Talk:List of Columbia Lions football seasons

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'Lions' before 1910

Today I'm moving several 1870s-1900s Columbia season articles to new names to reflect the fact that "Lions" was not adopted as the college athletics mascot until 1910.

As mentioned in the Columbia Lions article, the university adopted "Lions" as its mascot in 1910. This corresponds with the "How Columbia Became the Lions" section of the Columbia Lions Football Media Guide (page 238). It doesn't appear there was an official nickname before this. Columbia football was on hiatus at this time, so the first "Lions" football team took the field in 1915. The last team before the hiatus was 1905; it's this team, and those before it, whose articles need a name change. Here's my reasoning on the new names:

1915-present: No change needed, as "Lions" is the official name. 1915 Columbia Lions football team, etc.

1899-1905: 1905 Columbia Lions football team → 1905 Columbia Blue and White football team, etc.

Though there was no official name, press accounts of games often referred to teams by their uniform colors. In a few cases this became an "official" nickname (Cornell Big Red football and Harvard Crimson football, for example). By 1905 Columbia was invariably called "the Blue and White" (among other even more prosaic descriptions such as "the Morningside collegians") by The New York Times, and often referred to that way by other newspapers. The Wikipedia articles about Columbia teams from 1899 to 1905 are cited with clippings from Newspapers.com that show this trend. Not all news accounts used a nickname, but when they did, "Blue and White" (usually capitalized, and almost always in that order) was the dominant choice.

There aren't any mentions of "Blue and White" in the 1899 clippings, but I'm lumping them in with the 1900s because there's a seven-year hiatus, 1892-1898, which makes a natural stopping point for this section. It wouldn't distress me terribly if some other editor felt that 1899 and 1900 should be included in the next section below, and moved accordingly.

1876-1891: 1876 Columbia Lions football team → 1876 Columbia football team, etc.

The use of nicknames in general and "Blue and White" in particular seems to grow more common as time goes on. Articles about games in the 1870s tend not to mention nicknames. If "blue and white" or "white and blue" are mentioned, they are given in lowercase, which would seem to mark them as simple descriptors of uniform colors, rather than symbols of the team as a unit. Thus I'm simply deleting the nickname from these article titles.

1870-1875: No change needed, as these articles are already at 1875 Columbia football team, etc.

I'll update the links on this page and in the navbox. _``` t b w i l l i e _` $1.25 _` 19:22, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

~~I'd done up to 1900 before I was called away from the computer ... will get to the rest later today. _``` t b w i l l i e _` $1.25 _` 21:26, 26 July 2020 (UTC)~~ Done now. _``` t b w i l l i e _` $1.25 _` 23:06, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]