to a note at the bottom of the navbox, color the text itself in one of the team's colors, or find a more color-neutral way of shading it in a pale screen of grey. This is a very small point in the big picture.
2. Inclusion of scandal articles? No, not as a general rule, but if the individual talk page consensus is to include a particular scandal, then it would have my blessing. We are under no obligation to include every article related to the football team in the navbox. I see nothing but controversy and edit wars resulting from their mandatory inclusion in the team navboxes. Personally, I think scandals are best treated in the context of the biographies of the coaches and/or players responsible, with an appropriate and brief mention in the history sections of the main team articles that does not overwhelm the rest of the article content. The classic example of an overemphasis on scandal is the ongoing edit and article creation/deletion wars surrounding the Clemson–South Carolina rivalry. We don't need to provide an opportunity and excuse to replicate that kind of flame war nonsense across 120+ Division I football programs, every one of which has experienced some controversy at some point in its history.
3. I'm not really enamored of combining rivalry series articles and bowl game articles into a single navbox grouping.
4. Inclusion of "legends" or similar grouping? Nope—way too subjective and it will lead to an explosion of included individual players and coaches without any objective standard for inclusion. I absolutely agree we should include links to article lists of coaches, players, and All-Americans.

Now, for my big-picture conceptual issues:

1. There needs to remain some degree of flexibility from program to program, and we should not try to cram every program into an absolutely inflexible one-size-fits-all cookie cutter pattern. Certain items should be presumed to be included, and Jweiss' formulation provides a pretty darn good working list of those categories of links. As cmadler has observed, the circumstances of every program and its history are not the same, however, and the opportunities to link existing articles vary widely from team to team. For an example dear to my own interests, the Florida Gators have three national championships and eight conference championships. All 11 of those championships were won since 1991, and there exists a stand-alone article for each of the national championship games (1 Bowl Alliance in the Sugar Bowl, 2 BCS Championship Games), and 7 of the 8 conference championships (all 7 were SEC Championships Games). It would be a very strange Florida Gators football navbox indeed that omits the 11 greatest team accomplishments of the Gators program—team accomplishments for which major stand-alone Wikipedia articles already exist. We need to rethink this. Which leads to my next point . . . .
2. We need to rethink how we apply the "closed loop" concept to these navboxes. I've given this a lot of thought over the last three months. For those of you who are unfamiliar, by "closed loop," we mean a navbox includes only those links to pages on which the navbox is transcluded, and the navbox is only transcluded on pages to which it is linked. It is both a negative restriction and an affirmative requirement. It's a very good rule of thumb and guiding principle. That having been said, IMO, inflexible application of the closed loop principle leads to two kinds of navbox "errors": first, we require the placement of the navbox on pages where it is either redundant or otherwise not entirely appropriate; and second, we omit links from the navbox that are entirely appropriate to include. Examples are instructive. In many cases, the culture and lore is not football-specific; as examples, the university alma mater, the mascot, the marching band, and many, if not most school fight songs, are not football-specific. Does that mean we should transclude every existing team navbox for football, basketball, baseball, women's lacrosse, etc. on the articles for the alma mater, fight songs, and other articles covering the shared culture and lore of the athletic program? IMO, no, it does not. Does it mean that these links should be omitted from the navbox? Again, IMO, no, it does not. The other example that readily comes to mind is the head coaching succession; the head coaches' biographies are an intrinsic part of the history of any college football team; omitting them from the navbox omits a huge chunk of the collective history of the program. IMO, the head coach links are entirely appropriate (arguably, essential) to include in the navbox, but we need to come up with a different rationale or a different formulation of the "closed loop" principle that gets this right.
Instead of a rigid application of the "closed loop" principle, I would suggest that we think in terms of a hierarchy of navboxes: (1) university navboxes; (2) sports team navboxes; and (3) biographical navboxes. The hierarchy level determines the type articles on which the navbox is transcluded. Examples of this hierarchy principle are instructive. The university navbox may include a link to the football team, but the university navbox is not included on the football team article page because the more specific football team navbox is. The football team navbox may include links to the head coach biography articles, but the football team navbox is not transcluded on the head coach biographies because they already include the more specific head coach navboxes. It's actually elegantly simple: some navboxes are team-level navboxes and are only used on team-level articles. Likewise, some navboxes are biography-level navboxes and they are only used on biography-level articles. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:45, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
Agree with much of what Dirtlawyer1 says. I'd add, in general, that the drive for standardization is not always necessarily good and tends to go overboard. The templates by Jweiss are a great starting place, but some groupings and listings are more appropriate for some teams than others and what makes sense for Michigan may not necessarily make sense for Boston College, and there is nothing wrong with that. Keep in mind, the College Football Wikiproject does not own these templates. CrazyPaco (talk) 21:02, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I appreciate all the feedback so far. Per the national championship highlighting, I think simple bolding may work better than the orange highlighting. This would address Jtalledo's concern per WP:COLOR and DirtLawyer's concern about graphical clumsiness and hideous color clashing.

I like the highlighting, but with customization of colors (which will allow for improved contrast based on the navboxes overall color scheme), and possibly used in combination with bolding or italicizing.CrazyPaco (talk) 03:53, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Per Tony's concerns about "who are the legends?", I say that's what the articles are for. Heisman trophy winners and iconic/hall of famer-type coaches should certainly be mentioned in the lead of a given program's main article. I think the lead of Michigan Wolverines football does a good job of this. This should be even easier to execute for less storied programs with fewer luminaries to juggle.

Cmadler brings up a great point about lists in cases where there are very few items to list. Here's what I think the solution should be: any list (seasons, bowls, head coaches, All-Americans, etc) that is deemed too short to warrant it's own stand-alone list should live on the main program article until it grows past a critical threshhold. The navbox can point to the appropriate sections of the main team article for those lists. We could even set up redirects as placeholders for the eventual stand-alone lists. Those short, in-main-article lists ought to employ the same formatting that we give the to the guts of the stand-alone lists. This gives all the content a consistent feel and streamlines the process of breaking that list out into its won article when the time comes. There is a nice compliment of lists for Alabama, which I believe represent best-in-class formatting: List of Alabama Crimson Tide football seasons, List of Alabama Crimson Tide bowl games, List of Alabama Crimson Tide head football coaches, List of Alabama Crimson Tide football All-Americans. The All-American one still needs some development. Doesn't seem that we have definitive format yet for that kind of list.

Per Dirtlawyer's big-picture conceptual issues, you have some good points about the championship games. I'll give some more thought to that area. I realize that culture/lore items like fight song, mascot, and marching band are not exclusively football entities. They surely have strong connections to the football team, and in most cases that connection is clearly the strongest of any sport's. If any of these items have substantive, notable connections with other sports teams, I say they ought to be included in that team's navbox as well and have that navbox transcluded on the article. Once we get past football and basktball, I think those connections are going to get pretty thin, if we even have a navbox for those other sports. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seriously doubt that the marching band performs at tennis matches at most schools. :)

As for the other large issues of all-in-one solutions and experimentation that Dirtlawyer and CrazyPaco reference, I've heard the argument against all-in-one solutions many times and it's always vague and unconvincing. If we design the navbox for the most storied programs (the Michigans, the Notre Dames, the Alabamas) that have the largest and most varied set of articles about them, then we should be able to service all of the less storied programs with the same solution. Those other program might not have as many "things" as the big boys, but that's fine. We just turn off certain features as needed of the all-in-one solution for those guys. I'm all for experimentation as a long as its structured and forward-thinking. Part of good experimentation is throwing out the bad, failed experiments of the past. What I hope is that this effort will bring all the navboxes up to a new platform, purged of lesser solutions, and all on the same page. From there anyone can tinker and experiment to see if they can come up with something even better. Jweiss11 (talk) 02:39, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Look, I actually like your navbox, and I do agree that these navboxes shouldn't become trophy cases, and that repetitiveness in listing years is best to be eliminated. However, I find the arguments for stringent standardization equally unconvincing, and I will stand vehemently opposed to any effort that disallows customizations. Michigan's nav box is not necessarily appropriate for Alabama's or Notre Dame's because what is significant to one school is not necessarily significant or appropriate for the other, and that should be decided by those articles primary editors, as are reflexion of their expert knowledge on those individual topics. Cultures differ, "big boys" or not. The problem of the "big boy" argument is that it suggests that one school can't value different elements of its program than the ones Michigan values, and I find that inappropriate. For instance, if I am creating an navbox for Washington & Jefferson Presidents football, then I should be able to put a link to the 1922 Rose Bowl because will always be a signature event for that program, or if the editors of Chicago Maroons football determine it correct to put a link to Amos Alonzo Stagg, so be it. Heck if I'm Alabama, I might want to put a link to Bear Bryant and I see that as more than reasonable. For some schools, perhaps conference titles are a major element that is valued in their history. For schools that don't have many bowls, maybe those are important. Still others might think Hall of Fame players are important element of the tradition of their program. But this Wikiproject is not necessarily the best place to decide what is important for each and every college football programs. BTW, I personally think Michigan's lead is way too long. CrazyPaco (talk) 03:47, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
Crazy Paco, Alabama doesn't write Wikipedia. Encyclopedia editors do. What you're basically saying is that the final arbitration for what is important or what is simply included in a navbox for a given team rests with the fans of that team. That is the exactly what we don't want. Jweiss11 (talk) 07:05, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedians who have expert knowledge and special interest about Alabama write the University of Alabama articles. Editorial discussions about wording and content of those articles take place on the discussion pages of those articles and can be enjoined by anyone. Wikiprojects help provides tools, guidelines, and best practices, but they are not an enforcement tool that owns articles or templates. For example, my football expertise obviously lies in Pitt, Miami, and other programs in the Northeast, but I would not presume to understand as well as the actual experts on Alabama (or Michigan for that matter) what information was most important in order to convey to a reader the best understanding of that topic. For instance, I don't think a historical list of stadium venues is particularly important at all for conveying the sense of Michigan's program. I'd instead be inclined to list its three Heisman winners in the Nav box rather than three stadiums that were in use before 1927. Likewise, I would no have included the Michigan Trainer list (nor even actually vote to keep it in an AfD as it seems non-notable). But within the scope or context of Michigan's football program, that position may be a huge deal, enough so that it is apparently warranted enough to place within the Michigan football navbox. When discussion implementation of standards whose goal is to eliminate customization across a wide spectrum of articles, at minimum, posting a notice on the affected template and article talk pages would seem warranted. We have a difference in philosophy. I like your format as a starting place, or even a default design, but maintenance of flexibility and customization is a good and necessary thing because not all pegs are round. CrazyPaco (talk) 22:09, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Overall, these are good efforts to standardize navboxes, but there's at least one issue. Boldface should not be the only indicator of a national championship season, since it would result in confusion with the boldface indication of the article the reader is currently viewing. I see color has been rejected as the indicator, maybe an asterisk would work better? --NReTSa (talk) 16:28, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Generally speaking I do like the more streamlined navboxes as I do tend to agree that there should be some standardization across all programs. I do have a couple of issues though. I do believe that Heisman winners should be included in the navbox. Simply put, the Heisman is generally understood by people outside the college football bubble as being the most important individual award given each season. Limiting it only to the Heisman and not other awards (Maxwell, Lombardi, Doak Walker, etc.) does not seem to me as being an unreasonable inclusion within the navbox. In my CFB world Sullivan, Bo and Cam are a major part of the lore at Auburn, the same for Walker and Sinkwich at Georgia, the same for Rogers at South Carolina, the same for Spurrier, Wuerffel and Tebow at Florida... I do agree that the NCs need to be highlighted in the navbox in a way that meets the requirements of WP:ACCESS. Overall I do like what we are trying to do here. (btw I have updated the List of Alabama Crimson Tide football All-Americans) Roll Tide! Patriarca12 (talk) 02:37, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Crazy Paco, what you are talking about is not really expert knowledge, but more precisely “special interest”, as you state, and in the pejorative, political sense. We’re not talking about expert knowledge of the nuances of the zone blocking scheme or scholarly insight into how Teddy Roosevelt’s management of the reforms in college football circa 1905 paralleled his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War. It’s provincial fandom couched as “expertise”, e.g. “round the campfire where I come from ‘bout Tuscaloosa, Bear’s a legend…that Ralph Jer-dan don’t a hold a candle to him…we don’t give a cotton-pickin’ lick ‘bout dose boys from Auburn.” We should not waste time and effort stooping to the lowest common denominator of the whiny sports radio call-in meathead, and start debating which Heismans were more important or which legendary coaches were more legendary. A given element common among many programs should either be turned on in the navboxes for all programs or turned off. We have the same infobox for every football program, don’t we?
As for the lead of Michigan Wolverines football, perhaps it is too long given the current, undeveloped state of its body, but it’s certainly not too long for the comprehensive article that begs to be written. Conversely, the lead of Pittsburgh Panthers football is certainly too short given the comprehensiveness and quality of its body, for which I’m sure you are largely responsible and should be commended. The lack of any mention in the lead of Tony Dorsett and his Heisman, or coaching luminaries like Pop Warner, Jock Sutherland, and Johnny Majors strike me as glaring omissions. All too often, navboxes have become a fetish for proper article development. This is a temptation we should resist. Jweiss11 (talk) 18:33, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
Disagree strongly on most points and this is a perfect example of where one size does not fit all. For example, in my expert opinion (and I'll think that you'd find some outside Wikipedia do consider me to have a certain level of expertise on the topic), Majors' short tenure would not warrant a mention in Pitt football's lead, and I'd be shaky on including Dorsett at the expense of others. That is if I thought the lead should be lengthened, but I don't (except by maybe one short paragraph). A further example for Pitt of where inflexible standardization is bad: It makes no sense in the context of the entirety of the topic of Pitt football to highlight most of Pitt's historical venues by including them in the navbox. Outside of Heinz Field and Pitt Stadium (which should be included for reasons that would take some length to discuss), the articles on the other venues have essentially no usefulness in informing a reader about pertinent or necessary information to understand the topic of Pitt football. Thus, including them serves mostly as decorative cruft for this navbox, only included to fulfill a misguided need for mass template standardization, and actually wastes readers' time by guiding them to articles whose connection to the topic is peripheral at best, and comes at the standardized exclusion of much more important ones. Another, most teams do not have 100 different season articles, but rather list-type articles for blocks of earlier seasons. Does it really make sense to take up so much navbox space with each year if a stand-alone season article does not exist? Adding or excluding things just for standardization's sake just does not make sense if the goal is to provide readers with a guide for the best articles for understanding the topic...and the topic in each and every case is the actual individual college football program, not college football in general. That doesn't mean that I believe that it makes sense for one team's template to just go crazy and include any old thing (or as mentioned above, try to turn it into a trophy case), but issues such as that can be discussed on a template-by-template basis, bringing in experts from all affected wikiprojects that a template may fall under. There are many issues with one size fits all if you go through its use on an article-by-article basis, and this is just a couple of them.
I also still think Michigan's lead is way too long judging by leads of featured Wikipedia articles of similar length (for instance, Featured Articles of entire universities like Michigan, Duke, and Texas A&M). In fact, according MOS:LEAD, it should only be three or four paragraphs at most, no matter the length of the article, but I leave that for the editors of that article to work out on that article's talk page based on their expert knowledge of the subject. CrazyPaco (talk) 07:38, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
JW, down around the campfire, while we're roasting hog and slapping skeeters, we usually refer to Coach Jordan as "Shug Jordan," as in the first syllable of the word sugar. Not even his mama called him "Ralph." Just sayin'. BTW, I agree that navboxes should not become a substitute for proper article development. Right now, we spend a lot of time generating navboxes for the teams and also various awards and championships, and, sadly, these navboxes are often the most substantive elements on the page for many of our CFB articles about the coaches and even consensus All-Americans . . . . Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 18:44, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Update: Patriarca12 and I filled in the gaps so that we now have a team navbox for all 120 FBS teams; see Category:NCAA Division I FBS team navigational boxes. There are also 23 FCS navboxes and one lonely NCAA DII navbox. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:43, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

All of the existing team navboxes have now been standardized. CrazyPaco, per your last post above, and leaving the stuff about lead sections aside for now, nothing that you've mentioned here is essentially Pitt-specific. Most programs have now-defunct venues they once used as a home field, and many of have more than one. One of the reasons, which I neglected to mention above, for putting the full chronology of home venues with parenthetical dates into the navbox is to obviate the need for goofy, clunky venue succession boxes, much as our enhancement of the coach navboxes last year allowed us to purge the goofy, clunky coaching succession boxes. As for the yearly season articles, the reality is that most programs do not have grouped season articles, but rather a smattering of individual season articles, e.g. the last few seasons and sprinkling of others. The grouped season articles tend to be messy and if every developed would be come unwieldy to the point of needing to be broken out into individual season articles. For FBS programs, and perhaps FCS programs as well, I see no reason why we can't support the goal of having an article for every single individual season. This has already been done for Michigan, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:19, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
You have created and standardized all the navboxes in recent weeks (a monumental effort that I do appreciate your effort on). However, your alteration of existing templates to a rigid and inflexible standard was done without existing consensus. As Navboxes in articles in other, more active Wikiprojects (such as those for cities, countries, political figures, professional sports teams, and many more) allow flexibility in Navbox content in order for them to be tailored to their specific topic by a consensus of editors with expert knowledge, as demonstrated even in Featured Articles that fall within the same projects and categories, you do not seem to have consensus on the general idea of such rigid inflexibility of categorical Navbox standardarization across the general Wikipedia community either.
Regarding the inclusion of defunct venues, that is not my idea of useful or necessary information for some nav boxes. Further, when succession boxes exist for all other tenants of a venue, with the exception of one team that you removed, it makes for an incomplete article irregardless of whether succession boxes are stylistically messy (in the case of multiple succession boxes, they are often hidden in collapsed blocks anyway). If all succession boxes for all tenants were removed in a particular article, it would be a different story, but that is not the case for all of these venues. Succession boxes also appear in many Featured Articles, such as for those of major office holders like US Presidents, a much more prominent grouping of articles that does not seem to suffer from their inclusion of "goofy, clunky" succession boxes. This Wikiproject does not own articles or templates. General guidelines and standardization for layout are good. In general, most of your hard work is excellent. However, removing common sense flexibility in content inclusion for Navboxes is bad. It is now the busy holiday times, but I can see that we may have to take this discussion elsewhere to generate more widespread community commentary because there are issues here that may have far reaching effects across 100s of Wikiprojects and categories. CrazyPaco (talk) 08:02, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
The fact is that was no consensus or standard for team navboxes at all before this recent effort. The consensus, whatever there is off it, built right here represents the prevailing consensus on the subject. You keep talking about "expert knowledge" in a way that is totally vacuous. You seem to think that because you are an expert on Pitt football that means that you can exempt the Pitt navbox from a structure that serves every other college football team in the land. What is so different about Pitt football? You have failed to remotely explain this. As for succession boxes, the overwhelming consensus in this project, at WikiProject College Basketball, and elsewhere is that succession boxes are terrible for a number reasons and have been iterated many times. A year ago, before the coaching navbox upgrades and the Great Succession Box Purge of 2010, I made a similar argument as you do now about certainly highly rated articles and more mature topics of Wikipedia (e.g. baseball and American politics) using succession boxes and thus providing a standard that should be followed. But after more careful thought and time to allow the work of many to develop, it's quite clear now that this WikiProject, through its successful collaboration and standards-syncing with WP:College Basketball, WP:NFL, and WP:NBA, is in a position of thought leadership for Wikipedia at large, particularly when it comes to standardized article structures like navboxes and succession boxes (or lack thereof). I would like to see all of those NFL and MLB succession boxes, like the one on the Pitt venue articles, purged as well, and I'm quite confident I'm not alone there. However, before we sell a given standardization to another project, it makes sense to have it established and stabilized here. Jweiss11 (talk) 11:50, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
Please point to me where you have a consensus here that navboxes on articles that happen to fall within the College Football Wikiproject must adhere to your unalterable standard that has had minimal commentary here or elsewhere, certainly not on the discussion pages of the templates themselves nor were discussions started on any other projects those articles fall under. You have singlehandedly created missing navboxes following your standard and edited navboxes for every team-specific group of articles. This was not a task undertaken by a larger community. I do not see any consensus at all even here for this standard, in this discussion, nor at any of the related project pages, or on the template discussion pages themselves. This should under go a consensus building dispute resolution, starting with outside RfC I guess. As far as succession boxes, I do not have a problem removing them. What I have a problem with is removing only succession boxes for one team when multiple teams use a venue. You nor this Wikiproject owns those articles. Having a complete list of tenant succession boxes on an article (except for one tenant that just happens to play college football) does not adhere to any Wikipedia standards of presenting complete and accurate information to a reader, and I would submit, is also both confusing and misleading to a reader to have only one tenant excluded in these lists. CrazyPaco (talk) 23:14, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
Non-Support, Strongly, Interesting discussion, Jweiss11, I think what your attempting is very noble, however it may be too much of a utopian view for something as diverse and non-uniform as the constantly shifting world of major college sports/conferences/competition/bowls-playoffs-BCS-bowls. I point directly to your view that " . . . (opponents are) basically saying is that the final arbitration for what is important or what is simply included in a navbox for a given team rests with the fans of that team. That is the exactly what we don't want.", as an obviously intelligent wikipedian I am sure you realize that Logos and Ethos only come from the Pathos first, in short anyone that takes time away from their commitments, family, job, career, and goals to register here and edit/research within wiki rules, is a "fan" of something be it nuclear physics, Zulu anthropology or Alabama football. To somehow seek to remove pathos from "volunteer" editors going about things in the "good faith" of ethos and logos, I think you just killed wikipedia, seriously think about that, articles on 17th century math edited by contributors that couldn't care less, and are wondering why they aren't getting paid for this effort, the whole point of wikipedia is that there are talented people that care (love/pathos) a topic so much, they are willing to give information they could get paid big bucks for on the open market, away for free, taking the "fans" out of that equation and wiki articles aren't being created, aren't being updated, welcome to the buggy whip of the internet age. If I'm wrong in this assumption of necessary Logos and Ethos coming only from the Pathos of editors, please let me know, I am a big fan of any breakthroughs in anthropological psychology. No intent to sound disrespectful nor insulting here, but given your attempt to change the status quo by partly justifying it with very poorly chosen regional dialectic pejoratives (mocking?), the same "meat heads" that make Wikipedia what it is, I think we need to recross that proverbial bridge once again back to a more respectful dialogue. Bottom line here is that to somehow remove so-called "regional differences" from an institution that has fought tooth and nail for the last 75 years along "regional difference" lines and can't seen to even come up with a standardized system of scheduling, championships or even revenue sharing or TV contracts, is asking an impossible task for volunteers. The magic of wikipedia is that we are all volunteers, I am all for the ideal that the logos and ethos (standards) need to be present with the pathos, but just as every college team is very different in spite of paying industry wonks millions to sort out some sort of standardization (and failed), so is every wiki editors pathos, let's not kid ourselves by pretending you can remove that from this site and still have viability. College football is regional, and varied, the boxes should reflect that flexibility, within "reason" that was applied prior to this effort. Hholt01 (talk) 19:41, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Consensus AA navboxes

Done Just finished creating 74 consensus AA template navboxes. I made sure that all the players associated with that years consensus AA team has the navbox on their page (if they have a page). Next thing I will do is put the navboxes on the AA pages corresponding year (i.e 1974 consensus navbox on the 1974 all-american page) Aquamelli (talk) 01:13, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Nice work, Aquamelli. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:47, 27 December 2011 (UTC)
Thanks to everyone who helped fill this category in. When I created the first one ({{2009 NCAA Division I FBS College Football Consensus All-Americans}}) on 2010-01-03, I had hoped others would follow my lead. I am not sure if I expected it to happen in under two years, but I am pretty satisfied. I am glad that I only had to create about 2 dozen because this week I have had my hands full with them. First, I spent a spell adding Category:All-American college football players to the majority of articles on the early templates that needed it on the consensus AA templates I created. Now, I am in the midst of alphabetizing the categories of all the players on the consensus AA templates I created. If I had any more of these to do, I'd pass out.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:48, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Telegraph football!

Gang, this is wild! While researching the 1911 Kansas vs. Missouri football game (first homecoming game), I learn that over 1,000 fans gathered in downtown Lawrence, Kansas to listen to a play-by-play reporting of the game transmitted by telegraph! They had a giant model of a field set up with a ball and would move the ball closer to the goal line. As they did, the fans would cheer. Had to be an awesome sight!

Could this be the first "broadcast" of a sporting event??--Paul McDonald (talk) 22:09, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

WP:SYNTHESIS! Paul is forcing his midwestern POV on all of us! In all seriousness though, that's incredible... Nolelover Talk·Contribs 22:33, 27 December 2011 (UTC)
Couldn't tell you where, but I've read about such a thing before -- possibly for that game and possibly a different game. cmadler (talk) 13:56, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Stat help

When was the last time someone led the Big Ten in yards/reception in back to back years? I am fairly certain it goes back to at least 2000. Does anyone know a source for this stat?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 11:39, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I went as far back as 1970 and the closest person that came to leading the Big Ten in receptions and receiving yards was Desmond Howard in 1990 and 1991. Howard lead the Big Ten in receiving yards in 1990 and 1991, but Howard was second (62) to Kameno Bell in receptions (64) in 1991. Aquamelli (talk) 17:57, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
Unless you're asking for yards per reception? Aquamelli (talk) 17:58, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
Yards per. I am the Junior Hemingway main editor and it looks like he is going to repeat. I can't figure out when it happened last.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:04, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
I found two players that have accomplished this. Darryl Stingley in 1971 with 20.4 yards/per and 1972 with 23.6 yards per. The other is Andre Rison who in 1987 had 23.1 yards/per and 1988 had 24.6 yards/per. I found these stats at TotalFootballStats and did my best to confirm using sports-reference.com Aquamelli (talk) 18:19, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
When I was using sports-reference, it only went back to 2000. How did you confirm?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:24, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
I compared player stats from what TotalFootballStats showed and what Sports-Reference showed. They were the same - I couldn't look it up by conference, I had to go player by player Aquamelli (talk) 18:28, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
How did you get the conference Yd/rec leaders at TFS?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:29, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
If you go to the 1987 page for instance and scroll to the bottom, you'll see Receiving Leaders. One of the columns has a % symbol to symbolize yards per reception. It was hard to get to the pages that I listed, I only got there through a specific google search string. TFS is kinda difficult to navigate. I went from season to season by changing the year in the URL address Aquamelli (talk) 18:34, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
That is helpful. I do believe that Rison is the guy. I am just not sure that we have a WP:RS for the fact.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:41, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

College Football Barnstar

Greeting from The Awards Project!

Currently, WP:PUA lists File:NCAAFootball barnstar.jpg as your Project's award, but such an award does not appear on your project's page anywhere. I'd just like to confirm that it is, in fact, the Official Award for your Project. Cheers! Achowat (talk) 20:27, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it is. It's listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Templates. Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 22:34, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Importance assessment revisted

It's been a while, and I've taken a bit of a wikibreak, but I wanted to stir things up a little on importance assessment. I've got most of an assessment scheme at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Assessment#Matrix proposal. If you head down to the bottom of that talk page, there are several categories of articles still to do, and I'd really appreciate any suggestions on those remaining items. Thanks, cmadler (talk) 21:09, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Template:2011 Big Ten Conference football navbox

I can't remember if this has been discussed. Should Template:2011 Big Ten Conference football navbox include the 10 bowl games that the conference teams played in? I think it should.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 22:52, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I.E., should it include 2011 Little Caesars Pizza Bowl, 2011 Insight Bowl, 2011 Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, 2011 Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (December), 2012 TicketCity Bowl, 2012 Outback Bowl, 2012 Capital One Bowl, 2012 Gator Bowl, 2012 Rose Bowl, and 2012 Sugar Bowl?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 22:56, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
It seems like useful information, I'd support such inclusion. Achowat (talk) 23:36, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
I intend to change any other conferences that have templates as well should this be approved.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:38, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
If there are no objections by Sugar Bowl game time, this is what I will be working on during the game.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:52, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Yearly team season article format

I think the yearly team season article format template should be updated. It seems like we've lost consistency in these yearly team articles, and I think updating and adhering to the template will help.

What are some thoughts on this? Thanks! -AllisonFoley (talk) 09:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

As the one of the primary authors for the Michigan article, I can explain the roster portion. Sometime before last season, a discussion was held about the issue and resulted in me selecting this template based on what I thought was an agreement by others to use it. As for the at/vs. portion, I've just copied that from previous articles, so someone else will have to help you there. SCS100 (talk) 15:18, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Recently TonyTheTiger (talk · contribs) has been adding conference season templates to the External links section of bowl game articles. See for example [2] [3] [4]. There are some other bowl articles that have general team navboxes, with links to many other team articles other than the bowl games. I personally feel these navboxes run afoul of the spirit of WP:NAVBOX; the articles they list are increasingly tangentially-related to the subject of the article. I'd like to limit the navboxes in bowl game articles to the following:

  1. Annual bowl game template (such as for the 2008 bowl game season)
  2. Individual bowl game series template (such as for all Rose Bowls)
  3. Team bowl game templates (for the two participating teams only)

I'd like to discuss to reach consensus on this, so I would appreciate everyone's opinion. –Grondemar 04:00, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Generally speaking as a user of the Encyclopedia (reader; not editor) I find it useful to be able to use the Navbox I used to reach the article to leave the article. For instance, if I was looking up my Spartans and their season it's logical that I might end up at the games played by our rivals. "So State won the <st>Hall of Fame</st> Outback Bowl, who did tOSU play?" The Navboxes make Navigation easier for the reader, are designed to keep clutter down (besides, you're only talking, at maximum, 6 Boxes; for instance: 2011-12 FBS Bowls, Outback Bowls, 2011 Michigan State Season, 2011 Georgia Season, 2011 Big Ten, 2011 SEC). I !vote in favor of usability and for the Navboxen. Achowat (talk) 13:30, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Tony's rationale. Conference bowl games are very much related to a conference's season. — X96lee15 (talk) 14:34, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
I also agree with Tony's rationale, though I'm open to hearing the arguments on the other side of the issue, which I don't think Grondemar really presented. cmadler (talk) 15:02, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
I think I was one of the first editors to start putting those conference navboxes on bowl game articles back in 2009. Obviously, I'm in favor of including them, as I think that the bowl games a conference's members participated in during a season is a topic that a reader would often navigate between. That said, I'm not irreversibly married to the idea, so I'm willing to remove if a solid rationale is presented. Haven't seen one yet, though. DeFaultRyan 20:46, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Here's my more detailed concerns:

  • My biggest problem with the conference templates as currently designed is that they don't tell you which team participated in each bowl game. To use the Ohio State example above, you would not be able to find OSU's bowl game from the Michigan State bowl game article without clicking on each link in turn to see if you found the right one. That isn't a service to our readers and it limits the usefulness of the navbox. You could reformat the navbox to indicate which team went to which bowl game, but I think the result is going to end up either duplicative, ugly, or too large in physical size.
  • Many of our bowl game featured articles that are not BCS bowl games (ex. 2003 Insight Bowl, 2009 International Bowl, 2010 PapaJohns.com Bowl) already list most or all of where the other conference teams were playing in the prose, in the "Team selection" section. I didn't think navbox links were supposed to be redundant with links in the text.
  • I personally think that six navboxes on a single page is stretching it; there is a certain amount of "navbox fatigue" that sets in when several navboxes are sitting next to each other on the bottom of the page that discourages the reader from looking at any particular one.

One way to look at the navboxes listed on the bottom of the bowl game articles is by "dimensions". The navbox covering all of the bowl games in a single season is one dimension; the navbox covering the history of the specific bowl game is a second dimension, and the navboxes covering the bowl game history for each team cover a third dimension. The annual conference bowl game navbox is not a unique dimension; it is instead simply a subset of the bowl games in a single season navbox.

My proposal, therefore, is to consolidate the conference bowl season navbox with the overall bowl season navbox, either by:

  • Adding links to the bottom that would link to a list by conference of teams in bowl games (this list would probably be embedded in the conference season article, such as in the good article noted by Tony). The list format would still enable easy navigation between conference team bowl games while allowing better formatting than what is possible in a navbox. This would be my preferred option.
  • Indicating by each bowl game the two participating teams with links to their team season articles. I favor this approach less since it shares several of the disadvantages of expanding the entries in the conference bowl season navbox.

Thoughts? –Grondemar 00:42, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

My thinking is that you are only thinking about how the reformatted templates look on the bowl game articles. The usefulness of the bowl game links is not a subset of another template on the page for team season articles. It is an additional useful link.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 01:54, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure I follow your argument here, Tony. Could you clarify what you meant by "The usefulness of the bowl game links is not a subset of another template on the page for team season articles."? –Grondemar 23:02, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
The Bowl game links added to the conference season templates are not redundant links (as a subset of the links on season NCAA bowl games template) on several of the types of pages that the conference season templates are used. E.G., The conference season article and all the team season articles are places where readers who are interested in a conference's bowl game participation could find such links useful.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:24, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
Also, I am not sure that the pedestrian user understands the mouseover option, but I have no problem with just the bowl names on the template because I can see who played using the mouseover.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:24, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

BCS templates

Resolved

I have gotten intimately involved in Bowl game templates. I have noticed that both {{BCS National Championship Game navbox}} and {{Bowl Championship Series navbox}} exist. All the links on the former are on the latter. This may make it redundant. Additionally, the latter is not used consistently. In some years, it appears only on the championship game and in other years it appears on all BCS games. We need to resolve whether we keep both templates and how to use the latter. My feeling is that we only need one of these templates and that the only bowl games that should include it are the championship games.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 15:42, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

The links are not totally duplicative, because the trophy and the stadia are linked from the former but not the latter. cmadler (talk) 16:12, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
Do you have an opinion on whether they should be merged or whether the BCS navbox should be on non-championship BCS bowl games.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:16, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
My thought is that both should be retained, with just one change: on the BCS navbox, remove the "Champions" section entirely, since it duplicates content in the BCSNCG navbox and in {{BCS National Champion navbox}}. The BCS navbox should then be used only on the main bowl articles (e.g. Fiesta Bowl but not 2007 Fiesta Bowl). cmadler (talk) 18:41, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
That is acceptable to me. I await further feedback from others.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:14, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
I agree with what User:Cmadler proposed above regarding the navboxes. –Grondemar 23:00, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
If there is no objection, I will make these changes during the next Michigan basketball game.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:13, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Fair use football helmets in team infoboxes

A large number of fair use football helmets have been placed up for deletion, with contested fair use rationales. This would be a reversal of years of consensus on the location of the helmets in the articles. Just about every major football team has been nominated, so please comment.--GrapedApe (talk) 15:14, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2011 December 28
Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2011 December 29
Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2011 December 30
Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2011 December 31
Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2012 January 1
Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2012 January 2
Just a quick note: Texas, Michigan, and LSU all got deleted last month in the same manner. SCS100 (talk) 15:47, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
Dang. Missed those.--GrapedApe (talk) 16:58, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
It looks like the common reason for deletion is the copyrighted underlying helmet drawing. Is there a plan to get that drawing freely licensed, or else replace it with a free drawing. Unfortunately I do not have the graphic arts ability to do so myself. –Grondemar 22:06, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
  • As noted above on this page and in several of the deletion discussions, on 12/13/11 I emailed a request for the "blank" helmet to be CC licensed, and I sent a follow-up email today. In the continued absence of any response, I believe deletion of all such images is the appropriate action. cmadler (talk) 14:51, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Cmadler's assessment. Also, the comments regarding third-party use that are provided on the two websites from which these helmet images were drawn are not encouraging that the necessary Wikipedia permissions will ever be given. The website creators are rightfully more concerned with potential copyright and trademark infringement by their own use of the college football helmet logos. Speaking as a lawyer who has periodically dealt with intellectual property ("IP") law issues in my practice, I can tell you that the Wikipedia policies dealing with copyright are quite different from the applicable U.S. law on point. Wikipedia's copyright policies are far narrower than applicable law regarding fair use of copyrighted images because Wikipedia wants to be able to release all such images for third-party use, just like Wikipedia article text. That requires a complete and unconditional release of all authorship/creator rights in the image, thereby releasing the image or text into the public domain. The problem at hand with these helmet images is not the fair use of the helmet logo, but the use of the helmet image itself, which is also subject to potential copyright restrictions.
If we, as a project, believe that these helmet images are that important to our articles, I suggest we figure out how they can be recreated independently by one or more of our project editors. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:21, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
Just to let this project know I have done what I can to get this images saved or restored or properly replaced. I have emailed sportslogos.net to release the template and I have filed a request on their boards for them to be recreated with free-use template alternatives. CRRaysHead90 | We Believe! 07:33, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

East Carolina Pirates future football schedules deletion discussion

WikiProject CFB participants may want to take a look at this discussion and weigh in. cmadler (talk) 20:00, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Not just East Carolina, BYU, Notre Dame, and others are up for Afd: [[8]]. Please jump in. Wrad (talk) 05:01, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Darryl Stonum WP:BLP WP:UNDUE review

I need an impartial set of eyes to do a Darryl Stonum WP:BLP WP:UNDUE review.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 07:20, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Football field without formal name

From 1904-1928 Louisiana Tech played their home football games "in an athletic park, with a grandstand, located next to Harper Hall and present-day Howard Auditorium." No name was given for this venue in the Louisiana Tech archives. I doubt it had a formal name. How should this field be referred to on Wikipedia? Thanks! -AllisonFoley (talk) 23:04, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

How about "Louisiana Tech football field (1904–1928)"? ~ Richmond96 t • c 23:30, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

From 1901-1903 it is unknown where Louisiana Tech played their home games. Should "Unknown (1901–1903)" be listed under "Venues" in the navbox, or should those years be left off? Thanks! -AllisonFoley (talk) 03:38, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

I would think that "Unknown" should be included. ~ Richmond96 t • c 00:11, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, including "Unknown" sounds fine to me. It's consistent with what we do for chronologies in the coach navboxes, e.g. {{Austin Kangaroos football coach navbox}}. Jweiss11 (talk) 02:34, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. After some reflection, I decided it was probably best to refer to the first known field as the "Louisiana Tech athletic park" since "athletic park" was the term that was used by the media guide. It was probably used for many things besides football. -AllisonFoley (talk) 05:31, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Randy Shannon

If there is an admin here, you may want to auto-confirm lock the Randy Shannon article. Vol fans are hitting it hard. You may also want to keep an eye on Sal Sunseri, as sources have rumored him to be the next DC at UT. Bms4880 (talk) 15:55, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Only a few more needed

We only need a few more conferences for most recent years I believe. From what I can tell we need the following:

Category:2011 NCAA Division I FBS football season conference navboxes:CUSA, MAC, Sun Belt
Category:2010 NCAA Division I FBS football season conference navboxes:CUSA, Sun Belt
Category:2009 NCAA Division I FBS football season conference navboxes:CUSA, SEC
Category:2008 NCAA Division I FBS football season conference navboxes:CUSA, Sun Belt, SEC

P.S. I think they should have a second parent category. what should it be?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:29, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Coaching article in need of creation

Hi all. Someone may want to take a stab at creating Glenn Caruso. He was just named the Division III Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season. Jrcla2 (talk) 18:56, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, we ought to have an article for this guy. When creating new coach bio articles, please be sure to use the latest and greatest version and formatting for {{Infobox college coach}}. Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:10, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Team season standards hodgepodge

I jumped on the 2011 Alabama Crimson Tide football team WP:GAC review noting it seemed underdeveloped compared to 2009 Michigan Wolverines football team and 2010 Michigan Wolverines football team, which I have been involved in. I am now noticing horribly divergent standards at WP:GA and WP:FA. I had quickfailed the article and am reconsidering.

  1. Should the LEAD include the following
    1. Notable national, conference and school records set during the season?
    2. Notable national and major conference honors?
    3. Notable national and conference statistical leaderships?
  2. Recruit boxes
    1. Should they be omitted? ( 2005 Texas Longhorns football team, 2006 Oklahoma Sooners football team, 2007 Texas Longhorns football team and 2008 Maryland Terrapins football team)
    2. Should they be included? ( 2007 USC Trojans football team, 2009 Michigan Wolverines football team, 2010 Michigan Wolverines football team)
    3. Should they be included, but hidden? ( 2005 USC Trojans football team, 2009 Alabama Crimson Tide football team, 2010 Alabama Crimson Tide football team)
  3. Statistical summaries. I consider it quite easy to slap in the NCAA.org statistical summary as the 2009 & 2010 Michigan teams do.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 17:29, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

1. The lede is a summary of the topic, so to the extent that records are set and honors garnered, they should be summarized in the lede. I think this needs to be proportional to the degree of the record/honor, and some, particularly current-year conference statistical leaders, might not merit mention in the lede. It's possible that a team has no such records/honors worth mentioning in the lede. 2. I think that while recruit boxes are not necessary (strongly encouraged, perhaps), and I don't care if they're visible or collapsed, some discussion of that year's recruiting is necessary to a complete article. I would definitely fail 2005 Texas Longhorns football team in a FA review (and possibly in a GA review) for that reason alone. 3. I might look for detailed statistical summaries (tables, but also prose) at the FA level, but for a GA I would find it sufficient for an article to discuss only certain key stats that were particularly relevant for that team without the full tables. This is the difference between the GA requirement for an article to be broad in coverage and the FA requirement for an article to be comprehensive. This is the main area in which I find 2011 Alabama Crimson Tide football team lacking for GA. cmadler (talk) 21:29, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

As far as statistical summaries go, is the Yearly team page format template not the standard format anymore? I added it to the 2011 Louisiana Tech Bulldogs football team, but I haven't noticed that detailed individual statistical summary on any recent season articles. There seem to be so many different yearly team article formats with no standard anymore. Can we update that template to a more consensus format? Thanks! -AllisonFoley (talk) 22:04, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
For this team, a Wuerffel Trophy, Doak Walker Award, Outland Trophy, SEC Offensive Player of the Year, 2 unanimous and 2 consensus 2011 College Football All-America Team players are names and honors that should be mentioned in a WP:LEAD. Those are the highlights of the season and should be included in a summary. I should not have to work to figure those things out. They should be front and center in the LEAD.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 22:15, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
Oh, my. I missed all that in the article. Yes, those should certainly go in the lede, and should be more-clearly mentioned in the text of the article also. cmadler (talk) 00:40, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
In terms of the statistical summary part of the format template goes, I think conversation should begin with the NCAA.org format used in recent Michigan seasons.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 22:17, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
As the primary editor of the Alabama article where these things came up, here are my thoughts:
  • 1. Cannot disagree with the point here and have been working on improving the LEAD to address these. However, as previously stated the level of detail will be contingent on each individual season.
  • 2. I think the recruits list should be hidden. With a paragraph stating the class ranking and significant recruits, I personally think the expanded list is too much on the overall page. If readers want to see the entire listing, the information is there, and if they do not, can easily move forward.
  • 3. In my opinion, "to slap in the NCAA.org statistical summary" seems unnecessary. It is relevant information for an individual season article to have statistics giving totals and overall rankings for the major statistical categories IMO (i.e. total defense, scoring offense, rushing defense, etc.). However I fail to see the use in a table that shows Alabama having the 69th ranked passing offense with Houston having the highest rated passing offense. How is Houston relevant in the realm of Alabama's 2011 season?
For individual player statistics, unless they were a national or conference leader at a minimum, I do not think their statistics are necessary for a season page. For example is noting that Marquis Maze was tied for 98th nationally in receptions per game with Jordan White being first nationally necessary on a team article, and furthermore is a table necessary to show this as well? I feel that type of information is appropriate for an individual player article, not for that of the team.
Generally speaking, I think the information would be great in a stand alone article that could be referenced back to for annual statistical leaders at the FBS level. However, I feel WP:NOTSTATSBOOK may come into play here if we get mired into too many stats. Patriarca12 (talk) 02:49, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
This is a great year for bama football. With so many elite performances an NCAA.org style summary might seem to be rendering mundane info such as the Maze guy you mentioned. However, if someone wants a more in depth summary of the team knowing about Maze at 98th actually provides info. Think about a more normal year where you are something like 9-4 with one or two guys getting All-America mentions and just clarifying who is who is helpful to the reader. For every other team in the SEC but LSU, the content of the NCAA.org summary would present encyclopedic content. Yes when you lead the nation in everything a 69th ranked passing offense seems insignificant. However, for most teams in the nation that kind of info is really providing great context for the season. There are other ways to summarize data and that is just one, but I really think it is a good option. Another option would be to go to the ESPN stat page, but that data does not put the numbers in context like the NCAA.org table does, IMO.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 07:10, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
I agree that the table may provide encyclopedic information, but again my question is whether or not it's necessary. Even if Alabama had a bad season going something like 3–11, I still fail to see how a table showing them having the 91st ranked rushing defense with LSU leading the nation as necessary for inclusion. A mention of the 91st ranking in the prose seems to me to give the reader enough context of how bad the defense was for that particular season.
As for individual player stats, I still feel they are more appropriate for the individual players page unless they are national or conference leaders in a major statistical category. In the context of the overall team article, I still believe noting Maze at 98th is a bit much; however, in his individual article it is more than appropriate for inclusion. I do think that this point does need more discussion to form some sort of consensus. Patriarca12 (talk) 14:37, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I think the recruiting boxes should be included but hidden. I thinking the recruiting box is relevant enough to be included, but it's not important enough to be permanently expanded. If someone is looking for recruiting info, I don't think they can miss it if "Recruiting" is a subheading and it's listed in the table of contents. -AllisonFoley (talk) 08:17, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Request for Comment: Material on future football seasons

A lengthy and contentious AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/East Carolina Pirates future football schedules‎ has just closed as "no consensus." There is some debate as to what to do with articles such as East Carolina Pirates future football schedules, BYU Cougars future football schedules, Colorado Buffaloes football future schedule, and Notre Dame Fighting Irish football future schedule. Below is a proposal as to how to handle these kinds of articles on Wikipedia. Please comment and improve:

The proposal is that, for teams that do not have as much independently verifiable information on future scheduling decisions, we do something like this: Louisiana_Tech_Bulldogs_football#Future_schedules, putting the future schedule information in an aesthetically-pleasing table as part of a section of the main football article. For teams that do have a lot of independently-verifiable information on future schedules (more than just the schedule itself and one or two paragraphs of prose), we could do something like what has been done in already-existing future football schedules. These articles could be named under the format "SCHOOL MASCOT football (upcoming seasons)." This would follow a naming format that is already in place (see Notre Dame Fighting Irish football (1960–1969), Baylor Bears football (1980–1989)).

Once an individual season gets enough source material to merit its own article (i.e. when a new season starts or is about to start), it would split off into a new article about that specific season. All information on that season would be removed from the "(upcoming seasons)" article.Wrad (talk) 19:08, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

  • Thanks Wrad for taking the initiative. I propose to be bold and just create the "XXXX SCHOOL MASCOT football team" article for each individual season as soon as reliable, verifiable sources exist for NCAA Div I FBS football teams. The standalone article is not in conflict with WP:CRYSTAL since (underlining added by me for emphasis) "the subject matter must be of sufficiently wide interest that it would merit an article if the event had already occurred". These seasons are notable, and these articles would already have been created if the season were played or even if they were close to being played. The only debate is when to create the article. I find the creation of holding articles to be inefficient, though perfectly allowable. I understand the concern that WP:GNG says "Multiple sources are generally expected." However, there should be no doubt that the season will be notable even in the absence of current multiple sources. The fifth pillar of Wikipedia says "Wikipedia does not have firm rules ... The principles and spirit of Wikipedia's rules matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception to a rule." "Ignore all rules" is, unfortunately, often frivolously used with no supporting reasons, evoking WP:IDONTLIKEIT. I ask that it be considered in this good faith attempt.—Bagumba (talk) 22:01, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
    • This alternate proposal is unreasonable because it leaves no place for verifiable information about seasons beyond the most immediate ("next" season). Articles that are written for seasons too far out have a long history of being deleted, for good reason. Cases in point:
  • Many teams have independently verifiable information beyond "next season." They draw up schedules, sign contracts, join and leave conferences, and hire coaches for periods of time some years into the future. This information does not belong in separate, tiny, individual season articles about the distant future. At the same time, however, it should not be ignored. What we need is a solid, unified place to store information on future seasons (beyond simply the next, immediate one) if that information is independently verifiable from reliable sources. Editing trends are already moving toward my proposal, and, to be honest, Bagumba's comes quite close to it, but fails to provide a place for verifiable information beyond the most immediate future season. Wrad (talk) 23:19, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I have no opinion either way on this topic, but I'd also like to point out that the three AfDs were from 2008 and consensus and policies have changed in four years. Eagles 24/7 (C) 23:28, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I don't think things have changed that much at all, really. The only examples I can find of individual, future season articles that survived Afd were for seasons that were in the immediate future (i.e. "next season") and had enough reliable sources to support themselves, (see KSU and FAU links above for examples) articles that were any further ahead had few-to-no sources and were deleted time and again. The alternate proposal simply isn't feasible. Wrad (talk) 23:34, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
  • A thorough search [9][10]reveals that there are no articles currently in existence on the 2013 season for any college football team. All of them have been deleted or redirected. Clearly, then, the trend that existed in 2008 continues to be true today. Wrad (talk) 23:52, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
  • On the surface this is a WP:OTHERSTUFF argument whereby similar articles do not exist now, so they should never exists, period. The discussion instead should remain focused on whther the is season is notable, bearing in mind whether the subject would "merit an article if the event had already occurred." While past discussions could provide a precedent, we should discuss the arguments used previously and not just the outcomes.—Bagumba (talk) 18:24, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Wrad: Reagarding your comment, "Bagumba's comes quite close to it, but fails to provide a place for verifiable information beyond the most immediate future season." my proposal fully supports creating "2020 SCHOOL MASCOT football team" in the year 2012 if verifiable info exists. The season is notable IMO, would be notable if the season were already played, and therefore the article should be notable.—Bagumba (talk) 18:24, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I share Wrad's concern about potential deletions of non-immediate future season articles (more than 1 season out). Also, it will create a situation where we have gaps in the stream of future season articles (e.g. a team might have no games announced/scheduled for 2015 but two for 2016). Also, in some cases games may be contracted but the specific season not decided (real-life example: Eastern Michigan is currently scheduled to host Michigan State in either 2018 or 2020 -- this is already contracted as the third of a three-game series, with the first two games scheduled for 2012 and 2016 at Michigan State). For these reasons, I think that a section of the main team article, or a stand-alone article if there's enough content, incorporating all future seasons beyond the current or immediate next is a good idea. cmadler (talk) 00:59, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Yes, there will be gaps, but that is not a new problem introduced with this proposal. See Template:UCLA_Bruins_football_navbox for gaps on past seasons, let alone future seasons. In the cases where a future season article is not applicable, such as in the Eastern Michigan example, it does not need to be blindly used. I dont think we need to ban the creation of a class of articles due to the rare exceptions they may be incorrectly created. That is why CSDs and AfDs exist.—Bagumba (talk) 18:24, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Future seasons should not be included beyond the next year.--GrapedApe (talk) 01:01, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Agree with Graped Ape. Future seasons should not extend beyond the next year. To give some specificity to that, I'd favor a rule of thumb that a future season article can't be created more than a year before that season starts. So if the first game of the 2013 season is on September 2, 2013, the article shouldn't be created until September 2, 2012. Cbl62 (talk) 02:10, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Cbl's rule of thumb makes a lot of sense to me. We've got plenty of stuff that's already happened to work on! Jweiss11 (talk) 14:27, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I agree with GrapedApe, Cbl and Jweiss: not future season articles beyond the immediate next season. This is an encyclopedia, not a sports almanac or team media guide. We should be primarily concerned with what has happened, not with what is scheduled to happen five years from now—and may never occur because of future scheduling changes. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:41, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Important comment of clarificationI get the feeling that I haven't been completely clear about what this proposal is all about. I am not proposing that we allow individual season articles for teams years out into the future. I am not proposing whether or not people are in favor of the creation of something like a 2015 Michigan Wolverines football season article in 2012. I am against that, and in that sense agree with Cbl, Graped Ape, Jweiss11, and everyone here. I think everyone agrees on that, and has agreed on that for some time, as the Afds indicate. The question, remains, though (and this question is at the very heart of this proposal): What do we do with verifiable information beyond that next immediate year? That information exists, it exists in reliable sources, and we need to provide direction as to what to do with it. The question is: Do you think that this information should be merged into the main team article (something like Louisiana_Tech_Bulldogs_football#Future_schedules)? Do you think that it should be in an article called "SCHOOL MASCOT(upcoming seasons)" if and only if its size and its number of quality, verifiable sources merits its being split off (something like Notre Dame Fighting Irish football future schedule)? Wrad (talk) 18:11, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I guess I dont count for everyone :-) Can we get consensus on the future individual season articles (I've made a few responses to previous comments). If the consensus is that that individual seasons are not notable, we can move to your proposal of placing into main team article or into a general future season article.—Bagumba (talk) 18:24, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I don't believe there is anything in Five Pillars that arbitrarily limits articles to one season in the future in cases where there is verifiable information from independent sources for an article like 2015 Michigan Wolverines football season. The key point IMO is whether a future season "would merit an article if the event had already occurred." If the answer is yes, we can change consensus from the past and avoid the practice of creating temporary holding articles. We first need to address whether the seasons are notable, we can then worry about behaviors in past AfDs.—Bagumba (talk) 18:24, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I believe that, in regards to these future schedules articles, we should follow the spirit of WP:SUMMARY: if the information can be reasonably put into the main team articles, then it should be placed there. If doing so would overwhelm the team articles and put WP:UNDUE weight on this subject within the team articles, then it should be split of as its own subarticle. –Grondemar 18:34, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I feel that these multi-year horizon future season schedule articles should exist if there are WP:RS that provide content in need of being summarized. I believe that individual future season articles should exist when partial schedules, partial recruit commitments, and a modicum of news exists. I don't believe we should set a rule limiting our horizon to one year out although generally this will be the case. --TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:03, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

College Football News All-Americans

Is College Football News expected to put out an All-American team this year?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 22:25, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Template:College athlete recruit end Scout.com ID for Kansas State Wildcats football

I am having problems with the Scout.com link in the {{College athlete recruit end}} for Kansas State Wildcats football. Does anyone know the ID to fix 2011 Kansas State Wildcats football team#Recruiting, 2010_Kansas_State_Wildcats_football_team#Recruiting, and Tyler Lockett.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 09:05, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

The Scout ID is 173 Aquamelli (talk) 03:30, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
Thanks so much.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 06:49, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

American high school football underclass POY templates

Join the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_American_football#American_high_school_football_underclass_POY_templates.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 14:19, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Tai Streets POV

I novice editor keeps tagging Tai Streets as POV. I need a third party opinion. Please comment at Talk:Tai_Streets#Neutrality_-_January_2012.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 07:28, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Done, but I suggest others help out as well. SCS100 (talk) 09:09, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Maxwell Coach of the Year

Looking at Maxwell Football Club, I am having a little difficulty understanding what The Maxwell Football Club Collegiate Coach of the Year award is that Brady Hoke just won ([11]).--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 18:36, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Potential navbox deletion proposals

I want to see what others feel about the utility for {{Mountain West Conference Football Defensive Player of the Year navbox}} and {{Mountain West Conference Football Offensive Player of the Year navbox}}. To me, these should be deleted. While acknowledging that being selected as your conference's offensive or defensive MVP is worth mentioning, the need to use navboxes to denote this award is superfluous. They create navbox clutter, aren't all that notable (especially not compared to national awards), and these two navboxes are perfect examples as to why American college sports articles get hammered by everyone - this is banner-hanging at its finest. I would have already proposed deletion for both of them, but before doing so I wanted to get a read on whether I'm alone in that sentiment.

On a related note, here's a TfD: Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2012 January 29#UTSA Roadrunners football navbox/doc. Jrcla2 (talk) 21:43, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree 100% with Jrcla2's sentiment regarding these types of navboxes. While we are at it, what about zapping the {{SEC Championship Game MVP navbox}}? The SEC championship is an important game, but I do not think it merits a navbox, just a mention in the player article. Navboxes like this may result in ones being created for everything from a {{Conference USA Football Championship Game MVP navbox}} to a {{Independence Bowl MVP navbox}}, which I think everyone here would agree is unnecessary.Patriarca12 (talk) 22:53, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Delete All. I second what Jrcla and Patriaca said. All three of the cited navboxes fail the general notability guidelines per WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS. Remember, in order to be notable, these awards must receive significant recurring coverage independent of routine game coverage; that generally means stand-alone articles discussing the awards, apart from the game coverage articles. Furthermore, the navbox guidelines strongly suggest that a navbox must be supported by a stand-alone Wikipedia article per WP:NAVBOX. When we apply the notability and navbox guidelines, these should be the first of many award navbox TfDs. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:35, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Delete all. cmadler (talk) 15:53, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Delete all.--Paul McDonald (talk) 23:12, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
  • The delete votes above seem reasonable to me, but there's an open issue as to whether Conference-specific honors would ever warrant a separate navbox. For example, the Chicago Tribune Silver football has been presented to the Big 10 MVP since the early 1920s. Do people think {{Chicago Tribune Silver Football navbox}} should be deleted as well? Cbl62 (talk) 22:36, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
Comment: The thing the Chicago Tribune Silver Football navbox has in its favor over the other examples above is that we have an article for the award. Jweiss11 (talk) 23:03, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
I agree, JW. The Silver football also has a long history, and its award has received substantial press coverage over the past 80-plus years. There should probably be flexibility to allow navboxes for Conference-specific awards in cases like this. Cbl62 (talk) 23:41, 31 January 2012 (UTC)
I think conference MVPs should have navboxes whereas conference offensive and defensive POYs should not. Also, each year when this is awarded, it is awarded separately from all other conference honors, thus generating sufficient dedicated newscoverage.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:50, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, Tony, but I don't perceive any difference between a conference POY and a conference MVP. Without checking, I don't know that every major conference has both as a POY and an MVP; that seems like that's dangerously close to being the same award. In any event, the standard should be notability per WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS and the navbox guidelines per WP:NAVBOX. The Big Ten Silver Spoon Award probably satisfies the GNG and NSPORTS notability guidelines, but most other conference POY and MVP awards probably will not. Coverage must be significant and recurring to satisfy the notability guidelines and there is supposed to be a stand-alone Wikipedia article to satisfy the navbox guidelines; failing that, no navbox. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 01:55, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

List of navboxes I want to propose for deletion in mass TfD nomination

Now that I have a better read on the situation, this is the list of navboxes I want to propose in a mass TfD nomination:

Jrcla2 (talk) 02:58, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Delete All and I would also add the following to the list, {{Southeastern Conference 50th Anniversary All-Time Football Team navbox}} based on the above conversation as pointed out by Dirtlawyer1 for navbox guidelines per WP:NAVBOX. Patriarca12 (talk) 03:30, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Guys, is too late to throw one more on the fire? How about:

To the extent the hall of fame is actually meaningful, it's already covered in the Florida-Georgia rivalry game article, but I seriously doubt the hall of fame is notable enough to merit its own navbox. Feel free to add it to the mass TfD list. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:36, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

TfD enacted

Here it is: Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2012 February 2#Select college football awards Jrcla2 (talk) 16:50, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Convention for vacated wins

Copied from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Vacated victories#Convention for vacated wins. Nolelover Talk·Contribs 17:54, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

FYI

There is a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_College_Basketball#Convention_for_vacated_wins on convention for displaying vacated wins in the body and particularly the infoxbox of articles. Any consensus reached could lead to clarification in this essay as well. Please provide your input.—Bagumba (talk) 17:49, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Michigan Wolverines football lead section

Hello all, User:Jweiss11 and I currently have a minor disagreement on the Michigan football lead section. Jweiss11 is in favor of specifically mentioning the losses to Colorado in 1994 and Michigan State in 2001 as well as the loss to Appalachian State. While both of these games were notable and deserve mention in the history section, I disagree with their mentioning in the lead and feel this may be a case of WP:RECENT or WP:UNDUE. While the games against Colorado and Michigan State were both notable, neither game affected the national title and Michigan didn't win a conference title either year. They are only notable in the same fashion that the 2011 Michigan-Notre Dame game or the 2010 Michigan-Illinois game are notable: small quirks in history and interesting games. On top of that, the Colorado and Michigan State games were not as notable as some other games not mentioned in the lead, such as the 1945 Army-Michigan game (despite its not having an article I'd argue that it was more notable since it included Fritz Crisler's debut of two-platoon football), the 1969 Michigan vs. Ohio State football game, or the 1973 Ohio State vs. Michigan football game. I still wouldn't argue for the inclusion of those game, rather just the removal of the Colorado and Michigan State games while keeping the Appalachian State game since it was a defining moment within the history of college football. All-in-all, these "high profile losses" are given a similar amount of space in the lead as the entire career of Fielding H. Yost (and not one of Yost's famous games are mentioned). Jweiss11 also has some good points on the subject, but I happen to disagree so I was wondering if we could get some other comments (and as always, assume good faith). In the end it's really a minor thing among all the other stuff going on in the college football project.--Lonewolf371 (talk) 01:18, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

This article, including the lead, has been improved significantly since I last saw it. Good work by Lonewolf and Jweiss both for their work in this regard. On the point raised by Lonewolf, I agree that the attention given in the lead to 4 individual games from 1994 to 2007 is undue. There have been many, many significant individual games (a lot of them more significant than these 4), but they don't belong in the lead. There's more space given to these games than to entire national championship seasons, including 1997. Further, there's no mention of the decade-long Kipke era (which included the 1932 and 1933 national championships), the decade-long Oosterbaan era (including 1948 national championship), or the decade-long Bump Elliott era. I realize the lead can't and shouldn't include a full history of the program, but for this very reason, it is really undue to discuss these 4 games in the lead. It's fine to note them in the section on the Moeller/Carr era, but they don't belong in the lead. Cbl62 (talk) 05:55, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
Apologies for the delayed response here. I've had my hands full on and off-Wiki. Lonewolf371 and Cbl62, you bring up good points here about undue weight to recent games. However, only three non-bowl, non-Ohio State games in Michigan's long history have dedicated articles, the three I weaved into the lead. That an article exists ought to carry a good deal of weight in informing inclusion in the lead. The 2001 Michigan State game strikes me as the least notable of the three. Perhaps that article should be AfD'd. In the meantime, I won't stand in the way any longer if anyone deems to remove mention of that game from the lead. But the 1994 Colorado game, because it ended on one of the most famous plays in college football history, and the 2007 App State game are both in the top-tier of notable college football games and should be included. Jweiss11 (talk) 19:03, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
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