Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Archive 22

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Future non-conference opponents

All,

Is it worth having a "future non-conference opponents" section in the football articles? We have users who add to them, but no one ever goes and updates the boxes. I just edited one that still had 2017 in it, and I have found others (just a few) that still had 2016 and before on them. The other problem is that these sections also violate WP:OVERLINK... there are some that overkill on linking the same article. Thoughts? Corky 02:26, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Not a fan of such sections. Cbl62 (talk) 04:41, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
I think in the past some future season articles have been deleted, so some use this method as a bureaucratic workaround to park information. Personally, I think if there's verifiable info like opponents and recruits of future seasons of prominent programs, just create the future article. It's a waste of time to have to shuttle text around. At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2015–16 Illinois Fighting Illini men's basketball team, consensus was to keep articles on the next season. Frankly, I think seasons 2 or more years away are conceptually no different if it's verifiable. WP:CRYSTAL does not preclude this: It is appropriate to report discussion and arguments about the prospects for success of future proposals and projects or whether some development will occur, if discussion is properly referenced.Bagumba (talk) 04:52, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
Bagumba, I don't think this is much of a solution. Non-conference opponents can be scheduled up to 10 years in advance. For example, Michigan and Texas already have each other on the schedule for 2027, exact date TBD. I don't think we want 2027 seasons articles to be created now or anytime soon. There'd be hardly anything to wrote about them. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:07, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
It's certainly not perfect. What would you propose?—Bagumba (talk) 02:11, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
Well, either have these sections in the main program articles or don't. But future season articles are not a substitute. Jweiss11 (talk) 14:38, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
I would propose leaving the "Future non-conference opponents" sections alone. Ejgreen77 (talk) 21:04, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
Why should we keep them if no one is going to update them? All that gets updated is additions of new games/years. Previous years don't get removed. If we're not going to update them fully, we don't need the sections. It's not really important info, anyway, is it? Corky 22:05, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
IMO, if they're not going to be regularly updated, they'd be better off deleted. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 22:07, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

CfD: Category:Loyola Marymount Lions football

I have nominated Category:Loyola Marymount Lions football and two subcategories for renaming. Please see the discussion here. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 21:21, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Rankings question

Hey, I've tried adding a rankings table to 2000 Oklahoma Sooners football team and whenever I try to cut off the end of the rankings table it still has some sort of error message. How can this be remedied.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:21, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

@UCO2009bluejay: I set the poll1firstweek and poll2firstweek to zero instead of having them blank, seemed to fix it.
Yes it did, that was my first time trying to use it. Thank you.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:20, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Help with AfC

This is User:Cbl62. I have opened this alt account for temporary use due to log in problems. For more than a decade, I used the same simple password for my account. However, earlier this year, I received notices regarding attempts to hack my account, leading me to create a far more complex password. Unfortunately, that password was sufficiently complex that I am now unable to recall what it was. I am seeking input on how to reset my password. Any assistance in this regard would be appreciated. Also, if anyone here is familiar with the processes at Articles for Creation, assistance would be appreciated in moving the following out of Draft space: Draft:1935 Saint Mary's Gaels football team, Draft:1937 Saint Mary's Gaels football team, Draft:1940 Saint Mary's Gaels football team, Draft:1941 Saint Mary's Gaels football team, Draft:1942 Saint Mary's Gaels football team, Draft:1943 Saint Mary's Gaels football team. SonofCbl (talk) 10:57, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

@SonofCbl: For accessing your old account, the only way to recover it is if you have/had an email address associated with it. If you are still logged into that account on a different computer, you could go to "preferences" and set an email address, then have a password reminder sent to that address. For the drafts, are you asking for physical help moving them (because you are not auto-confirmed and can't move them) or are you asking how to submit them for review? If the latter, there is a button you can click in the template that will submit the articles for review. Since the assistance desired isn't especially specific to college football (help with your account, general help submitting drafts), you may wish to pose further questions of this type at WP:HELPDESK. --B (talk) 11:05, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. Unfortunately, I had a now-defunct aol email account back in 2007 when I started on Wikipedia. And yes, my temp account is not yet autoconfirmed. SonofCbl (talk) 11:18, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
Apologies for the bother. My browser refreshed my password. Problem solved! SonofCbl now officially deep-sixed. Cbl62 (talk) 23:50, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Arkansas–Texas Tech football rivalry

Arkansas–Texas Tech football rivalry was recently created by User:CalebHughes. Is this a legit rivalry? I'm thinking no. Seems more like just two teams that played in the same conference for about 35 years. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:57, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

IMO, speaking as an Arkansas fan, no. I know that just being an Arkansas fan does not make me all-knowing, however, so I did a little Googling and found these:
(1) Names series as "rivalry" in title but does not mention a rivalry in the article
(2) Names Arkansas as TTU's fifth-biggest rival, but stated that they are "former Southwest Conference foes" and "won't meet anytime soon"
(3) States "Tech-Arkansas is a wonderful rivalry", but illustrates its point on the fact that they hadn't played since 1991 and schools aren't terribly close
(4) 2015 TTU-Ark game preview from texastech.com that makes no mention of the word "rivalry"
(5) Maybe not a great piece of evidence, but this Fox Sports Southwest article on the top 8 "rivalries we want to come back" doesn't list Arkansas-Tech
(6) Article that names series as "SWC Rivalry", but makes no mention of a rivalry in the article
(7) Names teams as "former Southwest Conference foes"; also states that home-and-home is "renewing a Southwest Conf. rivalry"
So it seems that sources from 2013-15 consider it a rivalry from the days of the Southwest Conference, and if notable then, it is notable now. As much as I do not consider Tech a rival, I would say that this article should be kept, unless sources from the time they played say otherwise. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 16:26, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

College football rivalry AfD

Hello all,

I have nominated Houston-Texas football rivalry for deletion. I am open to reconsidering the nomination if legitimate, significant coverage that satisfies WP:GNG, however, I have been unable to find anything. Please share your thoughts on the matter on the deletion page or add sources that satisfy GNG. Thanks! CalebHughes (talk) 19:54, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Independents football records templates prior to 1956

We have standings templates for independent football teams going back to the inception of college football in 1869; see Category:NCAA Division I FBS independents football records templates. Many of these templates were created by User:UW Dawgs. The problem is that before 1956 the NCAA had no divisions, so the pool of independent teams playing in the one, singular level of college football was very large. Most of the templates prior to 1956 are very incomplete, but Template:1893 college football independents records already has 91 teams listed and is clearly missing many, many independent teams. Is there any practical way of subdividing these independent teams, perhaps by region, to make these templates more manageable? Or should we simply delete them? Jweiss11 (talk) 04:30, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

I would say that if the majority of teams are independent, there's no need for a template. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 15:44, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
PCN02WPS, what about if a minority of all teams are independent, but there are still more than say 50 of them? Jweiss11 (talk) 17:39, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
We could possibly come up with a number that would be the cap (like no template for >30 teams, or something to that effect), or just only keep the templates from a certain year onward (like only keeping independent standings templates from 1956 onward). IMO the second option would be best, what do you think? PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 19:04, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
I honestly don't see a reason to ever have a template in the team articles for independents. If you're in a conference, it makes sense to show the conference standings. But if you're an independent, there are no standings, so why have a template for standings? There are other uses of the templates than in just the team articles (e.g. the annual season pages like 1990 NCAA Division I-A football season) and so it's fine to have a template and use it there - but having 50 unrelated teams listed in a team article makes no sense. If you're looking for a cutoff, I'd say pick a year rather than a number of teams - maybe 1990? (In the early 90s, the BEFC formed, FSU joined the ACC, PSU joined the Big 10+1, and the number of independents dropped to something manageable.) --B (talk) 19:14, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
I think 1956, the creation of the University and College Divisions, is a natural and practical cutoff. So would everyone be in favor of deleting all the interdependent templates from 1869 to 1955? We'd leave the WWI and WWII military service templates be. @UW Dawgs: do you want to weigh in here? Jweiss11 (talk) 20:18, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Cutoff date makes sense, I would be in favor of that. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 00:06, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
No. No (new) rational is even being offered for whatever reason or links to the prior discussions. Selection of 1893 is particularly misleading as it predates the founding of IAAUS (the NCAA) in 1906. Aggregation of independents is an appropriate and utterly routine treatment. NCAA, ESPN, Sports Reference, S/R 1893, etc. Removal of the templates has the much more problematic consequence of removal from downstream pages, such as 1893 college football season#Conference standings and List of Division I FBS independents football standings (1869–1905). I remain in favor of adding a "collapsed" parameter to the template and/or implementing a default max count render (as was also offered above), allowing the template to be collapsed or semi-collapsed by default such as in team articles and open by default in other transcluded articles (such 19xx CFB season and list of...) -or by whatever rules are deemed reasonable. Additionally, I'm not convinced that every team listed in the NCAA Independents standings is even accurate as somewhat supported here and discussed more generally at Category talk:NCAA Division I FBS independents football records templates. Hence we are repeating, yet again, a discussion of function vs layout where I doubt anyone is against collapsing the templates in some articles or locations when the count exceeds some reasonable threshold or rule. UW Dawgs (talk) 03:39, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
UW Dawgs, I selected 1893 only because it's the most developed example. We could try 1915 if you want and see how many independent teams we can find. I'll bet we can find over 100. Sports Reference has to be taken with a grain of salt on topics such as this one, because they are only focused on what they determine to be major programs. I think collapsing just sweeps the problem of unwieldy templates under the rug. What about dividing independents by region? Jweiss11 (talk) 04:24, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Until you choose to articulate the (a new?) problem, there is no point to spitballing a solution. Everything you state is well-trod ground. Removing templates creates information gaps in at least 3 article types for literally no reason. Fully or semi-collapsing the templates by some rule or parameter directly resolves your stated issue of “unwieldly templates” and is reader-friendly. Pretending any of this is some new discussion topic remains bizarre. UW Dawgs (talk) 05:05, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
It's an old, unresolved problem. Feel free to link to any past discussions. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:12, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Whatever issue you’re trying again to resolve, please clearly and specifically articulate it with an outdent. Collapsing is a reader-friendly refinement that I would support. And you’re also welcome to link the prior discussions if they cover whatever you’re trying to tackle here. UW Dawgs (talk) 05:24, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
The issue is very simple. A standings template with 100 or more entries is not very usable. Collapsing it is better for page layout, but once you open it, you still have an unwieldy and user-unfriendly template. As an experiment, I've begun to expand Template:1915 NCAA independents football records. It's up to 103 entries, and I'm sure we haven't covered all bases here. Jweiss11 (talk) 06:24, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
You have proven my point, rather than articulated an “unwieldly template” issue. There were not 103 teams in the NCAA in 1915. There is a data problem re blind insertion into the existing NCAA Independents templates. NCAA membership by year UW Dawgs (talk) 06:36, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Well, it seems we have a very big structural problem if we use this NCAA member by year resource. For example, it states that Notre Dame joined the NCAA in 1924. But all the articles we have for Notre Dame after the inception of the NCAA are rolling up into NCAA categories. Washington apparently joined the NCAA in 1926. But they were already a member of the Pacific Coast Conference, all of which rolls up into NCAA categories. What does a concept like "1919 NCAA football season" mean if it doesn't include 1919 Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team? Should we have non-NCAA independents standings templates to capture teams like Notre Dame in 1919? Also, what about seasons like 1893? NCAA membership was a non-thing then. It is useful to have a template with records of 100+ independents on an article like 1893 Alabama Crimson White football team? Jweiss11 (talk) 07:17, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
I agree with Jweiss. I have articulated the rationale for my opposition to these templates in prior discussion. Cbl62 (talk) 15:53, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Chuck Fairbanks

Hello, I can somebody please tell me how to find a source with Chuck Fairbanks' date of birth Since an article which I linked to the coach's article from The Oklahoman that lists' his Date of birth as June 10 keeps being reverted on the June 10 page. I am being accused of edit warring when I am actually producing sources with two editors claiming that I didn't. @Cbl62: you're great at digging up sources. Thoughts please?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:20, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

UCO2009bluejay, his DOB is listed in two of his obituaries source in the Fairbanks article. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:45, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
I know so why did I have this problem in the first place?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:54, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
And now this response!-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 18:02, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
Seems like a bizarre situation where a couple admins have decided to start enforcing references directly on the date page despite none of the other entries having references themselves. Ostealthy (talk) 18:44, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
Total overreaction there. Jweiss11 (talk) 19:59, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: Sorry you got tangeled into this mess. I noticed that Fairbank's article didn't have a source for DOB, so I added it. I subsequently added Fairbanks (not the coach and source) to June 10. Then Todd reverted my edit on Fairbanks' page here saying it wasn't verified. Reading the article his DOB was in the article, and I thought June 10, was grouped with that. So, I was under the impression that if Fairbanks' article had a properly sourced DOB (it now does) that it should be okay to add it in June 10. If he just would have told me directly, "Hey let me look at that source, okay there it is, if you would also cite the source ON June 10 page as well (which by the way only Kate Upton is sourced)," instead of some slapped on non-discussion inducing warning like I'm some random IP making stuff up. (And I wasn't) I would have gone along with it. That is what I appreciate about our discussions on WT:CFB, we discuss and try to inform people as to why we edit the way we do, not that it doesn't get heated sometimes, but at least we know where the other persons stands and more importantly Why! I was under the impression they were throwing out both without verifying.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:52, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Category for renaming

I have nominated Category:Foster Farms Bowl for renaming to Category:San Francisco Bowl. The discussion can be found here. Thanks, PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 12:27, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Possible AfD-Marquis Wright

After reading the page, he does not seem to be notable enough to merit an article. It appears he played at Georgetown for and then graduated, no awards or subsequent professional or coaching career. Not entirely sure how to propose an article for deletion so looking for help/advice. Best, GPL93 (talk) 21:22, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

GPL93, yes, this article looks like a good candidate for deletion. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion contains all the instructions for nominating. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:37, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Unnamed parameters version of CFB schedule template

So I just had my first experience dealing with the unnamed parameters version of the CFB Schedule template, and... wow. That cannot be considered acceptable. The maze of pipes that results from not using named parameters is completely un-intuitive and difficult to work with. In order to add the rank column, I had to literally count out the number of pipes until I got to where the rank column is located, add the rank, and then add another pipe to every single other row in the table, and finally add the |rank=y parameter to the top. If you do anything wrong, you are greeted with no table at all and an error message that elucidates nothing at all about where the problem is. This template was clearly not built with anyone in mind but the select couple of users that designed it.

I do like the new template when it is used with Template:CFB schedule entry and named parameters, because of the ease of adding and removing columns. But when used with unnamed parameters, that benefit is erased and usability-breaking problems are introduced. In my opinion, this mess needs to be deprecated and replaced with the Template:CFB schedule entry in all cases. Ostealthy (talk) 17:29, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Ostealthy, I concur. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:33, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
I strongly disagree. I find it very easy to use and understand and have used it to create more than 600 schedule templates in the past eight months. The time needed to create a table with the unnamed parameters is a fraction of what it takes with the named parameters. But the beauty of the current system is we are using the same template, just with dual syntax. Those who prefer named parameters are free to use that. Those who prefer unnamed parameters can use that. Cbl62 (talk) 18:45, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
I will say this: The unnamed parameters works most easily for older seasons where there are fewer columns to juggle, e.g, no TV column, no time column, and often no ranking column. E.g, 1934 Loyola Lions football team. The unnamed parameters gets a bit clunkier when there are so many columns. You can choose whichever works best for you. Cbl62 (talk) 18:51, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
I disagree with this personalized approach where a handful of users use a template that is unwieldy and un-intuitive for everyone else, just because it fits their workflow better. The template needs to be easy to understand for anyone to edit. Team pages are not personal projects. Ostealthy (talk) 18:58, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
That named parameters are clunky, unintuitive, and unnecessarily time consuming is the majority view across Wikipedia. All of the major American sports use unnamed parameters for their schedule charts. See NFL (2016 New York Jets season#Schedue), MLB (2016 New York Yankees season##Game log), NBA (2015–16 Los Angeles Lakers season#Regular season game log), NHL (2015–16 Detroit Red Wings season#Schedule and results). American college football/basketball is alone in continuing to use the unwieldy named parameters approach. It is the named parameters approach that is the unwieldy and un-intuitive outlier. But many here seem wed to the unnamed parameters and, after extensive debate, we settled in January of this year on a dual syntax compromise that allows both approaches within the same framework. Those who prefer named parameter remain free to use that version. Cbl62 (talk) 19:29, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
As I was involved in this debate some time ago, I will offer my opinion - from the perspective of creating pages, especially older ones (as Cbl said), I would say that unnamed parameters are better. Less pipes, less columns, less clutter. As for more recent pages, specifically 2018 ones, I prefer named parameters. I know I argued strongly for unnamed parameters in the previous discussion, but after editing and adding info to teams' schedules, I can say that named parameters are much easier to deal with, so much so that I have converted Arkansas' 2018 schedule to named parameters. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 23:10, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
Unnamed parameters seem to really good for some editors to churn out schedule tables. But they are terrible for the overall maintenance and standardization of the project. We should eliminate the unnamed parameters. The allusions to the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB tables aren't relevant in the way Cbl thinks they are. Those projects are way behind this one in that they are using raw wikitable code to render those schedules. The new schedule templates with named parameters should not take much longer to type out than with unnamed parameters. It should move rather quickly if you copy/paste from one similar article to the next. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:47, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
You use the term "churn" as though creating hundreds of high quality, well-formatted schedule tables is a bad thing. There remains an enormous number of articles without schedule tables, and a tool that simplifies and speeds up the process of creating these tables is a good thing ... indeed, a very good thing. Further to PCN's comment, I have no problem with limiting the unnamed parameters to older articles. After all, that's where the backlog of articles without schedule tables is. And that's where I have been plugging away for the last eight months, filling in hundreds of tables. As for Jw's opinion that the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB projects are "way behind" this project, the folks at those projects would beg to differ (as would I). Tellingly, there is no backlog of NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB season articles lacking schedule charts. Cbl62 (talk) 01:53, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
There's no backlog of NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB season articles or schedule tables because, in large part, there are way fewer teams and seasons for those topics, and the sources are far more consolidated and accessible. It's a far more ambitious project to cover every major college football team since this late 1800s in this way than it is to cover the teams of those pro leagues. I didn't mean those projects were way behind generally. I meant that were way behind with respect the implementing standardized forms for standardized structures such as these tables. There's no question that you have created an enormous amount of high quality content on Wikipedia, but many of the schedule tables you've created in recent month are not very well-formatted, aside from the issue of unnamed parameters. We've got a bunch like 1947 Detroit Titans football team that aren't using any templates at all. You also appear to be skipping links to opponents when no specific season article exists. In those cases, Template:Cfb link should be utilized. See 1931 San Francisco Grey Fog football team. I'd rather we moved twice as slow and and did things the best possible way. Jweiss11 (talk) 02:40, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
I really don't want to get back into attack mode, JW, with you attacking the quality of my contributions. It's really unseemly (and frankly, dickish). I am, in fact, using cfb links, but I do a big group of related articles and then go back and do the cfb links all at once. 1931 San Francisco Grey Fog football team is frankly a pretty solid start and was just started today, for crying out loud. I am in the middle of the west coast Catholic group and have not yet completed it. As for 1947 Detroit Titans football team, that was, as you know, created long before the new templates were rolled out. I have that on my list to fix. Only so much a guy can do in a day. It would be nice to see you actually creating some schedule tables from scratch (haven't seen you doing that in a few years) ... might give you some fresh perspective on the effort involved. As for your suggestion that we do everything "twice as slow", I disagree -- I'd like to see us move "twice as fast" -- we still have a long way to go. Cbl62 (talk) 03:07, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
Cbl, I've debated over how best to respond here for the last few days. It isn't unseemly or dickish to point out legitimate flaws in the editing of others. That's how we improve things. It wasn't obvious to me that that you intended to circle back and fill in those cfb links. 1920 Tulsa Orange and Black football team has a schedule table that you added more than a month ago, and you haven't yet gone back to fill in the missing opponent links there. It seems that you are indeed including all the opponent links in your most recent edits, e.g. 1948 Santa Clara Broncos football team—glad to see that. The larger issue here remains the unnamed parameter scheme. The whole point of it is to allow more efficient assembly of schedule tables. The problem is that the unnamed parameter scheme doesn't facilitate maintenance and structural change down the road. What if we decide we want to delete an existing field? Or add a new field? Or switch the ordering of fields? Such tasks become far more cumbersome and manual with unnamed parameters. If saving two minutes now costs us five minutes down the road per table, we aren't winning. One glaring problem with the unnamed parameter scheme as it exists now is that the "gamename" (rivalry/bowl) data doesn't have it's own field. It's just added parenthetically inside another field, e.g. 1928 Princeton Tigers football team. This is really unacceptable and needs to be remedied. @Frietjes: can we reengage your expertise here to fix that? Cbl, as for you last few sentences above, I'm intimately aware of the effort involved in making and editing these schedule tables. You may not have noticed, but I have continued in recent months to resolve formatting problems with hundreds of them. I'm currently working my way through the Arkansas Razorbacks seasons. The main thrust of my editing on Wikipedia continues to be coach biography articles, where I have added, among other things, infoboxes and head coaching record tables "from scratch" to thousands of articles. Every one of those infoboxes and head coaching record tables employs named parameters, or the "questionnaire" structure that you find so unpalatable. I can't imagine what additional experience I could have here that would change my view on the value of named parameters. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:49, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
JW -- I am on vacation for 2-1/2 weeks with only sporadic access to wifi. In short, though, you are wrong in asserting that unnamed parameters doesn't facilitate maintenance/change; I'd be happy to review this further with you on my return from vacation. Of course, if you have any specific maintenance questions, you could also check with Fritjes. As for the "dickish" comment, what I viewed as dickish was, in the context of a discussion about unnamed parameters, publicly posting minor and unrelated critiques of my editing on this page for review by the entire project. If your goal was truly to be helpful, you could have simply left an inquiry on my personal talk page. You might consider that option in the future. Cbl62 (talk) 03:37, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Cbl, I think we've reached a point where you are reflexively assuming the worst possible—even worse than possible—motive for any of my actions here. Your practice of not including those opponent links is highly relevant to the question of efficient assembly of the tables—the whole justification for the unnamed parameter scheme, in your view. Both of our talk pages are as public as this one, and eyed by similar subscribers. You're grabbing at straws here to find new sources of indignation. You can see that I've already engaged Frietjes below regarding outstanding structural/maintenance issues. Enjoy your vacation. Hopefully we can get some of these issues hashed out by the time you return. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:58, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Nothing reflexive about my reactions. When you make constructive points, I often support you whole-heartedly. I wish our interactions were always of this type. However, your comments often lapse into an aggressive and snide tone -- the latest example being your assertion that I am "grasping at straws". Cbl62 (talk) 15:48, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Cbl, you assertion that "grasping at straws" is snide is yet another example of you grasping at straws. You're manufacturing reasons to be offended here. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:02, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
Add "manufacturing reasons" ("manufacture" defined in this context as "to invent fictitiously; fabricate; concoct") to the list. Can you please disengage? Cbl62 (talk) 01:37, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Your language policing just won't stop. It started with "churn" and now you're doubling further and further down the rabbit hole. Jweiss11 (talk) 06:29, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
I ask again. Please disengage.I would like to enjoy my vacation without further Jweiss-isms. Cbl62 (talk) 00:23, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
No one is making you read or respond except you. If you would you like to disengage, disengage yourself. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:33, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
Oh, I thought when you directed comments at me that you actually wanted me to read them. Silly me. Cbl62 (talk) 02:02, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

the positioning of the parenthetical can be detected by the module and could be autocorrected by the module, otherwise we wouldn't be able to generate Category:Pages using CFB schedule with rivalry after opponent and Category:Pages using CFB schedule with gamename after location automatically. the use of unnamed parameters does not prevent these parenthetical links from being moved automatically by the module. I can implement anything that there is consensus to implement, but I have not seen consensus yet concerning where these parenthetical links should be placed. Frietjes (talk) 16:18, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

The consensus is that the gamename should follow location, as is the case for the old legacy templates. We didn't have consensus to move it. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:35, 1 September 2018 (UTC)
@Frietjes: How does the module detect what's a "rivalry"? Anything in parentheses? Why was it set up up this way instead of giving gamename its own field? Can you correct the 546 instances where gamename is placed in the opponent column? Jweiss11 (talk) 23:14, 3 September 2018 (UTC)
Also, Frietjes, I've been experimenting with the conversation process you set up to replace the old templates with the new templates. See my recent edits at 1949 Michigan Wolverines football team. You can see there that after the conversion process there was still some manual cleanup needed to get the poll link in the footer pointing to the correct place. Can we incorporate that cleanup into the conversation process? Jweiss11 (talk) 23:19, 3 September 2018 (UTC)
the entries in the rivalry categories have the text "rivalry" as the link text for the link, the entries in the gamename categories are any other parenthetical links. the distinction between the two is fuzzy since some rivalries are named (see, e.g., Old Oaken Bucket vs. Indiana–Purdue rivalry). we have consensus that a rivalry link should be after the opponent name (see Category:Pages using CFB schedule with rivalry after location for articles that do not). making a separate column for the gamename is possible, but would not prevent people from putting it after the opponent's name in either the name or unnamed parameters cases. Frietjes (talk) 13:21, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Jweiss11, perhaps you should tell Coltsfan443 where to put the rivalry link. Frietjes (talk) 13:26, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
same for PCN02WPS who has been moving them as well. the last discussion that I have seen was in this thread. I'm not going to move them if they are just going to be moved back. of course, if we have the module move them, it would force the issue. Frietjes (talk) 13:29, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Frietjes, the consensus is that the gamename data should live in the site column, as has been the case in the legacy templates. We could not establish a consensus to overturn the legacy placement and move gamename to the opponent column. PCN02WPS and Coltsfan443 both appear to be in sync with that. I'm confused by what you mean here, particularly your use of the word "categories": "the entries in the rivalry categories have the text "rivalry" as the link text for the link, the entries in the gamename categories are any other parenthetical links". In the legacy templates (Template:CFB Schedule Entry and in new template with name parameters Template:CFB schedule entry, there is simply a gamename field that captures all named games, which include rivalries, bowls, playoffs, and other named games. And not that rivalries contain the world "rivalry". Is something different happening in the unnamed parameter scheme of Template:CFB schedule? Are rivalries being cleaved off from other named games? Can you clarify why gamename wasn't given its own dedicated field? Seems like this has opened a can on worms we never could have had if we'd simply stuck to named parameters. Jweiss11 (talk) 15:50, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Frietjes, also, when you have a chance, can you address my question above about tweaking the legacy-template-to-new-template conversation process? Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 15:54, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
(1) please read this thread which has a majority saying that the rivalry link goes in the opponent column. there is nothing stopping people from putting it in either location, even when using named parameters. (2) your continued refrain of "why gamename wasn't given its own dedicated field?" is getting tiring, as I have already answered this question in the linked thread. I was originally asked to make a module similar to {{sports rivalry series table}}, which is what I did. (3) I may be able to find some time to fix problems with the table conversion module over the next several days, but I may be busy with other things. Frietjes (talk) 17:09, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Frietjes, there was another discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Archive 21#2018 season articles in which it become clear that consensus to move gamename was murky. In light of a lack of consensus to move, I think we have to revert to the legacy placement, no? Whatever the case, it all needs to in one place or the other. What we currently have is a mess with mixed placement. That needs to be fixed. Is there anything systematic you can do to remedy this or is a manual cleanup the only fix?
the module could automatically move them to a particular location, or a bot could move them. Frietjes (talk) 17:48, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
In the old legacy templates, we never ever had a problem with people putting gamename in wrong place. The "nothing stopping people" argument is a non argument. I could put the time in the date field if I wanted to misuse the template. I'm sorry, I still do not see a good explanation why it was decided that gamename would not received it's own dedicated field. What is the advantage of that? Can you please explain that here and now? I'm not seeing an explanation in any of the old threads.
uses of the old template system had the rivalry link after the opponent in may cases, and after the location in many cases. the WYSIWYG approach was to allow flexibility and lack of astonishment with the results. if you continue to hammer me on past design decisions instead of focusing on what should be done in the future, I will stop following this thread. I really have no time or energy for it. Frietjes (talk) 17:48, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Can you please address my question above about tweaking the legacy-template-to-new-template conversation process? That needs to be addressed before we can make the bot request for the automatic conversion. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 17:35, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
you didn't read my response (point 3) directly above. Frietjes (talk) 17:48, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Frietjes, I indeed missed your response regarding the conversation process ("I may be able to find some time to fix problems with the table conversion module over the next several days, but I may be busy with other things."). Sorry about that. We need to address this sooner than later, as it is holding up the long-overdue conversion and deprecation of the old templates. If you can't get to this soon, is there another qualified editor you can recommend who might be able to look into that?

"uses of the old template system had the rivalry link after the opponent in may cases". Really? I've never seen this and I've edited thousands of these tables. Can you show me an example?

"WYSIWYG" doesn't seem to be a very good justification here. If "lack of astonishment" was the intent, well it's not working, because it's produced astonishing inconsistency. All of my questions and efforts here are intended to focus of what we can do now and in the future. I'm trying to understand exactly what was done and why to this point and so that we can rectify the problems we have right now.

"The module could automatically move them to a particular location". Can you execute this and move the links to the site field? If not, is there another qualified editor you can recommend who might be able to look into that?

Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 18:05, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

point spread sillyness

an editor 73.197.56.240 changed many pages from Elapsed time to point spread......any help reverting would be appreciated.....Pvmoutside (talk) 14:11, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Diocemy Saint Juste

A new AfD raises the question as to whether (i) a college football player must satisfy WP:NCOLLATH or WP:NGRIDIRON; or (ii) it is sufficient that the player pass WP:GNG with significant coverage in multiple, reliable sources. If you have views on this, one way or the other, please feel free to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Diocemy Saint Juste. Cbl62 (talk) 19:39, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Category:Patriot Bowl champion seasons

We don't typically have categories for regular season games right?- seeCategory:Patriot Bowl champion seasons.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 18:16, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Also Category:Pineapple Bowl champion seasons-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 18:35, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Category:Patriot Bowl champion seasons should be deleted. Its parent category, Category:Patriot Bowl, would then become superfluous and should be deleted as well. The Pineapple Bowl was a postseason bowl game, so I think that category is okay. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:36, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

football Template for discussion

There is a merge discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 September 17#Template:United Football League (2009) team that editors may be interested in discussing. FYI it regards merging Template:Infobox NFL team and others into Template:Infobox American football team. At the rate its going, "I think we need to identify the ultimate 'parent' template and see if there are any other templates that fit with this merge." it could impact Template:Infobox NCAA football school down the line. Thoughts are appreciated.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:38, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

Automatic semi-protection of rivalry articles

This idea probably flies in the face of Wikipolicy, but I'll throw it out there... There was some silly partisan IP vandalism on the Florida–Tennessee football rivalry article last week, so I requested semi-protection, and an admin semi-locked it down from Friday until Monday. Rivalry games usually bring out a flurry of IP vandals putting in crazy scores and who "owns" who - you've all seen it. But because of the protection, there was none of that on the UF-UT article. A couple of regular editors (including myself) updated the record and scores, etc., with no repeated reverting necessary. Perhaps it might be a good idea to semi-protect rivalry articles during the weekend of the game as a matter of course? IP users would be free to contribute at other times, but the overwhelming majority of anonymous edits on game weeks are straight up vandalism. Just a thought. Zeng8r (talk) 14:40, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

I've suggested this in the past in a few places and was turned down each time. Not sure about policy, but it seems most admins are against the notion of preemptive protection. What say you Bagumba? Lizard (talk) 23:49, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
The policy against it is WP:NO-PREEMPT. If I was running my own site, it'd be common sense and predictable for some annual events like the Super Bowl. But Wikipedia leadership is crowd sourced, so you'd have to come up with something agreeable for people wary of rogue admins silencing editors.—Bagumba (talk) 05:10, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps there's a way to shorthand the issue at RPP, like "recurring event vandalism", so that a disinterested editor doesn't have to explain the whole thing laboriously, and the admin doesn't have to think about it - just, ah, okay, it's that time of year again, semi-protected for a week. JohnInDC (talk) 11:12, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
WP:VPP might be the best place to propose. Be prepared to give some background for non-sports editors (though it probably applies in other areas).—Bagumba (talk) 11:18, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

 

Hello,
Please note that History of American football positions, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of Today's articles for improvement. The article was scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Today's articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing!
Delivered by MusikBot talk 00:05, 1 October 2018 (UTC) on behalf of the TAFI team

Two possible AfD's-The St. Brown brothers

I noticed that there are pages for both of Equanimeous St. Brown's brothers, Osiris and Amon-Ra St. Brown both of whom are currently freshman at their respective universities. While both may very well have successful college careers, these articles may be a case of WP:TOOSOON given they have no serious college honors nor a professional career yet. Best, GPL93 (talk) 15:48, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

National championships recognized with bolding in team navboxes

User:UW Dawgs and I have a disagreement at Template:USC Trojans football navbox which potentially affect many others navboxes of the kind. User:Corkythehornetfan has become involved in the dispute as as well. UW Dawgs made a recent edit to the USC navbox in which he bolded every USC season mentioned at College football national championships in NCAA Division I FBS, which includes seasons like 2007 USC Trojans football team, where USC won a obscure national title from the Dunkel System. I'm quite confident that we reached a consensus here some years ago to only recognize "major" national titles in these team navboxes. The NCAA record books recognize four "major" selectors for national titles since 1950: the AP Poll, the Coaches Poll, the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA), and the National Football Foundation (NFF). I believe our consensuses was also to recognize only national titles that the school in question claims for years prior to 1950. It's probably a good time to reaffirm or modify this consensus and, perhaps, expand its scope to formalize how we recognize national titles in other standardized structures like infoboxes and record tables. Thoughts? Jweiss11 (talk) 01:54, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Bolding seasons like 2007 for USC is clearly ridiculous. I think what makes the most sense for the team navboxes is bolding the titles that are claimed by the school. Teams generally don't make claims that are too far fetched, whereas the NCAA's list of every single "major selector" title is riddled with absurdities that no one claims. Only problem is that sometimes it's a little tough to tell what titles a school "claims" since that's a bit of a nebulous term. For example, I believe Washington's media guide includes "national champions" sections on 1984 and 1990, but their stadium only has a national championship banner for 1991. Ostealthy (talk)
I think seasons like Washington's in 1984 and 1990 fall into the bucket of obscure national titles the most everyone doesn't generally recognize. For years since 1950, I recommend we continue to limit it to just national titles from those four "major" selectors. Jweiss11 (talk) 02:58, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
This is somewhat misstated. The NCAA-coined term is "major selector" and we use them extensively within this type of article content, including via infoboxes callouts. The NCAA currently identifies about 12 active "major selectors" by my count, inclusive of Dunkel whose NCAA designation dates to its 1929 origin. Many current and prior major selectors predate the polling era. Recentism bias aside, you might be trying to use the term "consensus national champions." That is another of the NCAA's coined terms. There are currently 3 and that associated methodology dates to 1950. As I believe you are aware, there is an active discussion on what Dunkel claims in 2007 which makes the example problematic. UW Dawgs (talk) 01:28, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

MOS discussion: On the related subject of bolding navbox links in general (not CFB specific), I've started a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Text_formatting#Bolding_navbox_links.—Bagumba (talk) 06:48, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Can anyone help me out?

Currently in an edit war with an IP user on the Utah State Aggies football page over rivalries. They are stating 2 named rivalries with Boise State and Air Force that don't exist and can't provide proof. And every time I remove the info and ask for a source they just keep saying the "name is pending" and that I'm vandalizing. I don't want to get blocked from an edit war. Can anyone back me up on the Talk:Utah State Aggies football page? Bsuorangecrush (talk) 00:27, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

The IP got blocked for 31 hours and the page protected for 3 days. I'll leave this information here in case the edits continue after the block and protection expire. Thanks. Bsuorangecrush (talk) 01:04, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to rename 26 "Mountain States Conference"/"Skyline Conference" standings templates and season categories

Please see Talk:Mountain States Conference#Renaming "MSC" football standings templates and football season categories and weigh in with any thoughts you may have. Cbl62 (talk) 15:38, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

AfD Discussion: Zach Vraa

I originally proposed the article for Zach Vraa, a former wide receiver for North Dakota State, for deletion on the grounds that he doesn't meet the standards of WP:CFBNOTE but someone removed the tag. As you can see from his page he garnered no individual collegiate awards nor ever signed with a professional team after graduation and therefore certainly doesn't meet WP:CFBNOTE and there is no notable national coverage about Vraa as an individual. Best, GPL93 (talk) 18:13, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Agreed, page should be deleted. Simply being the member of a good team does not warrant their own page. Bsuorangecrush (talk) 22:21, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
There's several more from the same editor, who appears to be some sort of NDSU superfan who also created several other pages for NDSU players that do not meet notability standards. I proposed another one for deletion but there are several other ones of players whom either never made it to any professional rank or were only on a professional team for one preseason and never signed again after initial cuts. I've been going through Navigational Boxes below so I'm sure I'll find some more:

Best, GPL93 (talk) 23:34, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Agree with Bsuorangecrush. Simply being a player on a good team, even a Division I FCS championship team, is not a recognized basis for notability under WP:NCOLLATH. Such players would need to pass muster under the standards set forth in NCOLLATH, WP:NGRIDIRON, or WP:GNG. Cbl62 (talk) 15:41, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Please provide your opinion in a proposed change to “Infobox college coach”

Thanks. Template talk:Infobox college coach#Use of the “sport” field Rikster2 (talk) 21:47, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

This discussion could use more opinions to try to reach a consensus. Please go give your opinion if you can. Thanks Rikster2 (talk) 14:59, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
Once more, this discussion could use more input to reach consensus. Rikster2 (talk) 11:54, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

AfD-Ben LeCompte

Ben LeCompte was a punter for North Dakota State who had a short stint with the Chicago Bears on their practice squad after graduation and has not appeared on a roster since. I don't believe his achievements meet standards of WP:CFBNOTE or WP:NGRIDIRON and I don't think he has gained significant enough non-local coverage to pass WP:GNG. The article was previously nominated in 2016, when he was still with the Bears practice squad.GPL93 (talk) 14:58, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Jim Taylor (tackle)

What are the chances that a third-team All-American tackle from the 1920s, who doesn't appeared to have played pro, will ever be anything more than a stub? Is he notable enough for an article? Per guideline WP:WHYN: If only a few sentences could be written and supported by sources about the subject, that subject does not qualify for a separate page, but should instead be merged into an article about a larger topic or relevant list. The main reason I ask is that Jim Taylor (American football) should be moved to Jim Taylor (running back) per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (sportspeople) if the tackle is going to stay.—Bagumba (talk) 11:48, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

I haven't done the WP:BEFORE work to assess Jim Taylor (tackle), but have two general reactions to your inquiry: 1) The fact that further disambiguation may be needed should never be a reason (let alone "the main reason I ask") to consider deleting an article; and 2) Your question misapprehends the relative importance of college and pro football at the time Taylor played. In fact, playing for the 1924 Georgia Bulldogs football team was actually a much bigger deal (in terms of fan base, attendance, and press coverage) than playing for an NFL team (e.g., 1924 Racine Legion, 1924 Kenosha Maroons, 1924 Rochester Jeffersons). Cbl62 (talk) 14:27, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
I ran across the tackle in the hatnote after the RB's death. If he's not notable, I was not going to bother moving the RB and update all the links if only one Am football Jim Taylor will ultimately remain. I'm not looking to delete just to avoid a rename, per se. The comment about the tackle not playing pro was more that it's one less SNG he can meet. I was not discounting college football in those days. Hope that clarifies things. Regards.—Bagumba (talk) 14:38, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

2018 Nebraska score links

The 2018 Nebraska Cornhuskers football team page has links in the score of the schedule tables that link to the ESPN box score. To my knowledge it is the only one that I've seen with this. Is this something that should be copied on all 130 FBS and 100+ FCS pages, or eliminated?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 03:05, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

I'd eliminate it; there's no need, especially with the new "source" parameter that can be easily added to any schedule template. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 03:39, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
Agree with PCN. The "source" parameter is the preferred way to handle this. E.g., 1948 Detroit Titans football team. Cbl62 (talk) 03:54, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
I've seen this elsewhere and it's an inappropriate use of external links within the body of an article. These sources should be used as inline references where appropriate. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:03, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
@Wscsuperfan: you restored these external links last week when it appears the concensus was to remove them. Can you discuss? Hoof Hearted (talk) 13:28, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
@Hoof Hearted: I did not see any notice to remove the links? What is the rationale? Wscsuperfan (talk) 14:52, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
I think the notice was placed here (in this discussion) to attract more discussion participants. The rationale is that this in an inappropriate use of external links within the body of an article. To PCN's point, "source" is not available for the {{CFB Schedule Start}} templates (11,000 transclusions), and I'd hate to revert to the {{CFB schedule}} templates (1,900 transculsions) shown in Cbl's example. Should we add "source" to {{CFB Schedule Start}} (and {{CFB Schedule Entry}})? (Template editing is not my thing) Hoof Hearted (talk) 15:27, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
Source column should be available for both versions. If not, we should ask Frietjes to fix that. Cbl62 (talk) 16:33, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

"Source" is not included in the documentation for them and I get an error when I try to add that parameter to transcluded templates. @Frietjes: could you please add a source parameter to {{CFB Schedule Start}} and {{CFB Schedule Entry}}, similar to what was done with {{CFB schedule}}? (Or if it's already there, can you explain what I'm doing wrong?) Hoof Hearted (talk) 17:23, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Hoof Hearted, source is available in the new templates. I have converted 2018 Nebraska Cornhuskers football team to use the new templates using the conversion module. the new template automatically detects if any of the rows have a source parameter, and if so, it automatically adds the source column. Frietjes (talk) 17:31, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Glitch in independents templates

If the college football independents standings templates are going to be kept, they should at least be fixed to remove the "Conf" record column. See, e.g., Template:1898 college football independents records. This column is empty in each case because we are showing the records of "independents". It serve no useful purpose and simply renders a template that is wider than it needs to be, in many cases forcing schedule templates to shift downward, leaving empty space. Can someone with the requisite technical skill remove the "Conf" record column? Cbl62 (talk) 19:42, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

I will fully agree; if we're going to keep these independent standings, we need to get rid of the "conf" parameter. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 14:51, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
I understand the point you are trying to make, but almost every source lists the independent standings table with the conference fields blank (see ESPN, Yahoo, NCAA, etc). It just seems like extra work that really has no impact on anything. Mjs32193 (talk) 19:33, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't know how much extra work is involved to execute the fix; I assumed it was rather minimal. The impact is in unnecessarily making the template way wider than it needs to be, forcing schedule templates in some cases to shift downward, leaving empty space. Cbl62 (talk) 01:11, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Conference rankings

What is our policy on ranking order within conference templates? I've changed the Big Ten standings table a couple of times to match the order shown at BigTen.org (as it pertains to conference record ties). Yet, I must admit that ESPN and Fox Sports show different orders. I consider the conference website to trump all others, but is that right? Hoof Hearted (talk) 13:36, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure if a consensus on this has ever been reached. I agree that the order put out by the conference itself should probably be the default. One would hope that the conferences are following their own tie-breaker rules in their standings tables, although I don't exactly 100% trust them to do that. Meanwhile, I can't even tell what ESPN's sorting is.. why are Michigan State, Penn State, and Maryland in that order? Ostealthy (talk) 15:04, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
If there's a discrepancy, I would go with the ordering as presented by the conference itself. Most conferences officially recognize teams with the same conference record at tied for the same place; see page 1 of the most recent Big Ten football weekly release here. They appear to be ordering tied teams by overall record there. Tiebreakers between teams tied for the same place come into play when you have two or more teams that tie for a division title and only one can advance to a conference championship game; in other sports such tiebreakers are used to order seeding for conference tournaments. This is a misunderstood detail that has become incredibly tiresome at Nick Saban and Urban Meyer as IPs and newbies will routinely remove division titles from infoboxes on those articles for years in which the team lost the tiebreaker and did not play in the conference championship game. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:24, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Okay, the Big Ten's own ordering isn't consistent as https://bigten.org/confstandings.aspx/2018-19/fb?path=football differs from https://bigten.org/documents/2018/10/22//2018_Week_9.pdf?id=6131. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:28, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Fair enough, and thanks for all the research. I'll "stand down" regarding the order. Hoof Hearted (talk) 14:24, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

TfD: Template:Milton Wildcats football coach navbox

Template:Milton Wildcats football coach navbox has been nominated for deletion. Please see the discussion here. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 17:09, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Lists of seasons

I was looking at some CFB season lists and noticed some use the {{CFB Yearly Record Start}} templates and others use coded tables. Are we trying to unify on one layout? Which one? Unfortunately, the project guideline describes using the coded table, but also says (at the top) lists should look like List of Texas Tech Red Raiders football seasons, which currently uses templates.

Templates (Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan)

  • More "global" use in wikipedia
  • More user friendly(?)
  • Separate columns for overall and conference records
  • Most editors seem to use conference standing for division standing
  • No column for division record (important?)

Coded tables (Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State)

  • Allows for more customization - notably spanning rows for repeat values (is this better or worse?)
  • Separate columns for conference and division finishes (although conference finish usually becomes unnecessary beyond 1st or 2nd)
  • No column for conference (or division) records

It looks like @Comedian1018 changed serveral coded tables to templates in October 2013. Is that the way we want to go? Hoof Hearted (talk) 17:35, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

We did have a discussion on this exact issue before. But I don't think anything came of it. I think it is worthwhile to rediscuss this, and I think that Dcheagle had a good proposal.–UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:44, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
You must have better archive searching skills than me! If I'm reading it right, the concensus was to use Dcheagle's proposed "Version Two" (a coded table with a few modifications). I'll update the project guideline for these season list layouts, and start chugging through team articles as I find them. Hoof Hearted (talk) 18:21, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, I posted what I believe the concensus was in 2015 plus some last-minute suggestions in my sandbox. I don't know if I explained it well enough or got bogged down in the details, so I invite everyone to provide feedback. Doing the example table was quite a challenge, and I think I bit off more than I can chew volunteering to do all CFB season lists. If everyone likes this, I'll copy it to the guideline at Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Season-by-season lists format and convert the example Texas Tech list, but I probably won't be actively working on any additional conversions. Hoof Hearted (talk) 20:34, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
@Cbl62:, @Jweiss11:, @Dcheagle: @Corkythehornetfan:, @Ejgreen77: @MisterCake: Thoughts?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:58, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Also, @Lizard the Wizard:-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:59, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
I prefer the template over the coded table. It's cleaner and more consistent with the other articles related to the subject (e.g. coaches). I've never liked the coded table... I think that's it's too much clutter and more work than I wanna put in. Corky 22:38, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
And we have contrast problems, too, as I start to look at the coded tables. Ohio State has a grey for "N/A" which isn't readable. Corky 22:44, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm up for whatever you guys wanna go with, I had forgoten that I had even been working on the season tables coding. I myself prefer the coded tables cause you can customize it more. If any changes need to be made to what I already coded let me know and Ill get to work on it.--Dcheagletalkcontribs 23:38, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
I like the information presented in the coded table, but entering all that code sucks. The main thing *I* liked about the coded table was the ability to span rows for repeat values (Head Coach, Conference), but that requires even more code for coloring the championship seasons and I could see newer editors getting lost. For very long spans, it also makes it difficult to line up the rows when reading the table. So, after changing my mind on spanning, templates become my preference. I think bowl games are presented with too much detail in your example; if anyone wants to know who they played or what the score was they can click the link. I'm also not a fan of "null" cells marked "N/A" or "—" for nearly the whole column, and would be in favor of allowing blank cells for these (I don't think this was your invention, but more of a carryover from the existing guideline). Hoof Hearted (talk) 12:55, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Template talk

It may be worth pointing out that the {{CFB Yearly Record Start}} template family still has a fair amount of customization built in, including suppression of conference columns for independent schools, the optional use of sub-headings and sub-totals, and optional wikilinking for school, conference, and college football season articles. In fact, there's enough variation in the way these templates are used I wonder if we could give better guidance to help standardize their appearance. By no means is this a complete list, but I categorized 15 powerhouse football programs below that use the templates.

Team Subheadings for Name parameter School season link
piped under
CFB season link
piped under
Conference season link
piped under
Subtotals
Colorado Conference (linked) Coach (first one linked) Year none none none
Florida Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Overall record Year Conference record none
Florida State Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Overall record Year none none
Georgia Coach (linked), conference (linked) Team Team (name parameter) Year none Coach: overall and conference record
Miami Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Overall record Year none none
Michigan Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Overall record Year Conference record none
Michigan State Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Overall record Year Conference record Coach: overall record (%) and conference record (%)
Notre Dame none Coach (first one linked) Year none none (Independent) none
Oregon Conference (linked) Coach (first one linked) Overall record Year none none
Stanford Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Year none none Coach: overall and conference record
TCU Conference (unlinked) Coach (first one linked) Overall record none none none
Texas Conference (linked) Coach (first one linked) Overall record none Year none
Texas A&M Conference (linked) Coach (first one linked) Overall record none none none
USC Conference (linked) Coach (first one linked) Year, switches to overall record in 2010 none Year beginning in 2010 none
Wisconsin Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Overall record Year Conference record none
MOST COMMON Coach (linked), conference (linked) Coach Overall record Year none none
  1. I don't have a problem with some variation, but feel we should bring the red text discrepancies in line with the rest of the pack.
  2. Nobody appears to be using {{CFB Yearly Record Subhead}} to reflect changes in team name, although it seems like a golden opportunity to me.
  3. Conversely, the overuse of the subheading template for every coach change breaks up the flow of the table, and makes the Coach column redundant. I'd prefer recommending this template for team name and conference changes only.
  4. Although it's bucking the trend, I'd prefer to see the school season link piped under Year rather than Overall record – this just seems more intuitive to me.
  5. I don't think links to CFB or conference seasons are that important on this list. It is a list of <school> seasons afterall.
  6. With the prevalence of Head Coach lists, I think coaching record sub-totaling is clutter for Season lists. Subtotals for conference records might be more useful.

Hoof Hearted (talk) 20:35, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

We should at least be careful about a complete overhaul because of the many Featured Lists.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 14:17, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Only one of the eight season lists in that category use templates, so templates would definitely be a change in paradigm. I'm going to drop the issue - if anyone wants to pick up the ball and run with it, feel free. Hoof Hearted (talk) 15:12, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

1896 LSU Tigers football team

Anyone out there know why the Ole Miss and Tulane rivalries are not showing up in the appropriate places? They are listed on the edit page...Pvmoutside (talk) 16:38, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

@Pvmoutside: the game needs a stadium name. If you can't find it try a non-breaking space (&nbsp;) for the stadium. Hoof Hearted (talk) 17:10, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
The (&nbsp;) worked...thanks....Pvmoutside (talk) 18:31, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
I put in an edit request to see if we can get rid of that nasty dot separator when the stadium isn't specified. Also, note that the 1896 Tulane page is using a slightly different (non-nested) style that you may want to consider if the dot separator bothers you. Hoof Hearted (talk) 18:41, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
...and now the template's been fixed (thanks to Frietjes). A &nbsp; is no longer required. Hoof Hearted (talk) 19:54, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

Conforming Rocky Mountain Conference articles to WP:COMMON

We recently fixed some of the confusion over the naming/usage of Skyline Conference (1938-1962), and I'd now like to do the same for the Rocky Mountain Conference. There is considerable variation in how this conference is referenced in articles, templates, and categories -- sometimes as the Rocky Mountain Conference, other times as the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, and other times still as the Rocky Mountain Faculty Athletic Conference. My research, based on hits at Newspapers.com, shows overwhelmingly that the common usage from at least 1914 to 1963 (I didn't go beyond 1963, as the conference became less notable in later years) was "Rocky Mountain Conference". In a post on October 16, I proposed renaming articles and templates in accordance with this common usage, but have received no feedback. If you have an opinion, please post at: Talk:Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference#Renaming RMAC/RMFAC ---> RMC. Cbl62 (talk) 22:50, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

Michigan State–Ohio State football rivalry redux

Previously discussed here - Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_College_football/Archive_19#Michigan_State–Ohio_State_football_rivalry - and kind of inconclusive. Some recent editing at Ohio State Buckeyes football‎ caused me to revisit the page and I'm still skeptical that this qualifies. I intend to PROD it unless someone here has some other thoughts. JohnInDC (talk) 15:40, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

I recommend you AfD it instead. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:14, 26 September 2018 (UTC)
For what it's worth I'd probably support deletion if it was AfDed. A single CBS writer's spur-of-the-moment exceptional claim does not a rivalry make. The Detroit News source only vaguely suggests it's a rivalry. Lizard (talk) 03:24, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
The article needs narrative text to be developed, and I'd have to do a deeper dig to reach a final decision, but I'd probably lean to keep. Whether it's a true rivalry or a highly notable series, the notability is probably there. Sources include: (1) CBS Sports ("Michigan State-Ohio State is best modern rivalry"); (2) The Detroit News ("MSU-OSU is now the big-stakes game in Big Ten"); (3) Mlive.com ("Michigan State-Ohio State football rivalry blossoms with both projected atop the Big Ten"). The notability is also supported by the history of 22 marquee matchups in which both teams were ranked or a ranked team was upset. These marquee matchups include: 1951 (#1 vs #7); 1960 (#8 vs #10); 1972 (MSU upset of #5 OSU); 1974 (MSU upset of #1 OSU); 1975 (#3 vs #11); 1998 (MSU upset of #1 OSU); 2013 (#10 MSU defeated #2 OSU); 2015 (#9 MSU upset #2 OSU); and 2017 (#11 vs #13). Cbl62 (talk) 14:31, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
Maybe so. But I'd rather our criteria were a bit stricter than just "does it pass GNG?" when it comes to rivalries. The problem is that we have to try to prove a negative: you can easily find sources saying a series is a rivalry, but it's a lot tougher to find sources saying one isn't. That's why I cited WP:EXCEPTIONAL even though it doesn't directly apply. Lizard (talk) 14:48, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
Well, I didn't do it, but it's done. AfD here. JohnInDC (talk) 02:51, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

While we're fixing things ... "Border Conference"

Having resolved a couple other conference naming anomalies, there's one more to tackle. Please see Talk:Border Intercollegiate Athletic Association. Cbl62 (talk) 01:39, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Aaron Hernandez article

Opinions are needed on the following: Talk:Aaron Hernandez#Update. A permalink for it is here. The discussion concerns Hernandez's sexuality and how much detail to include on it, and WP:In-text attribution. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 03:45, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Featured quality source review RFC

Editors in this WikiProject may be interested in the featured quality source review RFC that has been ongoing. It would change the featured article candidate process (FAC) so that source reviews would need to occur prior to any other reviews for FAC. Your comments are appreciated. --IznoRepeat (talk) 21:46, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Bot request submitted for schedule conversions

I submitted a bot request 10 days ago to do the conversions to the new schedule templates; see Wikipedia:Bot requests#College football schedule conversions. No one there has yet responded. Perhaps if others here would chime in over there, it would draw some attention. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 02:58, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Jim Fiore

So, I just ran across this article today. It appears to have had edit-warring issues going on in the past, and it looks like some POV issues still remain. I'd say the entire article is in need of an overhaul/rewrite. Just putting it out there to try to get some eyeballs on the article. Ejgreen77 (talk) 22:55, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Marquis Wright

I cannot find the appropriate delsort, so notifying the project of an AfD of possible interest that I've listed: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Marquis Wright. I'm not watching this page, so please ping me if you reply. StarM 03:29, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

AfD: Lucien Abraham

Lucien Abraham, a newly created article for a college football head coach had been nominated for deletion. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lucien Abraham. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 18:17, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Cal Stanford

Just a heads up. One SPA is trying to change the record of the Big Game (American football) series. Yes I know that Stanford "disputes" the result of the game but I think we need eyes on it. As just more rivalry vandalism.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 15:59, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

NCAA related Templates for merging

There are two templates for merging that some editors may be interested in:

The first is Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2018_November_25#Template:Infobox_IAAUS_football_season which primarily uses a template for college football seasons from 1905-9. The second is Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2018_November_25#Template:Infobox_college_swim_team where one editor stated "Not really redundant, so a merger will need to be done; and the swim team template really does not seem a good merge target. There's the whole "Titles" section of the college swim team infobox that needs merger + the whole colors thing which is specific to US college teams. Merging all the NCAA sport templates seems a far better idea." (emphasis mine) I think it would be a good idea if we have a few editors comment in these discussions.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 23:25, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

David Long

Dave Long (American football, born 1944) was stable at Dave Long (American football) for over 10 years. While trying to figure out how to address the creation of David Long Jr. and David Long (American football), I moved the page. In less than an hour, I tried to move it back. I may have been unclear at WP:AN. I now have a new request in at Wikipedia:Requested_moves/Technical_requests#Uncontroversial_technical_requests. Feel free to weigh in as is appropriate.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:28, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Page has been moved back. Feel free to clean up hatnotes and anything else that catches your eye.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:51, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
Also if either of the new guys is related to the guy on the 1971 Ohio State Buckeyes football team feel free to help me establish that.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 12:18, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Coaching trees

Coaching trees: encyclopedic or trivial? Please join the discussion at Talk:Ryan Day (American football)#Coaching tree. Hoof Hearted (talk) 18:47, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

You might want to check out this thread, where this was discussed once before. Ejgreen77 (talk) 23:50, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

2018 College Football All-America Team

Anybody want to create 2018 College Football All-America Team.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 20:20, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Question how many selectors are we going to include this year? 01:03, 7 December 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by UCO2009bluejay (talkcontribs)
I would expect the list of selectors would be similar to prior years.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 03:36, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Annual All-conference teams on the annual season templates

Should we include the annual All-conference teams on the annual templates. I.e., should {{2017 NCAA Division I FBS football season navbox}} and/or {{2017 NCAA Division I FBS College Football Consensus All-Americans}} have links for 2017 All-ACC football team, 2017 All-SEC football team, 2017 All-Big Ten Conference football team, 2017 All-Big 12 Conference football team, and 2017 All-Pac-12 Conference football team.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:25, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. Those templates are National in scope and so including all-conference links, especially just for the Power 5, doesn't seem relevant. Ostealthy (talk) 05:01, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Ostealthy, the first template is already mostly conference-related links. How is this national in scope if the majority of the links are for conferences? The second one mostly links to players rather than articles with national subject matter.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:06, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
The first one is debatable. But it seems to me that if the template is supposed to represent links for the entirety of the FBS season, then the all-conference teams of the Power 5 is not broad enough in scope to be included. Including links to each of the ten conferences' season pages is justified. But the all-conference team is another layer down that tree. The all-Big Ten team is relevant to the Big Ten season, not the FBS season.
Now, with regard to the second template, I don't see how you would justify putting all-conference links on a template titled Consensus All-Americans. --Ostealthy (talk) 05:17, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
In terms of the FBS season template, I was thinking it should include all conference links that are notable enough to have articles. I don't know why only power conference all-conference teams have articles, but those articles are among those deemed notable for that season. If we have conference season articles, why not have links for all the all-conference articles that are considered notable.
WRT the All-American template, I was thinking that these are honorary all-star teams. Why not put these in the below template section?-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:28, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Do not add them. Per WP:NAVBOX, templates with a large number of links are not forbidden, but can appear overly busy and be hard to read and use. The average reader would be interested in a specific conference, and can navigate from an NCAA season article to the related conference article, and then to the all-conference team.—Bagumba (talk) 08:34, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

AfD: William D. McHenry

William D. McHenry has been nominated for deletion. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/William D. McHenry. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 04:56, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Need help stopping incorrect edits.

On Curt Cignetti's page, User:GoPhoenix1 continues to change the record in the "current record" field to what his "overall record" is. Current record should only be the record obtained at his current position. Cignetti has only been at Elon for the 2017 and 2018 seasons, compiling a record of 14–9. That is the record that should be in the "current record" field. His overall head coaching record, which includes his 2 seasons at Elon and 6 seasons at IUP make up his "overall record" which is 67–26. GoPhoenix1 has had this explained to him/her several times now and continues to ignore it and keeps reverting my edits. I have left messages on Talk:Curt Cignetti and User talk:GoPhoenix1 but the edits continue. I don't want to start and edit war but also don't know how to stop it GoPhoenix1 from changing the page to incorrect information. Can anyone help? Bsuorangecrush (talk) 19:40, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

GoPhoenix1 has reverted my edits twice with no explanation since this message. Also left a message on their talk page.Bsuorangecrush (talk) 19:45, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Oh, yes, frustrating. Don't make any more reverts yourself. I've warned him about 3RR on his Talk page. I know that my comment here will be sufficient for you! Let's see if he heeds the warning. JohnInDC (talk) 19:58, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Any chance that this person in violation of the close connection clause. They said that they were "permitted" by the coach. Granted that they likely said it because they thought it would help their cause, despite WP:OWN. In any event this is a WP:SPA because their edits are only on his page.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:14, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

And he just reverted the edits again. Thought he was starting to talk about it first but I guess not. Even removed the warning from his talk page.Bsuorangecrush (talk) 20:17, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

I don't want to revert the page again, I don't want to be blocked for edit warring. But It should be changed to the correct format and I assume GoPhoenix1 should be warned or blocked at this point. Bsuorangecrush (talk) 20:25, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
He's gone over 3RR now, should be blocked shortly. If he reverts yet again, wait until the block kicks in and then fix it yourself (or a tiny bit better, let another one of us do it). JohnInDC (talk) 20:38, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Ranking tables when not ranked

Looking for thoughts on ranking tables now that the season is nearing the end. If a team received votes in the AP or Coaches poll but never actually made it to the Top 25 should a ranking table be included on the season article? I have always operated under the thought that just receiving votes is not worthy of warranting an entire table just filled with RV's and NR's. I figure it's a ranking table and if they were never actually ranked then there is no reason for a table so I have removed them from pages if a team was never ranked. Is just receiving votes, sometimes for only one week, worth keeping an entire table?Bsuorangecrush (talk) 02:45, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

I would say delete them if the team was never actually ranked. The only reason I kept and maintained Arkansas' was that I didn't know if there was already a set consensus on what to do - didn't want to delete something that needed to be kept. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 16:16, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
I vote delete if they were never ranked. Ostealthy (talk) 19:56, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Notre Dame-Penn State Football Rivalry

Thoughts? JohnInDC (talk) 03:11, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Ah - here's one idea: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/CalebHughes JohnInDC (talk) 03:23, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

How do I fix this

Someone had placed a giant map on the NCAA Division II Football Championship page that no matter where I place it always seems to shift information elsewhere on the page, and makes it very unsightly. Do we really need this map? See precedent here that was removed here. The overall discussion can be found here.--UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:39, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

@UCO2009bluejay: I added Template:clear underneath the map, seemed to work. As for whether it should be there, I can't offer any help. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 20:03, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Template creep

There is no way that any of these navboxes are necessary. 198.199.134.100 (talk) 17:56, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

These navboxes seem useful and reasonable to me. They are only on the second navbox on their constituent articles and provide they navigation of these season lists between fellow conference members. Jweiss11 (talk) 22:48, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Bowl game cancellation

With the unprecedented cancellation of the 2018 First Responder Bowl, it's probably worthwhile for the project to consider how we want to handle this on all associated article tables (First Responder Bowl, 2018 Boston College Eagles football team, 2018 Boise State Broncos football team, Steve Addazio, Bryan Harsin, etc.). Ejgreen77 (talk) 12:03, 27 December 2018 (UTC) Here are my thoughts:

  • I'd advocate including them where they are anyway. I doubt people will choose to exclude this from Boise State's bowl streak, and say that they didn't make a bowl in 2018. So that would take care of the lists of bowl games, and the navboxes.
  • In the season articles we should include this as we would normally would in cancelled games in the schedule tables. In the infoboxes we could list it as bowl game "vs. [other team] (cancelled)."
  • In the coaching tables I would include it as a bowl berth but without a W-L-T indicator, as it is if the game is yet to be played. –UCO2009bluejay (talk) 19:35, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

Article for deletion

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alabama–Clemson football rivalry. Corky 21:49, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Season article campaign

There are only two remaining Power Five teams that lack articles for every season: NC State (44 pre-1950 seasons lacking articles) and Louisville (roughly 70 seasons through 1995 lacking articles). Anyone care to fill in some of the gaps? Cbl62 (talk) 11:42, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

I'd be more than willing to help out; I'm not the fastest by any means but I enjoy doing them. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 15:06, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
Every bit helps. Thanks. Cbl62 (talk) 15:31, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Bowl season articles

If you have time, please consider adding content to the bowl season articles (list in second column here). In the last few weeks, User:Mooreux and I have started pages for seasons 1981–82 to 2000–01 and added more content to articles up to the present. It would be great if we could get articles started on every season, with at least a schedule of games for each, and then adding some more prose. I would also like to see some more consistency between articles, if possible. Thanks, Ostealthy (talk) 00:38, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

FCS support in Template:Infobox NCAA football yearly game

I was wondering if there's any way that we could add support for FCS within Template:Infobox NCAA football yearly game? Admittedly the template is used for vastly more FBS games than FCS, but it seems out of place when used for an FCS game (ex. 2017 Celebration Bowl, 2018 Celebration Bowl, 2007 NCAA Division I FCS Football Championship, among others). There's a couple of components of the template that are exclusive to FBS teams, listed below.

  • ranking fields (no support for STATS FCS poll, coaches' poll links to FBS poll)
  • season field automatically links to FBS season (ex. |Football Season=2018 links to 2018 NCAA Division I FBS football season)

Is there any way to use the template for FCS games with appropriate links, or is there a similar template for FCS games? PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 19:07, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

PCN02WPS, thanks for bringing this up. I thing the template should be amended to service FCS and lower division games. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:22, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
Ditto.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 19:30, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
@Jweiss11 and UCO2009bluejay: with the conclusion of the 2019 Championship Game and the creation of the 2018 Championship Game page, I think this is something that should be done sooner rather than later (as there are many more FCS Championship game pages that I plan to create); is there anybody we could get to help with this? I would give it a try but I have no experience with templates. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 02:19, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

AfD for 2009 Sacred Heart Pioneers football team

I am not familiar with this program, but it is a Division I FCS program. Feel free to offer opinions at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2009 Sacred Heart Pioneers football team. Cbl62 (talk) 06:45, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Ryan Day during Meyer's administrative leave

(I first posted this at Talk:Ohio State Buckeyes football but it cuts across a few articles so I decided to move it here.) Ryan Day is OSU's head coach beginning in the 2019 season, so I guess - now. He led the team to 3 wins during Urban Meyer's administrative leave at the beginning of the 2018 season. A couple of editors have updated Day's record at Ohio State Buckeyes football to 3-0 to reflect those wins. I've reverted them, on the ground that Day wasn't "Head Coach" at the time, and figuring too that if you credit the wins to Day you need to take them away from Meyer, which seemed - well, implausible to me. But now I see the statement at Urban Meyer that Day is credited with those wins. (Found a ref for this here.) Does anyone know anything different? I don't care which way it goes, other than I don't think the same wins should appear in the lifetime records of two different coaches. Thanks for any input. JohnInDC (talk) 22:02, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Sports Reference has those wins credited to Ryan Day and not Urban Meyer on Ohio State's 2018 season page. For Meyer's career stats, they also do not count those three wins in his total. I'm not sure it carries the weight of "official" yet, but there's an outside source. Ohio State has not updated his totals yet on their website. --JonRidinger (talk) 22:11, 2 January 2019 (UTC)
Day is the coach of record for the first 3 games of the 2018. I got in touch with the OSU athletic department and confirmed this in the fall. In situations such as these where a permanent coach is still employed by the school while an acting/interim coach leads the team, the NCAA leaves it to the school to determine who is credited as head coach for the games. Jweiss11 (talk) 23:04, 2 January 2019 (UTC)
Meantime Urban Meyer credits him with all the wins - annotated, but with the wins. I'm inclined to remove the wins, keep the annotation, and add what refs we've got (to be updated by OSU stats when they arrive). Yes? No? JohnInDC (talk) 01:26, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
JohnInDC, I fixed the 2018 records at Urban Meyer. The totals in the infobox and record table were correct. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:23, 6 January 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for that. JohnInDC (talk) 12:45, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

WikiProject United States 50,000 Challenge

  You are invited to participate in the 50,000 Challenge, aiming for 50,000 article improvements and creations for articles relating to the United States. This effort began on November 1, 2016 and to reach our goal, we will need editors like you to participate, expand, and create. See more here!

I know this template is probably meant to be used on a user talk page, but I'm going to put it here just to bring it to everyone's attention. Our WikiProject is one that is constantly creating and improving articles, and so I thought we could be of great help to WikiProject United States in their 50,000 challenge. Of course, this is completely optional, but if you would like to help out, simply add any article you create or greatly improve (as long as it relates to the United States and has proper sourcing, which almost all of our articles do) to the list at the bottom of this page. I think it'd be awesome to see more college football show up. Thanks! PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 06:50, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Notre Dame Fighting Irish football series records

This list and Creighton Bluejays football series records are two of the remaining of their kind that we discussed here We had a consensus after deletion discussions here, here, and here, that were successful. As well as a previous discussion here that was determined as No Consensus. What does anybody think about these articles, either 1) delete them entirely (as was previous consensus) or 2) use this as a template.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:44, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

  • I remain generally opposed to such lists with my rationale being laid out at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Texas Longhorns football series records. Accordingly, I favor deleting the Creighton list. As for the Notre Dame list, I'd be ok with re-opening the discussion in a fresh AfD, though I note that (i) the votes were evenly split on the last AfD (5 keep, 5 delete), (ii) it includes extensive contextual information (thus overcoming any WP:NOTSTATS objection), (iii) Notre Dame is a bit of a special case, and (iii) Shatterdaymorn has worked diligently to keep it updated. Cbl62 (talk) 11:26, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
Note: Deleting Category:College football all-time series records might also help discourage proliferation. Cbl62 (talk) 11:30, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
@Cbl62: Noted. That was/is my big hangup about these. Also see this edit posted on the Iowa Hawkeyes football page after the Iowa series records were deleted.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:04, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
I’ll support the deletion of these two lists. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:32, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
@Cbl62: et al. I have nominated it here Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Notre Dame Fighting Irish football series records (2nd nomination).UCO2009bluejay (talk) 23:19, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

RfD for 2019 NCAA Division I FBS football season navbox

Hi all, just wanted to bring to everyone's attention that I have nominated the above linked redirect for deletion; it was a redirect that I unknowingly created after moving the navbox itself from article namespace to template namespace. Nomination page here: Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2019 January 11#2019 NCAA Division I FBS football season navbox. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 16:40, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

AfD: Michael P. Waddell

Not directly related to this project, per se, but of tangential interest to some members here as an NCAA Division I athletic director. Please see: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael P. Waddell. Thanks, Ejgreen77 (talk) 04:11, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Hawaii–Wyoming football rivalry

I have been working on building out the Wyoming season articles and came across Hawaii–Wyoming football rivalry. Wyoming has two long and historic rivalries with Colorado State (110 games dating to 1899) and Utah State (69 games dating to 1903). In contrast, there have been only 24 games with Hawaii dating to 1978. Yes, a group of Wyoming alumni living in Hawaii created a trophy, but it seems to lack any of the other expected earmarks of a notable rivalry (e.g., no geographic proximity, only a brief period with regularity of play (1979-1997 followed by a 16-year gap), no fan intensity, no marquee matchups, etc.). Is Hawaii–Wyoming really a notable rivalry? Thoughts appreciated. Cbl62 (talk) 20:49, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

As for the trophy, one of the current sources (here) calls it "a rivalry that didn't garner much interest outside of Laramie or Honolulu" and notes the lack of interest in the trophy: "It is clear the Cowboys' staff didn't think too highly of the trophy as representatives admittedly stated they have no idea of its whereabouts. . . . just like the series, this trophy didn't carry much historical value or lore." Cbl62 (talk) 21:01, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Notre Dame Fighting Irish football series records (2nd nomination)

Hello everybody Notre Dame Fighting Irish football series records is up for deletion here if anybody is interested in participating.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 23:20, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: Last one (maybe): Buffalo Bulls football series records.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 16:08, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
Let's AfD it! Jweiss11 (talk) 16:10, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
Agreed but is there a chance that there may possibly be others that have slipped through the cracks like this and Creighton did.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 16:12, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
Guys, this article is basically just a bunch of stuff that was split out from the main Buffalo Bulls football article a couple of years ago by another user. Looking at it today, I'd say that the "All-time MAC records" section can be moved back into the main Buffalo Bulls football article where it originally came from and the rest of the article can be safely deep sixed as meaningless trivia. Ejgreen77 (talk) 16:34, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, I moved it back to its original name, I messed up there. I would support a MAC records section like in other teams' pages however it needs to be current teams only. I agree that the vs P5 and ranked is fluff.--UCO2009bluejay (talk) 18:58, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Jim Taylor RM

Greetings! I have recently relisted a requested move discussion at Talk:Jim_Taylor_(American_football)#Requested_move_17_January_2019, regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks, —Bagumba (talk) 06:23, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Damarea Crockett

The position has been advanced in the above AfD that: (i) national coverage is required for college football players to have articles; and (ii) feature coverage in three major metropolitan areas (Kansas City, St. Louis, Little Rock) is "routine local" coverage that should not count toward notability. If you have views one way or the other, feel free to participate in the discussion. Cbl62 (talk) 21:58, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps more reason to have a WP:College Sports

I've noticed that we have a level of inconsistenies at the overall NCAA level for instance we have Template:NCAA Division II navbox which has recently been repurposed into a championships navbox. This is redundant to the list of championships found in Template:National Collegiate Athletic Association, keep in mind that we don't have any corresponding navboxes as such Template:NCAA Division I navbox, and Template:NCAA Division III navboxes. Much of the information that was found in the D-II navbox can now be found in Template:NCAA Division II conferences which makes sense since we have three separate navboxes for Division I conferences, and at least two of them are redundant. I feel this needs to be addressed.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 15:00, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Tooltip template in CFB schedule

I've been creating some 2019 team articles lately and I've run across a problem. If a team has a non-Saturday game as their season opener, the use of the tooltip template seems to not work with the CFB schedule template. Here's an example using Clemson's schedule without the tooltip template:

DateOpponentSiteTVResult
August 29Georgia TechACCN
  • Rankings from AP Poll released prior to the game

...and with:

DateOpponentSiteTVResult
August 29Georgia TechACCN
  • Rankings from AP Poll released prior to the game

with the template, something messes up with the columns and it won't fix unless the tooltip is removed. Can anyone help? PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 02:40, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Technical issue aside, {{abbr}} (which {{tooltip}} redirects to), discourages use of hover text for anything but abbreviations. See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style (accessibility)#Text. Aside from the day of week information being useful as a TV guide before the game, it's probably trivial in the long run.—Bagumba (talk) 04:10, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
I disagree in principle, I think the tooltips for non-Saturday days of the week are extremely helpful. Ostealthy (talk) 04:14, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
If they are useful, mobile users and those with disabilities wont see the hover text.—Bagumba (talk) 04:56, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Isn't usefulness for some users still good as long as it doesn't compromise usability for others? Jweiss11 (talk) 05:04, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Could make it a footnote.—Bagumba (talk) 06:20, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
That could work, though it'd get a bit cluttered for MAC teams that play mid-week games throughout the end of the season (ex. 2018 Buffalo Bulls football team). PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 15:16, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Template conversions

I noticed that an account name "PrimeBOT" change a large number of schedule template a few days ago. A large part of template became less attractive or even could not be displayed. I really don't know why it did that, and I undid many of its edits. 七战功成 9:05, 2 February, 2019

All, please see the discussion at User talk:Primefac#CFB template conversion. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:46, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Article for deletion Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Antonio Penn

Hello, Antonio Penn has been nominated for deletion. Interested editors are encouraged to participate at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Antonio Penn.--UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:51, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Mack Rhoades

So, somehow this AfD slipped through the cracks. The guy is a sitting AD at a P5 institution, and before that he was AD at another P5 school. Very likely notable. What can we do to prevent stuff like this from happening in the future? Ejgreen77 (talk) 22:47, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

He's clearly notable from a cursory news search. Seems the article was created by an editor who hasn't been active in years, so the notification went into an abyss. Can we take this to Wikipedia:Deletion review? @Tone: you were the closing admin. What do you suggest here? Jweiss11 (talk) 23:24, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
Rhoades fell through a crack in the AfD sorting process. If anyone sees an AD being nominated, it should be sorted to the college football and basketball buckets at a minimum. This is a case where even a cursory search appears to show passage of GNG. See, e.g., [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], and many more. Cbl62 (talk) 00:57, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
@Cbl62: In the interest of trying to prevent this type of situation from occurring in the future, what would you think about trying to do a mass auto-tagging of everything in Category:College athletic directors in the United States for either this project or WikiProject College Basketball? (Similar to what we did for coaches here) That way, if an AD article gets sent to AfD or PROD, it will automatically fire into the Article alerts for at least one of these projects and we can try to get some eyeballs on them before they get deleted? (Side note: it's moments like this that I kind of regret that Dirtlawyer went ahead and torpedoed that proposed WikiProject College sports project. Sigh.) Ejgreen77 (talk) 03:27, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
If the school has a college football and basketball program, then the AD is effectively the CEO of those programs, so it makes sense to tag them for the two projects you mentioned. That should help fill in the crack. Cbl62 (talk) 04:48, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, on second thought maybe basketball would be the way to go. People like Bill Scholl at Marquette are at a school that doesn't have football, so it might look incongruous to have his article tagged for the CFB project. Ejgreen77 (talk) 05:34, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
If someone can create a page that clearly meets WP:GNG, I think they can go ahead and create a new page. Looking at the deleted content, it just cited one source—a non-independent college page. From there, the nominator and participants never said GNG was not met, and sound as if they limited themselves to sources in the article. The close was fine based on what was said then.—Bagumba (talk) 02:27, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Another former AD There's a relisted AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael P. Waddell.—Bagumba (talk) 02:34, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

  • So, would you like me to relist the AfD so that you can improve the article? --Tone 07:41, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
Tone, yes if you can relist the Rhoades AfD, that would be great. Jweiss11 (talk) 23:49, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
Done! --Tone 08:17, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment - My advice would be to work to amend WP:NCOLLATH via consensus to include ADs for (at a minimum) P5 schools. I also think it would be wise to propose amending this to expressly cover all NCAA D1 football and men's basketball head coaches (and maybe women's basketball since that only goes back to the 70s anyway). I've seen a million head coach AfDs and have yet to see one that didn't meet GNG unless it was a case where (for example) the person's full name wasn't actually known. This would save a lot of trouble. Rikster2 (talk) 13:42, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
    I'm almost sure any present day and on AD from Power 5 has enough coverage. Perhaps we make that the cutoff? Is there such an "Internet era" precedent for SNGs? Otherwise, if I go to Category:NCAA Division I athletic director by conference navigational boxes, the existing red links in the P5 navs make it a tough sell. That's only for current ADs, not historic ones. And there aren't that many ADs where we are facing mass deletes, as opposed to people churning out stubs for, say, all draft picks.—Bagumba (talk) 13:58, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
A special notability rule only applicable to "Internet era" ADs would be a mistake. Such a rule would codify, and is likely to exacerbate, inherent bias toward recent sports figures. Just because sources are easier to find for individuals in the Internet era does not make them more notable. Cbl62 (talk) 16:42, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
For better or worse, Wikipedia does base notability on the amount of coverage. Not only are sources easier to find in the Internet era, there are more publications and volume of information, no longer limited by the cost of printing and physical distribution. That being said, I'm OK if we just use GNG here.—Bagumba (talk) 18:02, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
The amount of covearge is not an issue. I've created coach and AD articles from the 40s to the 80s and no problems - plenty of newspaper etc. coverage via Newspapers.com. I will also reiterate that we should look to extend this guideline to NCAA division I (at the time the individual coached there) football and basketball coaches. There have been plenty of AfDs on these, partially because people outside the US don't understand how much coverage major college sports get here. Rikster2 (talk) 18:26, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
It's people using biases without actually searching first. There's at least one reqular sports AfD person who does it all the time. As for non-Americans, they see "college sports" and (naturally) think intramural sports.—Bagumba (talk) 18:40, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
I agree with what Rikster said. The Internet-era bias derives more from the ease of finding sources. The sources are there pre-Internet, and while some are available via newspapers.com, most newspapers are not even available with newspapers.com. For example, I've been working on Colorado topics of late, and unfortunately newspapers.com has yet to include the major Colorado dailies for most of the 20th century. Cbl62 (talk) 19:14, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Lost in shuffle AD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael P. Waddell still needs input too.—Bagumba (talk) 14:03, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Comment The tagging WikiProjects and lack of notifications for ADs that was discussed above is not necessarily always the issue, based on the participation at Waddell's AfD. WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, so that's just how things roll sometimes.—Bagumba (talk) 10:39, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
The only reason the Waddell AfD got noticed was because someone delsorted it into the American football section (which doesn't usually happen for AD Afd's). If that hadn't happened, the Waddell article probably would have been deleted. Ejgreen77 (talk) 00:52, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Proposed merger of List of Harvard–Yale football games into Harvard–Yale football rivalry

I just came across this merge proposal submitted by UW Dawgs back in September. If interested, have a look and express yourself so that this issue can be resolved one way or the other. See Talk:List of Harvard–Yale football games#Merge to Harvard–Yale football rivalry. Cbl62 (talk) 23:51, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

State titles

What should be do about state titles, and also do any others know about state titles outside of the Southeast (other than Nebraska)? I started lists for Florida, Kentucky, and South Carolina. My goal is not to have e. g. "2018 Florida state champions" crop up as something to note with 12 banners on an article, but these were quite relevant in the days before any team had joined a conference, or before one had claimed a conference title. In short, before any school in the state had entered big-time football and played games outside the state, state titles were very relevant. It's also why you'll see things like "it was the school's first title of any kind" - that usually means "They had not even won a state title before this conference title", such as 1914 Tennessee. There are some states where they may not have any due to entering big-time football quickly or immediately. There are also some like South Carolina where they are still being claimed while teams are winning conference titles, but seem to die out in importance eventually. Cake (talk) 22:14, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

One concern with these "state" titles is that they were typically very loose with no formal structure or mechanism for determining an actual state champion. Often, it was just a sports writer or newspaper informally declaring "U of X" to be the state champion because the team beat its cross-state rival and maybe one or two other teams from the state. Cbl62 (talk) 23:26, 9 February 2019 (UTC)
Yeah. Then again, conference titles are no better back then. For the most part, the newspapers and whether schools claim it are what you have to go by. Cake (talk) 00:30, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

CFB recruits templates

{{ College athlete recruit entry}} and {{ College athlete recruit end}} are long overdue for an overhaul since Scout was acquired by 247 a couple years ago and no longer do their own recruiting. Currently, if you leave the scout stars attribute blank for a recruit entry, it leaves "Scout: N/A". At the very least, Scout should only print if there is a value there. I propose simply replacing the scout parameters with new ones for the 247Sports Composite, which is not reflected in the templates right now but is arguably of more use to readers than anything else. I feel like there are a myriad of other ways these templates could be improved, from incorporating conference rankings, to overall and positional recruit ranks, to adding sorting based on name or ranks. Do others have thoughts? Will someone with template editing experience help implement changes? Ostealthy (talk) 22:50, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Proposal to regionalize the pre-1956 NCAA football independents templates

The pre-1956 NCAA football independents standings templates have been the subject of multiple past discussions. Efforts to delete them (supported by me for one) were unsuccessful. Their extreme length continues to be a problem. Last fall, Jweiss suggested regionalizing them (See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Archive 22#Independents football records templates prior to 1956), and I concur with his proposal. I prepared a mockup of Template:1947 NCAA independents football records (> 50 entries) with four regions (northeast, midwest, south and west) which can be viewed at: User:Cbl62/1947 independents. (Proposals for refining the regions are welcome as well.) Cbl62 (talk) 18:18, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

  • Support regionalizing the templates. Cbl62 (talk) 18:18, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support regionalization; those region templates look much more managable and navigable than the combined ones we have now. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 19:13, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support I'd prefer that these be deleted outright but I know I'm in the minority. This is a good step though.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:57, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

The regional breakdown here is reasonable to me. I would suggest that we explicitly define the regions by state before rolling this out. Probably makes sense to go with something like the four regions defined by the US Census Bureau: Western United States, Midwestern United States, Northeastern United States, and Southern United States. Some of the southern Mid-Atlantic States (MD, DE, VA, WV) seem to be ambiguously defined between Northeast and South, so we need to figure out where those belong. Jweiss11 (talk) 19:43, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I've used those four regions and am content with the US Census state classifications. On the border states, I'd put Maryland and Delaware in Northeast and District of Columbia, West Virginia, and Virginia in the South. Cbl62 (talk) 22:23, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
I agree with Jweiss. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 20:11, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose narrowly as the first step, as we still lack sufficient data to make an informed, LT decision. As we already know, the more pressing issue is 1906 onward "YYYY NCAA independents football records" templates are systemically inaccurate, as they comingle NCAA and non-NCAA teams. And ncaa.org give us the year of NCAA membership, allowing the inclusion/exclusion problem to be fixed as a first step.
Ex with 1915:
In later years, we pickup additional organizational splits with NAIA (1951), NCAA University/College (1956), and NCAA Division I/II/III (1973). So it would seem wise to first correct the template inaccuracies, before proceding to implementation of regions (or similar, if/as necessary) without any understanding of the qty of teams involved in each season and over the decades. UW Dawgs (talk) 20:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
* Your view that the earliest years should be limited to NCAA members is seriously flawed. Many of the major powers did not join the NCAA until the mid or late 1920s. For example, Notre Dame joined in 1924 and USC joined in 1927. Your proposed limitation would mean excluding undefeated independent 1920 Notre Dame and USC teams from the Template:1920 NCAA independents football records. That makes no sense at all. Cbl62 (talk) 23:48, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
That is explicitly NOT my view. We first need to correct the well-known and existing problem of inaccurate "NCAA independents" standings templates content. That should be done with template bifurcation, not merely expunging the non-NCAA teams (ND, USC, in your examples). That also means remaining problem could be accurately sized and a well-considered solution created. UW Dawgs (talk) 00:16, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
FCS Citadel joined the NCAA in 1952 and we have Citadel YYYY articles from 1905~1951 (Category:The Citadel Bulldogs football seasons). That makes Citadel an ideal team to seed new (Template:1906 college football independents records(it's a redirect)~Template:1951 college football independents records) templates to allow correction of the existing standings via migration of non-NCAA team W-L-T records. UW Dawgs (talk) 00:16, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
  • The regional split is far more logical, and your proposed split (NCAA members vs. non-NCAA members?) does absolutely nothing to solve the overpopulation in later years like Template:1947 NCAA independents football records where there are > 50 entries and 90% of them are NCAA members. The consensus does not appear to be with you on this one. Let's see if others have views. Cbl62 (talk) 01:13, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
My recommendation here is that we eliminate all specific references to the NCAA in the naming of articles, categories, and templates prior to the creation of the University and College Divisions in 1956. Merely joining the NCAA before that time seems have had no functional or structural effect on a team's play, and appears to get little, if any, mention in primary or third-party sources. So if USC joined the NCAA in 1927, that means 1926 USC Trojans football team was affiliated with no association, whereas 1927 USC Trojans football team was an NCAA team. They were membera of the Pacific Coast Conference in both years. What did joining the NCAA mean for the USC program? Note that Category:1926 Pacific Coast Conference football season rolls up into . Seems conferences in that era must have often had a mix of NCAA and non-NCAA teams. So, it makes sense that we eliminate the NCAA categories and upmerge their content to the main yearly college football categories, e.g. Category:1926 college football season. Also, the verbiage in the infobox and lead of articles like 1926 college football season should be edited to remove subject-defining references to the NCAA. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:28, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I agree 100% with Jweiss on eliminating references to NCAA in the naming of pre-1956 articles, categories, and templates. The idea that Knute Rockne's undefeated 1920 Notre Dame team is somehow less deserving because the school had not at that point paid membership dues to the NCAA is absurd. Cbl62 (talk) 04:45, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

One problem I foresee is that football was heavily centered in the Northeast for a long time. So it won't do us much good if a Northeast independents template in 1905 has 70 teams in it while a Western template has 5 teams. We don't really know that until we decide which teams exactly need to be included in the templates, so UW Dawgs has a point there. On the question of NCAA/non-NCAA I think that it makes more sense to avoid the confusion and just go with "college football".

But I do think that the extent to which these templates are needed at all is extremely limited, and I would sooner we just get rid of the damn things. It makes no sense why there should be a "standings table" for teams that are not standing in relation to each other in any meaningful way. Including a "Midwest independents standings table" on any of Notre Dame's season articles would be a confusing distraction. The only setting in which these standings are helpful at all are in a section like 1921 college football season#Conference standings, but even then, is it really? Not every team needs to be listed in a conference standings section, because not every team is in a conference. Ostealthy (talk) 01:43, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

I've long favored getting rid of the independents standing templates altogether, but if we are going to keep them, they need to be more manageable. You are correct that the Northeast will be the most crowded, but the subdivided sets are still vastly preferable to one big dump of 50+ teams. See User:Cbl62/1947 independents as an example of how the subdivided templates would look. Cbl62 (talk) 04:45, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment - A few suggestions here. One, especially in the old days "West" meant "west of the Alleghenies" i. e. the Midwest, so calling the California teams just "West" seems confusing and anachronistic. "Pacific Coast" would be the term there, or maybe "Pacific West" or something. It admittedly gets a little confusing for e. g. Montana or some state not on the coast, but that's less confusing than having both "West" and "Midwest" when talking about 1900. Also, Maryland and DC are a little confusing. U of Maryland was in the South Atlantic Intercollegiate Athletic Association, for instance. However, Navy is the federal government, and with the Army-Navy rivalry going so far back they can be considered "Eastern" i. e. northeastern football just like the Ivies. Then again, I think sometimes Navy players were on All-Southern teams. A similar problem with Georgetown. DC is federal, and was the capital of the Union, so in some sense it is North. Then again, Georgetown and George Washington were considered in the South Atlantic, and its players made All-Southern teams. Cake (talk) 22:04, 9 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment The list has a few flaws, it lists Central State University (Ohio) as joining in 2008, and nothing (at least that I found) that demonstrates prior membership despite the fact that they were the NCAA Division II runner-up in 1983 before dropping to NAIA play.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 23:10, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

The Omnibus Template:NCAA College Football Championship Games navbox

Now that User:Dmoore5556 is creating I-AA, FCS championship game pages (which I support by the way.) I think it is time to revisit the issue of the omnibus NCAA Championship Games navbox. We already have pages for BCS title games, Template:BCS National Championship Game navbox, and the Template:College Football Playoff navbox. But in other sports such as college basketball we have different navboxes for the divisions such as Template:NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament navbox for D-I, Template:NCAA Division II Men's Basketball Tournament navbox for D-II and Template:NCAA Division III Men's Basketball Tournament navbox D-III. Furthermore the CFP Championship is after all not officially sanctioned by the NCAA. So I believe some discussion is in order before we act. Should we keep it as it, and merge the BCS, and CFP into it, should we split it into a separate FCS, D-II and D-III (assuming one day D2 and D3 get enough pages to warrant their own navbox,) or something else?---UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:59, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm in favor of deleting Template:NCAA College Football Championship Games navbox and keeping the others. I don't think we need articles for the D-II and D-III championship games. Articles for the D-II and D-III seasons and perhaps the whole playoff tournaments should suffice. A navbox for the I-AA/FCS champ games should be created. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:08, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
For what it is worth we also have 1973 Camellia Bowl the first D-II championship game. My only issue with it is that it's category links to the current Camellia Bowl, and the 73 La Tech page links to the Camellia Bowl champion seasons category (again current not contemorary). The then Camellia Bowl being host to the NAIA and DII Championships intermittingly and others such as the Grantland Rice Bowl, (which also has its own categorical taxonomy) give me some idea that these articles may be fruitful, but I'm not going to bother creating them myself.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:47, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Noting Jweiss' objection to the creation of DII/DIII Championship Game navboxes, he has a point and certainly right now which illustrates how pointless the omnibus is. It not only includes FBS, CFP (and the Bowl Coalition)-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 22:04, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

But also as of this moment we have a grand total of 3 NCAA Division II Championship Games, and a whopping Zero D-III.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 22:04, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

@UCO2009bluejay: I re-purposed the omnibus into Template:NCAA Division I Football Championship Game navbox. Jweiss11 (talk) 20:47, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

CfD: Category:Virginia Tech Sports Hall of Fame Inductees

I have nominated for deletion. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 February 15#Category:Virginia Tech Sports Hall of Fame Inductees. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 00:44, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Position coach navboxes

Hey y'all. What do you think of these Template:Quarterbacks coaches of the Big 12 Conference, Template:Big Ten Conference defensive coordinator navbox, and Template:Big Ten Conference offensive coordinator navbox. Also note Erik Chinander is currently under PROD.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:26, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Template:Quarterbacks coaches of the Big 12 Conference should be deleted. Not sure about the OC and DC navboxes. Chinander should probably go to AfD not PROD, given that he's a coordinator for a top-tier program. Jweiss11 (talk) 20:43, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
I agree with everything Jweiss11 said, except I have doubts as to whether Chinander should go to AfD. I added a couple feature stories on Chinander to the article. Cbl62 (talk) 21:26, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
Cbl62, I don't doubt that Chinander is notable. I meant that a challenge to the article should go to AfD, not PROD, because a cursory glance puts Chinander in at least the plausible realm of notability. Jweiss11 (talk) 22:25, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
I understand and agree with you. Cbl62 (talk) 00:25, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
Navboxes that go down to position coaches are WP:FANCRUFT IMO. It's a small for which it's useful. "Current" listings are often a case of WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Encyclopedic content is not really built, as the content will always change and what is added today will have zero historic content for a reader say 20 years later. These "current" navs should remain select.—Bagumba (talk) 03:33, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: @Cbl62: @Bagumba: I have nominated the Big XII navbox for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 February 15#Template:Quarterbacks coaches of the Big 12 Conference-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:06, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Should we delete these

I am all for national championship navboxes and all, but we have navboxes for teams that don't even claim that national title?.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 00:05, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

I confess I made these when there is an excuse for them because it's helpful in editing the teams. 1908 LSU, 1922 Vandy, etc would also be included. The hardest to justify in terms of consistency might be 1899 Sewanee since they did not even have an unofficial title, but it's such a famous team that I've been back-and-forth whether to put it up for deletion. Also, I will note we don't list national championships based on whether the school claims them and stick to all the NCAA official selectors, lest we run into OR. Though I also agree that sticking to the official NCAA selectors AND school claims might make it look more official. Then again, such a criteria would not eliminate e. g. 1941 Alabama, probably the most contentious of the bunch. If you do, say multiple selectors and school claims it makes a more official looking list, but again we run into arbitrariness and OR. Cake (talk) 22:47, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, I understand the usefulness of creating navboxes like this, one thing that I think would be a great campaign for the project would be to add rosters to the national champion team pages. But in regards to the number of champion navboxes, we don't have a navbox for the 41 Bama team yet.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:09, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Move request

The move request at Talk:Pat White (gridiron football) may be of interest to some members of this project. Lepricavark (talk) 04:00, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

College football season restructuring: 1906–1955

Per the above discussion to regionalize the pre-1956 NCAA football independents template, I started to restructure of the college football seasons from the founding of the NCAA in 1906 until 1955, the year before the NCAA's University and College Divisions were formed. As I argued above, merely joining the NCAA between 1906 and 1955 seems have had no functional or structural effect on a team's play, and appears to get little, if any, mention in primary or third-party sources. It seems that conferences in that era must have often had a mix of NCAA and non-NCAA teams. Therefore, I've removed "IAAUS/NCAA" from the infobox and lead of the 1906 though 1955 seasons. The articles for those seasons have never had "IAAUS/NCAA" in their titles. I've also opened up a discussion to upmerge to the related NCAA season categories; see here.

I've renamed the 1956 though 1972 seasons article to include "NCAA University Division" in the article titles. These articles have had a mismatch between article title and lead/infobox. I've also restructured Template:NCAA football season navbox to explicitly break out the University and College Division for the 1956–1972 era. We already have an article for 1956 NCAA College Division football season, but we need to create ones for 1957 though 1972. The University Division articles contain info toward the bottom related to College Division play. That content should be migrated to the new College Division articles.

This restructuring is going to requite a fair bit of cleanup. For example, 1956 college football season currently directs to 1956 NCAA University Division football season. The direct links to that 1956 college football season need to be disambiguated so that it can be converted to a disambiguation page. I've already hit a few hundred of the articles for coaches of the era to update links in the head coaching record tables. Help here would be much appreciated!

Also, the leads of the college football season articles, e.g. 1964 NCAA University Division football season, could really use some work. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:45, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Nice work. Cbl62 (talk) 05:33, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
What about the template on the NCAA season pages, they often link to #### college football season? For instance on 1974 NCAA Division I football season the link for 1975 links to 1975 college football season instead of 1975 NCAA Divison I football season. Also I've previously dabbed 1980-2000s college football seasons, should these (1955-79) eventually be dabbed themselves?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:26, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
UCO2009bluejay, that template needs some work. Yes, everything after 1956 should be disambiguated eventually. Jweiss11 (talk) 18:33, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Template:Infobox college football season, etc

Given the college football season restructuring discussed above, Template:Infobox college football season need some work to facilitate proper navigation between season. We also have five different season infobox templates that I think should be merged into one:

To summarize, the college football seasons we need to support are as follows:

@Frietjes:, any thoughts here? Can you help? Jweiss11 (talk) 18:52, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Jweiss11, {{Infobox college football season}} has a |type= parameter which supports all of these in theory. this is how the Division III box was merged into the main box. it should be fairly straightforward to extend the logic in the various switches for other divisions. Frietjes (talk) 19:07, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Should the 1977 NCAA Division I football season infobox have two links for 1978 for I-A/I-AA?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:11, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Interesting idea. By the same rationale, the 1955 college football season infobox would have two next-year links also, for the 1956 University and College Division seasons. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:57, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Not to mention NAIA from 69 to 70 with two division. (Also for 1955 cfb as well.)--UCO2009bluejay (talk) 00:41, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Wrong formatting?

See List of Oregon Ducks head football coaches, it looks like some of the season lists.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:26, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, it's totally wrong and needs to be redone. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:30, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Bot replacement of outdated templates with Template:CFB schedule

You may have noticed a bot is in the process of converting the old named parameters templates to the new named parameters template approved a little over a year ago. If anyone spots any glitches in the conversion process, please alert the bot operator here: User talk:Primefac. Cbl62 (talk) 16:19, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Looks like the bot run to convert these templates has completed. Primefac, thanks for jumping on this. Many of the articles will need a little cleanuo to get the rank link pointing to the correct place in the footer of the table. See my last edit at 2017 McNeese State Cowboys football team. If you'd like to chip in with that cleanup effort, please don't be bashful and let me know if you have questions. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 23:44, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
What happened here? I would fix it but I haven't messed with schedule tables since we moved to the new format.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:50, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
@UCO2009bluejay: what's the problem there? I don't see anything wrong. Jweiss11 (talk) 02:07, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
@Jweiss11: I thought that the new templates had everything on one line, separated by || instead of the different parameters like the old one.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:12, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
No, the new templates support both named and unnamed parameters. The big change with the new templates is that the logic is more sophisticated, so you don't have to go through the cumbersome task of turning off and on various parameters all over the table. You just fill out data when and where it exists and can be populated. I'm of the opinion that the named parameter scheme is much more stable and maintainable and that we should probably do away the unnamed parameter scheme. Jweiss11 (talk) 17:37, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
As you know, I strongly disagree. Despite more than a year of claims of greater stability for the named parameter, no significant issues have arisen. The greatest virtue of the unnamed parameter is that it is light years easier to create and has facilitated the rapid creation of hundreds of schedule charts. A good example of the unnamed parameters version can be found at 1947 Denver Pioneers football team. Cbl62 (talk) 19:27, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
The issues are already there if you know how to look for them. I've been working on cleanup of several series of schedule tables recently, such as those for VA Tech, Texas Tech, and TCU. Such tasks are much easier when you have uniform formatting across the series as you can rapidly cut and paste elements from one year to the next. As part of the Texas Tech cleanup, I've been adding attendance figures to the tables for Texas Tech articles like 1951 Texas Tech Red Raiders football team from their media guide. I've also made edits to dole those attendance figures out to the tables for Texas Tech's opponents, like 1951 Texas A&M Aggies football team–a super easy copy/paste of "| attend = 27,000" from the Texas Tech article to the Texas A&M article. But it's far more cumbersome to do that for 1951 Texas Western Miners football team, which is running the unnamed parameter scheme. With the unnamed parameter scheme, if there are no attendance figures already, you have to turn on the attendance field at the top of the top of the table and then add pipes on each and every line in the table. This is exactly the sort of cumbersome reworking from the old templates that the new templates were designed to eliminate. Jweiss11 (talk) 19:50, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
That's a real stretch. If you are looking to time savings, that factor weighs overwhelmingly in favor of the unnamed parameters. Cbl62 (talk) 19:56, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
It's not at all a stretch. The unnamed parameter scheme may save time for you if you're doing it the way you do it, which I'm not convinced is the most efficient way to make these tables as complete as they can be. This is evidenced by your habit of often leaving opponents unlinked. My sense is that you are pulling raw text from sites like Sports-Reference.com and then formatting as needed. A much more efficient way is to make tables is to copy existing tables for a team from another year, which will already be pre-loaded with all sorts of applicable data and formatting and modify as needed. For example, when I made the table for 1953 Texas Tech Red Raiders football team, I started with a copy of the table from 1951 Texas Tech Red Raiders football team. Copying from +/- two years offset is helpful because games between common opponents will typically return to the same site every other year. Jweiss11 (talk) 20:10, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
We disagree. Cbl62 (talk) 20:38, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

UConn–UMass football rivalry requested move

See Talk:UConn–UMass football rivalry#Requested move 1 March 2019 if you have thoughts on moving UConn–UMass football rivalry to Connecticut–UMass football rivalry to meet naming conventions. Ostealthy (talk) 16:31, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Rivalry results template settings

@PCN02WPS: Ok, we just talk about that things here. I know they were both ranked in their last five meetings, but this is still a small part of the all meetings. More importantly, there are links to the articles of each of their last four meetings on the template, which are good for people to know the detailed information. So I think it's enough good, no need of any more part there. 七战功成 04:32, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps the community needs a bit more info here. User:七战功成 and I are involved in a dispute at Alabama–Clemson football rivalry about compact vs. expanded rivalry tables. We have had a previous discussion on the matter, seen here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Archive 21#Rivarly results table settings. I think we should change the table to extended as both teams have been ranked in each of their last five meetings and we decided that the compact vs. expanded dispute can "be decided on a case-by-case basis." I have been reverted three times by 七战功成 trying to change the table to expanded. Thoughts? PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 00:43, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

I like the use of the expanded format here. Showing the ranking of the losing team helps build the story of how important these games were. Ostealthy (talk) 02:43, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
  • I agree with Ostealthy. For rivalries like this, where both teams are frequently ranked, the expanded format is better. Cbl62 (talk) 22:08, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

I am sorry that I forgot to add response before. I still maintain my opinion now. As I said, there are already links there to the articles of their recent meetings, so people can easily find more information through those links. We don't need to add more information to that template. The current one looks more concise, which is good. 七战功成 04:26, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Jweiss11, Bagumba, UCO2009bluejay, Ejgreen77, Rikster2, UW Dawgs, and MisterCake: pinging some frequent editors/talk page visitors to get more opinions. I'd like to settle this now and not have this same dispute open up on another page in a few months. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 05:24, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • List both teams' rank Seems unbalanced to show one ranking and not the other, and surprised it's even a template option. If we want to make this more compact, use abbreviated months (ok in tables per MOS:DATEFORMAT).—Bagumba (talk) 06:01, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

It's not necessarily unbalanced in this way. As I said, the two teams are only both ranked in a small part of whole meetings, and there are links to the articles that introduce the important games between them over there, you don't have to add more information. 七战功成 11:29, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Program navboxes

Standard or no? Template:Texas Tech Red Raiders athletic program navbox.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 22:19, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

There might be a need for a athletic navbox, but not to duplicate sport specific info e.g. Template:Texas Tech Red Raiders football navbox.—Bagumba (talk) 17:07, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Seems like fluff to me. Would you put that navbox on all the pages linked on it - like coaches, etc? If so it seems like it’d be overkill and if not why have the navbox since you wouldn’t “nav?” Rikster2 (talk) 19:31, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
I would say delete it, since we also have Template:Texas Tech University, which can cover the athletics at a high level. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:51, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
I tend to agree with Rikster2 and Jweiss11. The overarching university navbox adequately covers sports at a macro level, and the individual sports navboxes cover coaches and the like in more depth. Cbl62 (talk) 22:13, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Templates for deletion

I don't know if the NFL draft has anything to necessarily do with WP:CFB but a mass deletion of NFL draft navboxes are underway where the nominator states that they are unused, see Wikipedia:WikiProject National Football League/Article alerts.UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:23, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Wake Forest Fighting Baptists

So while doing some schedules for the NC Tar Heels, I looked at our pages for Wake Forest. The athletics page refers to Wake as the Fighting Baptists (not cited), but the mascot page Demon Deacon refers to them as simply the "Baptists," or "The Old Gold & Black" before 1923. The school's website also confirms the Baptists or The Old Gold & Black names.....In an effort to be accurate, any preference on which name to use prior to 1923? My preference is Baptists...Pvmoutside (talk) 19:49, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

The WP:COMMONNAME should control. Searches of Newspapers.com would hopefully provide some clarity on that. Cbl62 (talk) 20:08, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
For starters, I did searches for a number of years and found as follows:
  • 1895: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 911 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 10 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1900: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,424 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 21 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1905: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,546 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 22 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1910: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,051 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 26 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1916: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,872 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 34 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1917: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,318 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 19 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1918: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,019 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 27 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1919: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,526 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 41 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1920: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,295 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 38 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1921: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 1,744 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 76 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
  • 1922: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 2,579 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 141 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 0 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 1 hit.
  • 1923: (a) "wake forest" & baptists - 712 hits; (b) "wake forest" & "old gold" - 45 hits; (c) "wake forest" & "demon deacons" - 35 hits; and (d) "wake forest" & "fighting baptists" - 0 hits.
This is pretty strong evidence for "Baptists" (of the non-"Fighting" variety) as the common name, at least from 1895 to 1923. Ideally, this exercise should be repeated for other years. Cbl62 (talk) 20:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
A closer review shows a lot of false positives where "baptists" is being used in a context other than as the mascot/nickname for the WF sports teams. Still, the proportion is pretty darn heavy in support of "baptists". Cbl62 (talk) 20:52, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Using a more restrictive methodology, a search for the overall period 1895-1923 gives 68 matches for ("wake forests baptists" & football), 3 hits for ("wake forest old gold" & football), and 0 hits for ("wake forest demon deacons" & football). Cbl62 (talk) 20:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Wake was the Baptists and Trinity/Duke were the Methodists. Cake (talk) 21:38, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Trinity/Duke were called Trinity Eleven, the Blue and White or the Methodists up until 1923 according to Duke's web site. Wikipedia uses Blue and White, so I guess we are OK for them?.....Pvmoutside (talk) 22:19, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I've renamed all the Wake seasons up through 1923 to reflect the "Baptists" nickname. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:06, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Maybe I shouldn't have capitalized. I used "Blue and White" because that's what I found for the 1891 football team. Not sure what they were called during the reign of Arthur Bradsher. My point was just wake were the baptist school contra duke the methodist school. Not sure if that was 'official', the same way teachers schools teams were called the Teachers, or Mercer was the Baptists before they were the Bears. If Vandy and Sewanee were not the Commodores and the Tigers respectively, I'm sure they would have been referred to as the Methodists and the Episcopalians (is anybody the Episcopalians)? Cake (talk) 22:41, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of multiple season articles

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1905 Southwest Texas State Bobcats football team. Cbl62 (talk) 22:57, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Naming convention discussion for two schools

At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College Basketball#Saint Francis vs. St. Francis Brooklyn. Posting here as there probably other sports that would be affected. It involves two schools that used to be identically named but one changed its athletic WP:COMMONNAME a few years ago. Please help reacha consensus, it’s a little complex. Thanks in advance. Rikster2 (talk) 00:22, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Quick question about starting QB Navboxes

Are school starting Quarterback Navboxes supposed to list every single QB to start for the school or only those that have articles? I know that many of them, such as Vanderbilt's (below), list every QB to start a game in school history but isn't the point of navboxes to help navigate to existing articles? Not sure if this has already been discussed or not just wondering. Best, GPL93 (talk) 16:22, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

A couple of thoughts pop to mind. First, per WP:NAVBOX #4, each template should have an article on the subject of the template. I'm skeptical if WP:LISTN is met with independent sources that talk about the school's QB grouping. Secondly, aside from whether that is met, there's WP:TEMPLATECREEP; not every list should be a navbox. I'd save them for the most distinguishing attributes typically listed in bio's leads.—Bagumba (talk) 16:46, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
@Bagumba thanks for the help. I've always thought having the red links or plain lists of names defeats the prupose of Navboxes, which is why last year I went through the CFB national title navboxes and removed all non-linked names I think that the same practice should be applied to QB's as well. Best, GPL93 (talk) 21:56, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

AfD for 1943 VPI Gobblers football team

I have nominated the above page as well as 1944 VPI Gobblers football team for deletion at AfD; the discussion can be seen at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1943 VPI Gobblers football team. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 10:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Mass TfD deletion of NCAA standings templates

See discusssion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 March 4#Unused sports standings.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 22:36, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

The omnibus nominator has renominated the templates individually, the templates of note for this project are: Template:2017 Division III independents football standings and Template:2015 University Athletic Association football standings. You can view much of them at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 March 13UCO2009bluejay (talk) 14:07, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

new discussion on regular season articles that were not played

Hey everyone, there's an AFD right now at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1943 VPI Gobblers football team concerning two season that were not played due to WWII for Virginia Tech. An older AFD Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1918 Montana Grizzlies football team covers a similar issue. I know it's come up before, but I think it might be time for us to have a discussion about a "preferred" or "standardized" approach for handling missing seasons for those that have season articles.

I've set up a page here: Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Missing seasons--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:25, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Central States Football League navbox

 Template:Central States Football League navbox has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:23, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

Have not seen season articles challenged in this setting before, but please take a look as this MfD may set a precedent: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:1970 Colorado State Rams football team. The eight challenged draft articles are submitted to MfD on grounds of being "patent WP:NSEASON failures". Cbl62 (talk) 11:20, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

CCNY Beavers navbox up for deletion.

Hello everybody Template:CCNY Beavers football navbox is up for deletion Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2019_March_25#Template:CCNY_Beavers_football_navbox. It appears that the navbox used to link to several pages [9] but said pages were turned into redirects all by the same user apparently without discussion.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 19:31, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

@MisterCake:, @Jweiss11: y'all had something to do with this navbox at some point.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 19:32, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

South Carolina Football rivalries

I think the rivalries list shouldn't be in that order. North Carolina is a much bigger rival than Georgia and NC State, they're hated more. It goes way back. Sports Fan 1997 (talk) 15:12, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Clemson (obvious 1st)

North Carolina (Battle of the Carolinas)

Georgia

NC State

Texas A&M (protected cross division rivalry)

In order where? At South Carolina Gamecocks football? The infobox? The "Rivalries" section in the body? Jweiss11 (talk) 15:22, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes that article, the infobox and rivalries section. I don't agree with North Carolina being over NC State and Georgia as number two Sports Fan 1997 (talk) 16:00, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

We do have some inconsistency, a few (such as South Carolina) have them in alphabetical order, Michigan has them in alphabetical order, except Ohio State). Ohio State's for that matter makes no such subheadings for different teams but in order goes Michigan, Indiana (no page?), Illinois, and Penn State. At this point it is a matter of conjecture, there is no definitive way to determine who is the biggest rival of a team, just because somebody says so lest we get into WP:OR. (The fact that we delete pages all the time on faux rivalries demonstrates that we even have trouble determining who is a legitimate rival of teams.) Not to mention that the SEC fans think every dang series must be a rivalry. here, here, here, here, etc.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 19:52, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Not to mention that USC has played against UGA 14 more games total than against than UNC and has only played against UNC 3 times since 1991. "Historically significant" is completely subjective (ie original research) and if it was truly that significant, they would find a way to play slightly more often, like they do with Clemson. Yosemiter (talk) 21:17, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
As to "It goes way back", USC first played Georgia in 1894, UNC in 1903. Yosemiter (talk) 21:58, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

So what y'all are saying is it's supposed to be in alphabetical order but it really doesn't matter how the order is listed? Sports Fan 1997 (talk) 01:16, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Reporting of legal issue at Mike Kelly (gridiron football)

There's a bit of a contentious issue at Mike Kelly (gridiron football). The subject of the article appears to have edited the article under several usernames. Kelly was arrested for domestic abuse in 2009. The chargers were later dropped, but the arrest was reported and later referenced by reliable third-party sources and appears to be tied to his firing from the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Kelly has removed cited content detailing this, arguing the legal record of the arrest was "expunged". See edit here. Thoughts? Jweiss11 (talk) 03:12, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia is free not gift-wrapped.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 15:41, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Template:Alabama Crimson Tide head coaches navbox

User:Lsw2472 has created Template:Alabama Crimson Tide head coaches navbox and a few other analogous navboxes for other SEC schools. Do we need these? Seems like unneeded footer clutter. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:20, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Didn't Dirtlawer create one for Florida that was deleted in the past?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 15:40, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
UCO2009bluejay, I don't think there was ever a navbox the Florida Gators coaches, but I think there may have been one for the Florida Gators athletic department with links to all the teams and facilities, etc. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:30, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about that type of navbox. But that doesn't mean much...--Paul McDonald (talk) 16:44, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and nominated these for deletion. Please see there discussion here. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 00:47, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Connecticut → UConn naming convention change

See Talk:Connecticut Huskies#Requested move 29 March 2019 for discussion on whether the naming convention for the Connecticut Huskies should be changed to UConn. Ostealthy (talk) 13:24, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

FYI, this resulted in a consensus to change the naming convention to UConn for current articles back to 2013–14. I've tried my best to move as much as I could to the new name, but I probably missed some. If you see any uses of Connecticut since 2013–14 athletic year, please change it to UConn. Ostealthy (talk) 14:17, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
Also, see this silly RfD. Ostealthy (talk) 14:17, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Discussion notification

FYI about a discussion I just started over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Football League#Dick Egan - dab needed

Thanks. SportsGuy789 (talk) 16:59, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

A new newsletter directory is out!

A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.

– Sent on behalf of Headbomb. 03:11, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Step by step ... year by year

We have now built a framework of historic season articles for most Division I FBS teams, but many of those articles remain really bare-bones, sub-stubs. Lately, I've been trying, year by year, to build many of them out so that they have a basic modicum of introductory text and schedule charts that include source citations for each game. The year-by-year approach has been efficient, because a single game source fills slots in two different articles. I would welcome anyone who wants to adopt a year to continue this slow, but important process.

For reference, here's what I've done so far in building out the 1947 season: Arizona, Arizona State, Arizona State-Flagstaff, Arkansas, Army, Baylor, Boston College, Boston University, Bowling Green, Brown, Buffalo, Butler, BYU, California, Catawba, Central Michigan, Chattanooga, Cincinnati, Clemson, Colgate, Colorado, Colorado A&M, Columbia, Connecticut, Cornell, Dartmouth, Davidson, Dayton, Delaware, Denver, Detroit, Drake, Duke, Duquesne, East Texas, Florida, Florida State, Fordham, Furman, Georgetown, George Washington, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Hardin-Simmons, Harvard, Hawaii, Holy Cross, Houston, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Kent State, Kentucky, Lafayette, Lehigh, Louisville, Loyola, Maine, Marquette, Maryland, Merchant Marine, Miami (FL), Miami (OH), Michigan, Michigan State, Michigan State Normal, Minnesota, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Missouri, Montana State, Muhlenberg, Navy, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Mexico A&M, North Carolina, NC State, North Texas, Northwestern, NYU, Ohio, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma A&M, Oregon, Oregon State, Penn, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Princeton, Purdue, Redlands, Rhode Island, Rice, Richmond, Rutgers, Saint Louis, Saint Mary's, San Francisco, Santa Clara, South Carolina, SMU, Springfield, Stanford, Syracuse, Temple, Texas, Texas A&M, TCU, Texas Mines, Texas Tech, Toledo, Tulsa, UCLA, USC, Utah State, Vanderbilt, Vermont, Villanova, Virginia, VMI, VPI, Wake Forest, Washington, Washington & Lee, Washington State, Wayne, West Texas State, West Virginia, Western Michigan, Wichita, William & Mary, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Xavier, Yale. Cbl62 (talk) 19:08, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Clarification on redshirt status in American football roster template

There seem to be two different understandings in how to identify redshirts when using {{ American football roster}}. Compare the rosters of Michigan and Purdue articles from 2018. The former designates a player that has completed a redshirt year by prepending R to their class, while the latter does so by setting the |rs parameter so the redshirt icon appears. To me, it seems clear that the intention of the template is that former method is to be used, and the redshirt icon is for a player who is actively redshirting the year in question. That way both designations are possible and you aren't drowned in a sea of red when looking at the roster. The template already correctly sorts the classes prepended by "R".

I'm not suggesting we go back and try and fix all the rosters that aren't doing it this way, but I've added clarifications in the template documentation to make this clearer. Are others in agreement on my interpretation? Ostealthy (talk) 21:23, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I agree, that is consistent with how the basketball template is used as well. In the basketball template there are two fields, |rs and |cur_rs. One puts the redshirt icon while they are sitting out and the other adds an 'RS' to their class for subsequent years. It may be a good idea to update this template to be consistent with CBB and avoid confusion.Mjs32193 (talk) 20:29, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

CfD:Holy Trinity Hilltoppers football

I've nominated Category:Holy Trinity Hilltoppers football and its subcategories for renaming. Please see the discussion here. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 14:04, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Northeastern University - were they an Independent, or in the New England Conference?

I have found opposing information and am hoping someone can help clear this up. According to the main article at Northeastern Huskies football, the program was an Independent from 1933–1992. College Football Data Warehouse doesn't list any conference affiliations (although I think they just haven't fleshed out the entirety of the program's history yet, so I think they might be wrong). And Northeastern's athletics pages for their football team don't demarcate any conference vs. non-conference games in their yearly listings, nor mention specific conference affiliations in their program history section. Yet List of New England Conference football standings has Northeastern in the standings templates between 1933 and 1946 (WWII absentee years notwithstanding).

The only pseudo-evidence I can find that Northeastern played in the New England Conference is a snippet from the Yankee Conference's football history (page 2): "The Yankee Conference originally developed from the New England College Conference of Intercollegiate Athletics. When Northeastern offered its resignation from that group, the Land Grant institutions appointed a committee to form a new league." So either the parent article is wildly inaccurate, or the New England Conference article and Yankee Conference history website are.

Can anyone with a newspapers.com subscription dive into this to find concrete write-ups of Northeastern's affiliation (or lack thereof) with the New England Conference? If it turns out they were in it, the season articles I've created as well as the parent article will all need to be updated. SportsGuy789 (talk) 17:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Anybody? I'm leaning toward Northeastern being in the New England Conference but I'd like a source to confirm their membership, if possible. SportsGuy789 (talk) 14:43, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
I used snippets I found in a few places (including the Yankee Conference history page you linked above) to create the standings templates, which are combinations of each school's yearbook from those years. I had questions about it as well, but went with the best info I could at the time. I had a hard time finding something independent in either direction, but I remember finding enough to feel confident in creating the standings templates. Billcasey905 (talk) 14:58, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
So these templates were all original research... interesting. I mean you may be accurate about these schools' affiliations with the New England Conference, but it's hard to really know for sure about Northeastern specifically because there doesn't seem to be an available historical Northeastern football media guide online. SportsGuy789 (talk) 16:57, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
Found an independent, definitive source! The Playing Grounds of College Football, book page 281: Independent (1933–1937), New England Conference (1938–1944 but no football in 1943 and 1944), Independent (1945–1992 but no football in 1945), Yankee / Atlantic 10 (1993–2006), CAA (2007–2009). I'm going to update the standings templates, early season articles, and main program article to reflect the conference affiliations. SportsGuy789 (talk) 19:36, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
I should note that these years listed above are the college football season years, not academic years. Northeastern left the NEC after the 1944–45 academic year, but the book says they "left" after 1944, which was merely their final football season. SportsGuy789 (talk) 19:41, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Restore previous content

Information to be added back: "First Season" Column Information. Explanation of issue: Prior to a recent update, this page included the first season an FBS head coach started coaching a team. The information has recently disappeared. Please add it back and the ability to sort on this column. References supporting change: This is the corresponding page for FCS Coaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_NCAA_Division_I_FCS_football_coaches MEKWiki (talk) 21:27, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

I've restored the deleted content to List of current NCAA Division I FBS football coaches. Thanks for pointing that out.
Note to other editors, I've removed this editor's use of the request edit template, as it didn't seem appropriate here because there doesn't appear to be a conflict of interest. Ostealthy (talk) 22:09, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Novemeber 25, 1951 Loyola vs San Francisco football game

In my Loyola football ticket stub collection, my ticket from the November 25, 1951 Loyola vs San Francisco game is a Loyola home game ticket from the game played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. I believe the game wasn't played at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.— Preceding unsigned comment added by ‎Fountainvalleyloungelizard (talkcontribs)

@Fountainvalleyloungelizard: It looks like User:Jweiss11 has corrected the game's location at 1951 Loyola Lions football team and 1951 San Francisco Dons football team. –Ostealthy (talk) 04:18, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Omarius Hines

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Omarius Hines again raises the question as to whether extensive regional and local coverage (more than 10 feature stories in multiple sources) is sufficient to pass WP:GNG. If you have an opinion, one way or the other, feel free to express it there. Cbl62 (talk) 13:41, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

2019 season articles and New Page Patrol

A question has come up at New Page Patrol about 2019 season articles such as 2019 Montana State Bobcats football team. Basically, reviewers feel like it is too soon for those and they violate WP:NSEASONS at this time. Some of them have been moved to draft space and promptly moved back to main space by the creators. I know this issue has come up in years past and about lots of different sports, not just college football. Perhaps someone from this Wikiproject would like to provide some input as to how you think these ought to be handled for the next 3 months? ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 23:59, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

We have applied a one-year-in-advance rule. Once the 2018 season is complete, we allow creation of the season article for the following year. But no sooner. The issue then is whether the particular program is sufficiently notable to warrant a season article. There is clear consensus that all Division I FBS seasons warrant articles. I believe this consensus extends as well to Division I FCS seasons (such as Montana State). No consensus that I'm aware of for Division II, III and NAIA seasons, where the article creator would need to show that WP:GNG is satisfied. Cbl62 (talk) 01:01, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
@Cbl62: and others: How does this project want to handle notable seasons (e.g. Division I FBS seasons, any season which GNG is met) where the current page is just stats. WP:NSEASONS can be interpreted many ways: Do we draftily or delete a notable topic, or leave for someone to expand? Note that the above Montana link is now red.—Bagumba (talk) 06:22, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
Can you give an example of the type of pages you are referring to? Cbl62 (talk) 07:01, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
Oops, I now see that this thread was orginally about NSEASONS as it pertains to new seasons, not just NSEASONS in general. For college basketball examples of past seasons, there's couple of team season AfDs at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Basketball.—Bagumba (talk) 07:56, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
I am in agreement with the position advanced in those AfDs by you and others that, if the teams are notable, season articles should not be deleted due to under-development of prose and over-development of charts. The latter concern is cause to improve, not delete, the articles. Cbl62 (talk) 13:13, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
Ok. Depending on how those AfDs turn out, perhaps WP:NSEASONS needs tweaking regarding:Team season articles should consist mainly of well-sourced prose, not just statistics and lists of players. Clarification may be needed whether this is regarding the page's current state or not.—Bagumba (talk) 15:23, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
Note that it says "Team season articles should," not "Team season articles must." Sure, in a perfect world, every season article would be an FA. But, the fact that they're all not isn't in and of itself a reason to delete them. Ejgreen77 (talk) 00:43, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
BTW, for some background info here, the user who initiated these basketball AfD's is primarily a baseball-centric user who is known for advocating for removal of material that meets WP:GNG (see here for an example). Ejgreen77 (talk) 16:09, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Bolding on 2019 NCAA Division I FBS football season

Is there excessive bolding of words/links on 2019 NCAA Division I FBS football season?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 22:35, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

IMO, yes. Cbl62 (talk) 22:54, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

listing of NCAA Divisions in scheduling table

I've noticed on several Idaho Vandals pages that the table lists the division of an opponent. I know this is standard procedure if a team is ranked such as what we do on 2016 Alabama Crimson Tide football team, 2016 Chattanooga Mocs football team. But we don't for instance, if a team is unranked such as the listing for Mercer on the 2017 Alabama Crimson Tide football team page? Would I be correct if I removed the indicators as I did here?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 16:35, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to remove it if it's already there. It's useful information, even if it's not standard across the project. Ostealthy (talk) 16:51, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
I actually don't give a rip either way, so long as we're consistent.–UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:00, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
The only thing we need to be consistent on is the formatting. The amount of information has never been consistent. Some schedules have attendance, TV, time, references, homecoming, etc. Others don't have these things. Doesn't mean we need to take out the extra, good information. Ostealthy (talk) 17:45, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
I agree on the "attendance, TV, time, references, homecoming." Those parameters are already well established. The divisions are an addition to a few Big Sky articles. It is that much of a minority, (and the fact that many editors have in the past complained that these tables are too wide) is why I brought it up on the first place. If it is acceptable in the Big Sky articles then it should be added to the others. UCO2009bluejay (talk) 17:57, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
I am in favor of adding divisions, though I haven't done so to teams that aren't ranked (ex. FCS Portland State on the 2019 Arkansas page) just because I thought it wasn't acceptable to add. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 19:28, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
  • I think the schedule tables are cluttered already with too much information (e.g., listing of TV networks broadcasting games). Accordingly, I do not favor adding opponent divisions to the schedule charts as a general proposition. Cbl62 (talk) 16:55, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
To clarify, I have no issue with a divisional notation where it is needed to clarify a cross-divisional ranking (e.g., the notation re Chattanooga at 2016 Alabama Crimson Tide football team). This should, however, be the exception and not the rule. Cbl62 (talk) 04:46, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
  • The reason why we list the division only when a team is ranked is because each division uses different rankings. It would be misleading to list ranking for a team in another division without specifying that they are ranked within that other division. That being said, I don't see a need to add division otherwise because the team is linked and can easily be clicked on if the reader wants more information on that team. Mjs32193 (talk) 19:56, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
  • Per Mjs32193, yes, it's misleading to list a ranking from another division without specification. Aside from the cases where the ranking itself is being specified, it's completely non-standard to list the division for inter-divisional opponents. I don't think I've ever seen this done aside from the Idaho examples, which are principally the work of User:Glacier109. Jweiss11 (talk) 01:41, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Lots of AfDs pending

This week is especially active for football AfDs. Have a look and chime in on those where you have an opinion. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/American football. Cbl62 (talk) 16:19, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

George A. Nash 1938 All American

Hello, the page for the 1938 Big Ten All Conference [1] team shows my grandfather, George A. Nash on the team as well as mention that he was on the AP-2 team I think. Does this mean Associated Press All American 2nd team? Is there a way I can see the listing for that? It was not in the sources. We think he was also on a different team as All American team as well (named after a writer or member of the press), but can't find that information. Any help would be great! He played end for Minnesota. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ToInfiniti (talkcontribs) 00:22, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

@ToInfiniti: the AP-2 in the All-Big Ten article means that he was selected to the Associated Press's second-team All-Big Ten. George Nash is listed in the first source: "Players just nosed out of first-team honors were [...] George Nash, Minnesota end ...". If Nash were featured on an All-America team, he would probably be listed in the article 1938 College Football All-America Team, but he doesn't appear to be listed in any of the sources collected there. Ostealthy (talk) 01:01, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
@ToInfiniti: Here are some clippings about your grandfather that you may find interesting: Nash Went Long Way on Courage, Nash's Fast Start Impresses Coaches, End-play, by-play, Butch Nash Named Anoka Head Coach, Nash Appointed Coach at Anoka, Cardinals Still After Nash; Butch Agrees to Conference, Butch Nash to Be Given Testimonial Dinner Wednesday, Hail Butch Nash! He's a Player's Player. Cbl62 (talk) 04:23, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

References

@Ostealthy::@Cbl62: Thanks for the help! I created a article for him which was declined at first. Still working on getting it through. Not sure what else the need now that I have 20 sources on him. Draft:Butch_Nash — Preceding unsigned comment added by ToInfiniti (talkcontribs)
User:ToInfiniti you have resubmitted the draft and it is awaiting re-review. A reviewer should get to it soon. But as it stands now I'm not confident that it will pass review. Beyond some small manual of style things, I don't think Mr. Nash passes Wikipedia's policy on notability. Your draft claims that he was a second-team All-American, but as I pointed out above, the listed source lists him as second-team All-Big Ten, not All-American. So Butch Nash was a second-team all-conference player who went on to have a long career as a low-level D1 assistant (he never was a D1 head coach or even coordinator, it seems). This resume would not pass Wikipedia's notability guideline on amateur coaches and athletes, and he doesn't appear to pass Wikipedia's general notability guideline because none of the listed sources establish significant coverage outside the Minneapolis area. Some others with more liberal opinions on notability may disagree with me. But anyway, keep working on it and it may be ready to publish. Ostealthy (talk) 00:03, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
@Ostealthy: Thank you! I miss read and equated AP to be AP All American. I will correct. He mentioned he was on an All American team of some sort. We have a video interview biography filmed in 1992 that I can probably re-watch to see if there was mentioned. As for you comment on notability, true. I figured it was worth a try, however there are FAR more insignificant figures with articles out there (I got this idea because I googled a recent assistant coach to see where he was working and even he had a page with hardly 2 references). There is a scholarship and statewide high school coaches award. I just figured the guys winning these awards would want an easy reference to who this guy was, haha.

ToInfiniti (talk) 12:42, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

2019 Southern Utah AfD

There is an ongoing AfD regarding 2019 Southern Utah Thunderbirds football team; everyone's opinions would be appreciated!

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2019 Southern Utah Thunderbirds football team

PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 04:19, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

AfD has been withdrawn. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 13:14, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Two month virtual editathon on Women in Sports

WikiProject Women in Red is devoting the next two months (July and August) to a virtual editathon on Women in Sports. Please take this opportunity to write more articles about women footballers who lag far behind men on Wikipedia.--Ipigott (talk) 06:59, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

@Ipigott: Perhaps you are looking for WP:Football? College football, though it is unfortunate, rarely has women to write about. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 12:31, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Steve Kazor DOB

An issue regarding the Steve Kazor article may be of interest to folks here. Please see: Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons#Steve Kazor DOB. Jweiss11 (talk) 22:27, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Category:College sports teams in the United States by former conference

How necessary is this category? I am just wondering how pertainent it is to the overall project especially when we (through the season articles campaign) have greatly expanded information on conferences that don't exist anymore. As such there is an extreme opportunity for expansion of this category such as Category:Former Michigan Collegiate Conference teams, Category:Former Maryland Intercollegiate Football Association teams, Category:Former Heartland Conference teams since that conference is soon to be defunct etc. But at some point it just seems like they will become unwieldly and will have several gaps and discrepencies. This inconsistency can pose an issue. I doubt that this really is that pertainent to schools that are no longer in the conference and in some cases hasn't been for almost a century.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:53, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Though, if people disagree and consensus is to keep them, I can contribute to adding this information. Despite the fact that I think it would take too much effort to ensure across the board consistency.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:59, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

AfD: A. D. Kenamond

A. D. Kenamond, a head coach in the early 1900s, has been nominated for deletion. Can this one be expanded and saved? Jweiss11 (talk) 01:57, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Yes. Cbl62 (talk) 04:40, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
Cbl62, thanks for your great work on this one! Jweiss11 (talk) 17:08, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Ryan Day requested move

Please see Talk:Ryan Day#Requested move 9 July 2019 if you have thoughts on the matter. Thanks. Ostealthy (talk) 22:31, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Football vs. "American football"

You are invited to join the discussion on the use of "American football" at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_National_Football_League#Football_vs._"American_football".—Bagumba (talk) 08:26, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Oklahoma Sooners football

There is an IP adding unsourced material (and some of it unfactual like adding an unbeatened streak that actually belongs to Washington) on the Oklahoma Sooners football page. Can a few people keep an eye on it in the next couple of days?-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 21:52, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Length tagging of 11-year Tedford section on Cal Bears football

@Rybkovich:

Era sections in FBS team articles are generally no more than 4 paragraphs, in practice if not policy. California Golden Bears football#Jeff Tedford era (2002–2012) is currently 15 paragraphs. It is the largest "era" section I am aware of in a FBS article.

As such, it was tagged with Template:very long section[10] which encourages cleanup including via subject matter experts. This type of tagging is regularly done and without controversy as it is a solicitation to improve the article. At the margin, this issue relates to Category:History of college football by team where more extensive coverage is appropriate, articles in this category have extensive/additional era content, and we currently lack a History of Cal Bears football article.

Note, the Tedford era section is about 24kB of the Cal article's 124kB.[11] while the Jeff Tedford#California section is only about 11kB, FWIW.

WP:TOOBIG says

  • > 100 kB Almost certainly should be divided
  • > 60 kB Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading material)

User Rybkovich has removed the maintenance tag[12] along the lines that specific changes needs to be proposed and consensus reach via the Talk page. That is reasonable enough re content changes (I made none), but unrelated to the removal of the maintenance tag re size. Both the section and article are demonstrably large. Based on the above, I believe the maintenance tag is appropriate. UW Dawgs (talk) 01:44, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

The history section is way too long as a whole, especially for Jeff Tedford on to the present. Perhaps the current content could be spun out out to a new article called History of California Golden Bears football? Which would be followed by significantly trimming the main article's history section. Until that's done, I agree that there's good reason to keep the "very long section" template. Ostealthy (talk) 03:20, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
Good idea re history of cal article, most likely I will do that. For the future please keep in mind the people that actually create the content. If you're concerned about an issue and want someone's work removed at least write a paragraph on the talk page explaining your opinion, out of respect. I did not write the Tedford section, but I can put myself in that author's place. Rybkovich (talk) 04:24, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
Details of all but the most historically significant games should be moved to their respective season's article.—Bagumba (talk) 05:08, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
Another way of dealing with this is to create an article on "History of California Golden Bears in the Tedford years". Compare History of Michigan Wolverines football in the Yost era and History of Michigan Wolverines football in the Kipke years and History of Michigan Wolverines football in the Crisler years. Cbl62 (talk) 08:38, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
I would hope that a cross between History of California Golden Bears football, Jeff Tedford#California, and the individual season articles would be enough. Any more seems to invite minutiae (e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jabari Parker's high school career (2nd nomination)). Note the grouping by coaches is recommended when the indvidual seasons aren't notable. Per WP:NSEASONS: In cases where the individual season notability is insufficient for an article, multiple seasons may be grouped together in a single article. This grouping might be based on head coaches, ...Bagumba (talk) 08:52, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
Respectfully disagree. I think the division of Michigan's football history by coaching eras has been quite helpful. In the case of programs with particularly rich and long histories, a single, well-developed "History of..." article will easily become WP:TOOBIG; breaking the history into major eras is quite helpful in this regard. (The history of an individual player's high school career (Jabari Parker) is simply not comparable to the history of a major college football program.) Cbl62 (talk) 09:05, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
Also, the current Cal Bears football "History" section is already 98,681 characters -- suggesting a likely need for subdivision under WP:TOOBIG. Major coaching eras is the most logical framework for such a subdivision. Cbl62 (talk) 09:10, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
Fair point on Parker, but don't take the example too literally. The important question is whether there is a line here between what one calls interesting versus what another considers fancruft? (And comparing Cal to Michigan is probably not on par either.) Cheers.—Bagumba (talk) 09:24, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
Yes there's a line to be drawn (not always a bright line) between encyclopedic content and fancruft. I have not read the Cal Bears "History" section in full, just observing that at 98,681 characters, it's pretty long and would likely benefit from subdivision. Cbl62 (talk) 09:30, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
... would likely benefit from subdivision Perhaps, but I still recommend to first move out most game- and some season-specific details to their respective season article, and then re-evalutate. Furthermore, a high-level history article can sometimes benefit by grouping a string of uneventful years together, and not give WP:UNDUE weight and cover them the same as more eventful seasons.—Bagumba (talk) 09:48, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

This is something that I think is a problem on more that just Cal. I actually think this would be as great a time as any to make a more uniform pattern for what should be listed in a history section. (Granted some programs should have more info) but the Cal page is IMO Fancruft. Let me add alot of these program articles are very much violators of WP:Recentism Oklahoma is a good example of that.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 15:16, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Agree with Recentism but not re uniform patterns. The most significant article parameters should be complied with, but at the same time each page's community of editors, should have the freedom to make their own decisions and agreements on how its content is to be displayed. Rybkovich (talk) 18:07, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
This WikiProject has gone out of its way to keep a certain level of standardization of pages/templates/categories. I'm not saying that anybody WP:OWNs any article, or that the information should be the exact same but a general format should be utilized. Otherwise we could have a few items (proposals) that could be some stuff that could really be off the wall. You also increase the chances of fancruft because let's be honest that many editors on these articles are only worried about promoting their own teams.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 18:19, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
This old thing does need to be dusted off and updated though Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Style guide,UCO2009bluejay (talk) 18:24, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
I looked at the Tedford era in a 2016 version of the article and its even larger. Do people agree that there is enough info there to create a separate page - History of California Golden Bears in the Tedford era? Rybkovich (talk) 04:25, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
Tedford era is now shrunk to four paragraphs. Rybkovich (talk) 06:26, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
Great. If you can, it'd be good to WP:PRESERVE some of the deleted content, especially the sourced ones, into the individual season articles. I'm sure the original contributors would appreciate that. Also, be sure to attribute as necessary. Regards.—Bagumba (talk) 07:30, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

@Rybkovich: I think that you're making some headway but may I recommend that you create a History of California Golden Bears football first. I am not against a Jeff Tedford era article but the program does have a rich early history that I think can be explored, and then Tedford can later be a WP:FORK of that. I wonder what other editors might have to say about these suggestions.-UCO2009bluejay (talk) 20:57, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

I hear you, but the detailed description of Tedford era that is in the 2016 version cal football page seems too large for even for a history page - 12.000 characters, Lou Holtz in Notre Dame History is 10,000 Nick Saban in Alabama History is 6,000. On top of Tedford there could also be a detailed Pappy Waldorf era as well as Andy Smith. There is also a lot of info in the Tedford's season pages that may be interesting in a more detailed Tedford years article. But yes a history page would be great, as there are years that need more info than on the team page at the moment. Rybkovich (talk) 01:56, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Group CfD nomination

Per recent discussions about removing "NCAA" from groupings prior to 1956, I've nominated a bunch of categories containing yearly standings templates for renaming. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 July 10#Yearly college football standings templates. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 18:42, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

This nomination has been relisted at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 July 18#Yearly college football standings templates. Can we get some input there? Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 17:26, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
@Cbl62:, @Corkythehornetfan:, @UCO2009bluejay: can you guys take a look when you have a chance? Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 17:35, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

FCS/DII/DIII/NAIA playoff appearance boxes

I have seen quite the discrepancy between lower divisions and how they list playoff appearances and games on their program pages. Some teams like Appalachian State, use the "List of bowls" method like many FBS teams have, whereas Delaware uses the same format that basketball uses for NCAA Tournament appearances, Central Oklahoma (one that I've created [copied from somewhere]) uses it's own format, as does Texas A&M–Commerce. But yet I think some formats are better than others because there are a variety of small college bowls that have/do exist, ex Nebraska Omaha, and Missouri S&T have links to these, and in UNO's case should have both. Yes I know that I have been the one to add a few of those (and in different formats) but that is why I am asking the following:

  • What format should we utilize to list playoff appearances for FCS and lower division articles?
  • How should we incorporate small college bowl games into the consensus generated standardized format?
  • Perhaps most importantly, without violating WP:Crystal, once the College Football Playoff becomes even more firmly entrenched what will we do if the playoff expands, and/or eschews the bowls? -UCO2009bluejay (talk) 19:24, 24 July 2019 (UTC)