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Tis the season, beginning today!

All right fellow loving disciples of college football, our religion begins another official season today. Let us be the monks who ensure that articles are properly updated and revised as the season progresses. ...and take some damn pictures (if you can) :-) --Bobak 16:00, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

And watch my #2 LSU Tigers blow away Mississippi State tonight on ESPN. Someone else will have to update the 2007 LSU Tigers football team page, because I'll be too busy celebrating the win! Seancp 16:04, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm in the same boat on certain games, but remember that most of the articles you can hang a reference off of usually come out the next day anyway. --Bobak 17:49, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

For anyone who goes to games, please remember to TAKE A CAMERA with you. I have a new camera for this season ... 7 megapixels and 10x zoom that I bought on sale for only $200. --B 16:10, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

From my limited picture taking experience, the "exposure time" is a more important factor for action shots. Corpx 17:33, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
And, quite possibly, the zoom (unless some of you are some major donors/members of the media). But yes, B, as my earlier call to arms on photos --this is not only an opportunity for in-game shots (which are great for season pages) but also photos of schools, traditions, players and coaches. --Bobak 17:49, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
Dont forget message boards either. Most posters will be glad to license out their work(s) under cc2.5 Corpx 23:46, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
Another good way to get closeup shots is to go to games early. You can usually get in a few hours before the game and get pictures of coaches and players as they come in the field and just tell the ushers you want to snap a few pictures and they might let you in the area, especially if you tell them you're working for Wikipedia. :) MECU≈talk 14:18, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
Has that seriously worked for you?  :-p Also, remember a lot of programs have pre-game events/traditions where players walk to the stadium through or very close to fans (even at away games, coming off the bus). Those make great, though sometimes crowded, opportunities as well! --Bobak 19:19, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Also try to keep game summaries to the team article only, don't create articles on games unless there has been historical significance per WP:N. Currently #5 Michigan is close to being upset by a Division-II school, unless it says upset of the century or something, keep the info to the 2007 Michigan football team article. I'm saying this because I expect some newer users create articles on their teams games. Does anyone else agree. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 18:59, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

They did get upset, 34-32 (wow!). I'm not sure it's worthy of an article by itself either though. MECU≈talk 20:07, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
As an Appalachian State alumnus - please realize that the Mountaineers play at the FCS (I-AA) level. We are not a DII team. It's unfortunate that the BCS (I-A) folks are so clueless about the other divisions that play some GREAT football on Saturdays.Geologik 20:15, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

They are the top Division-II school in the nation, not that big of an upset, if it was like a 0-10 Division-II team, then it will be the upset of the century and deserves it's own article, this doesn't. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 20:44, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Are you purposely being obtuse? Appalachian State is not a Division II team. The Mountaineers play in the same Division as Michigan. And based on everything I'm reading - it is quite possibly the biggest upset in college football. However, I agree it doesn't need it's own article. That's pushing it a little. ;) Geologik 20:50, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
It was a huge upset, but not the biggest of all time. The point spread was only set at -27.5 (usually a good indicator for how big of an upset something is). The record for biggest overcome point spread is -38. VegaDark (talk) 00:22, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Proposed deletions (WP:PROD)

Another proposed deletion

I just created an article on the Appalachian State upset of Michigan. It's been nominated for deletion. If anyone wants to comment on it, go here. — Dale Arnett 05:04, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I realize there are a lot of articles like this here, but can we make these type of articles on WikiNews from here on ? What we're doing is covering an event that is also covered by lots of reliable sources. This type of stuff is really meant to WikiNews Corpx 05:21, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Apparently not since Wikinews uses the CC license which is not compatible with the GFDL. We would need every author to agree to the relicense. More hassle than it's worth it seems. MECU≈talk 15:24, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Guys, the media: LA Times, NY Times, SI, ESPN, have all called alternatively "the" but mostly "one of the" greatest upsets of all time. So, I'd say this is article worthy --it's just amazing to have it the first "week" after the Boise State-Oklahoma game. --Bobak 17:20, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Another proposed deletion

Please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2006 Hawaii Bowl. Johntex\talk 03:34, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Portal nominations

Another notice for WPCFB members. We have eight images up for Selected Image for our Portal. I ask that everybody take a look at them and vote. Hopefully, we'll continue to have frequent nominations as the season progresses. Also, there is one old Selected Article nomination that needs more voters to determine a majority. Check out the nominations at Portal:College football/Selected Content/Nominations.↔NMajdan•talk 02:56, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Infobox for trophy games

I put together an infobox for trophy games, feel free to take a look at it and comment. I took a look around at different articles and it seems there is a hodge podge out there. One standard seems to to have a toc for who won which years, such as Paul Bunyan's Axe, but it seems kind of messy to me to have logo images scattered about. It also seems a little redundant to have that toc listing the years each team won, followed by in many cases a complete list of scores, which gives you the same info. My main hope with the infobox was to integrate the logos into a better layout and this is what I ended up with. Here is the article: Floyd of Rosedale, and here is the template: User:Gopher backer/sandbox7. Feel free to do whatever with it. Gopher backer 06:35, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Proposal for notability of college football games

Due to the ongoing discussion on deletion and possible transwiki of 2007 Appalachian State vs. Michigan football game to WikiNews, I suggest that the project hash out ASAP workable criteria for inclusion of individual college football game articles in Wikipedia.

Initial ideas:

  • Games that were instrumental in deciding a national championship — Definitely in.
  • Other games of historic significance may be in or out, depending on many factors. For example:
    • 2007 Fiesta Bowl is borderline because of how recent it is, though the fact that all future major upsets will probably be compared to it (in fact, there are MANY sources drawing parallels between App State-Michigan and this game) may sway things in favor of Wikipedia.
    • Hail Flutie would likely stay, as it's still vividly remembered almost 25 years later.
  • Games that were important to the history of a specific school, but not necessarily to college football at large — Move encyclopedic content to the articles on the individual teams.

I'll welcome all proposals. — Dale Arnett 05:43, 2 September 2007 (UTC)


We already have "2007 <Team> Football Season" page and I really do not see any need for having any articles for games. All these individual game articles do is provide an intro ("leading up" to the game) and a rehash of the box score. Both these are easily provided by the season article. Flutie's hail mary is notable, but is the rest of the game notable? I dont think I've ever seen any other play from the game. I personally think it should be mentioned in 1984 BC Season or 1984 Miami season and a redirect placed.
These are appropriate, but for WikiNews as all they do is collect information from the various reliable sources covering the game + add a rehash of the box score. Corpx 05:52, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Some more thoughts. This isn't a vote for or against any article, but more a discussion of logistical issues. First, many of the games currently in the College football games category involve teams for which no season article exists. Some of them even involve schools that don't have a football article at all. To use the Flutie game as an example, Miami has a football article, but nothing on that season, and BC does not have a separate football article at all (BC football is a section in its athletics article (see correction). Second, some game articles may end up "swallowing" the season articles in terms of content (I'm thinking about the 2007 Fiesta Bowl in relation to 2006 Boise State, and to a lesser extent 2006 Oklahoma). — Dale Arnett 06:19, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
My bad. BC now has a football article. However, it still doesn't have a separate article on that season. — Dale Arnett 06:26, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I agree. Bowl games are notable and deserve their own article (Even the lowest bowl game), but regular season games, unless something truly whacky happens that can't be included into a season page elsewhere, like was mentioned above that things like Fifth down don't have a season page and would likely be too long to be included in a season page, shouldn't exist. MECU≈talk 15:27, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I have to agree that bowl games are notable enough and deserve articles if people are willing to do them. The classic games already mentioned and perhaps others, like the so-called "Games of the Century" probably deserve articles especially if there is no article to merge them into. I don't think that a regular season game that has happened in the last few years is automatically not notable, but obviously most aren't and don't deserve articles. 2005 Texas vs. Ohio State football game is a good article and has already survived AfD. I think games on that scale should have articles, but the rest need to be merged. Phydend 17:14, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Indiviual Major Bowl games in my opinion are notable, like Rose, Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, but not the lower ones, propose this in the new Wikipedia:Notabilty (sports) guideline. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 19:07, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
My point is that we can have good, even great articles written about individual college football games. They do NOT merely duplicate what is available from any individual sport for several reasons:
  1. We can bring together facts from multiple sources. For instance, the hometown newspapers for both teams as well as the national press.
  2. We can provide more historical context than most news reports will bother with.
  3. We can aid the reader with informative links to related topics, such as terms used in college football. No news source does that, not even online news sources.
  4. Unlike some on-line newspapers, access to our stories will always be free of charge, so long as we don't delete them.
  5. Many of our articles also come with photos that can be reused under GFDL or CC license.
We have made a start at a notability proposal I think we should reactivate the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Notability and try to come up with a guideline that will show how valuable articles like this can be if they are done well. Johntex\talk 23:48, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Correction only one of the articles survived AFD, another one is heading for a Delete concensus in AFD and it isn't a GA, the last one never reached AFD. The notabilty proposal has been rejected, and I merged some of it to the new sports notabilty proposal, which is sort-of WP:MUSIC for sports articles. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 00:00, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Thank you Jaranda. I was mistaken that all 3 survived AFD and that all 3 are GA. Only 2 are GA. Regardless, my point stands: These can become good or great articles. They will get there faster if we don't have to waste time protecting them from deletion. Also, the notability proposal was not truly rejected. It never got enough discussion to be either accepted or rejected. Hopefully this deletion-spree will cause people to take the time to work something out. Johntex\talk 00:06, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
I'd much rather have Bowl games as part of the season article, unless it is a MNC game. All the reasons JohnTex mentioned above makes the case (to me) why these type of articles are much more appropriate for WikiNews. Sometimes, trimming is much better than making a new article, as we continually see with trivia sections + plot summaries at AFD. Corpx 04:02, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
One problem with merging is that, increasingly, both teams have a season article. That means that information on the bowl game would have to be merged into two spots. That obviously duplicates information, which is somewhat inefficient, and it also leads to the chance for the information to diverge and to become contradictory.
Another problem with merging is that it makes information hard to find. If you are reading about one of the two teams involved you might be able to find it, but what if you are trying to research the history of the bowl game? The reader is better served if the bowl game is its own article. Then in can be in multiple categories including a category for the bowl game as well as for each of the two teams. Johntex\talk 17:19, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I think that's a good thing, to have coverage in two places. Each can focus more on the individual team more Corpx 21:53, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Time for a separate college football wiki?

I feel really bad now about opening up such a can of worms on the topic of college football games.

It now looks like virtually all of the game articles will get shot down sooner or later. Also, I really believe the next step will be that someone will start putting up season articles for AfD, since a large part of them will from necessity be game recaps.

Maybe it's time that someone started a separate college football wiki, if it hasn't already been done, which can include team articles, season articles, people, places, history, and yes, games of true historic importance. Now, I don't have the time myself for something that ambitious... but I'd like to see what other folks think about this idea. — Dale Arnett 04:09, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Added comment: Many of the existing articles on individual games can't be put on Wikinews because they predate that project. Also, it's been pointed out that Wikipedia content can't be transwikied to Wikinews because of incompatible licenses, which means that even for those articles that conceivably could go into Wikinews, they would have to be redone from scratch. (Depending on the article, that might be a good thing, but still...) Which makes a dedicated college football wiki something worth considering, IMHO. — Dale Arnett 04:14, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I doubt it's needed, Division-I teams, and seasons are notable by defualt, games are the issues though, if they are of true historic importance, keep them, if it's a normal game, delete or merge to the indiviual season. It's fairly simple. Jaranda wat's sup Sports! 04:17, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't be too sure about it. There are some pretty strong arguments out there that no games at all should be included, with the possible exception of national championship games. — Dale Arnett 04:21, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Well the Michigan game is going to end up as no consensus, most of the other games placed in AFD are regular season games which has no claim of major notabilty at all, and one bowl game with a very weak claim of notabilty. Jaranda wat's sup Sports! 04:30, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

http://ncaawiki.com ↔NMajdan•talk 21:02, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

  • There is no reason for Wikipedia to chase off valuable contributors to work on another project. Most contributors to sports articles also help with other topics - why should they split their time between two projects? Wikipedia already provides a framework and important guidelines like WP:NPOV.
Instead of contemplating leaving or splitting our time, we need to be confident and carry the day. Sports are an important part of the world. Wikipedia aims to be comprehensive. Therefore, we need to show people why these types of articles are important.
The people who cry out "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate source of information" are missing the mark. These are not collections of graphs and statistics. They are encyclopedia articles written in prose. Nothing in Wikipedia's policy prohibits them and we need to remind everyone of that fact. Johntex\talk 17:24, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Agreed.↔NMajdan•talk 17:35, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I choose to stay and "fight" (the good fight) for college football's place on Wikipedia. --Bobak 17:58, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I've been away from Wikipedia for a week or so and I'm amused and somewhat annoyed at this brouhaha over sportspeople, seasons and game notability. After all, this is Wikipedia where you can find articles for every entry on the List of Star Trek episodes, the List of The Simpsons episodes, the List of Family Guy episodes most of which have zero reliable sources that discuss them, not to mention characters from Firefly (TV series) like Derrial Book which also have zero sources. If the base standard for notability is being the subject of verifiable reliable sources, clearly the college football subjects under discussion here have such. Why the double standard? AUTiger » talk 13:04, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

New article question

I am thinking of creating an article called List of current and former LSU Tigers football players because the list is getting quite long on the main page, and it has been argued (and I agree) that the main page lists too many players, many who weren't even that prominent. Also, what criteria determines "prominence"? So I figure a separate list would alleviate this, while not removing link to players who some consider to be not prominent. I would appreciate any thoughts or opinions. I don't want to create it if its just going to get AfD'd. Seancp 17:59, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I would think a list of players would violate WP:NOT#LIST and WP:NOT#INFO.↔NMajdan•talk 18:08, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I understand the WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument, but it seems that the WP:NOT#LIST policy is selectively enforced. From a few posts up: List of The Simpsons episodes, Family Guy, Star Trek, etc. I have a hard time understanding the logic of Wikipedia sometimes. Seancp 18:17, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Basically, you're proposing article-izing (catchy, huh?) a category. At least with the TV episode lists, they have plot summaries.↔NMajdan•talk 18:40, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't see how article-izing it is a problem. How is it any different than, say, Boston Red Sox all-time roster? Isn't that the same thing as Category:Boston Red Sox players? Seancp 18:56, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Well, you took the first step I was just going to recommend - find a precedent. Looks like there is an article for every MLB team's all-time roster. So, at least if your article does get AFDed, you now have an argument. Knock yourself out.↔NMajdan•talk 19:10, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Actually, Boston Red Sox all-time roster is better because it contains names of players that haven't had an article written about them yet. Seancp 18:58, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
And thinking about it even more, maybe a better name for the article would be LSU Tigers football all-time roster, to mirror the other pages like that. Seancp 19:05, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
For football examples: List of New York Giants players, New England Patriots players Seancp 19:08, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps just listing players during the times they played as part of the historical article(s) when no season/roster article exists? For example, if you had LSU Tigers under X, you would list the players that played under him during that time period. Then it's not just a list but also valuable info because you can see Coach X coached all these players. It gets tricky for coaches like Joe Pa, but even his career is split up. But it still might not be split up enough. Figure 25 names for 40 years, that's 1000 players. Yes, some players will be duplicated when the coaching changes. They're duplicated on each consecutive season page too. But if my idea flops, I like the NY Giants list method. But I don't think there should be redlinks, since all college players aren't deserving of an article, but all NFL players are. MECU≈talk 19:47, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Honestly, if a list like this existed, I would prefer every name to be in a sortable table with columns such as "Name," "#," "Position," "First year," "Last year," and "Coach." That way if I wanted to get an alpha list, I could, or a numerical list, I could, or a list by position, I could, or a list of all players under a coach, I could, or all players that started in 1979 or all players that left the team in 2000, I could. But it would be a long list. And yes, no redlinks. If there is not article, just don't wikilink it. Not all CFB players are deserving of an article.↔NMajdan•talk 20:03, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I like that idea. And I agree with the no red-links comment, to an extent. LSU still has some All-Americans that don't have articles written about them. I think that a red-link is ok if an article is warranted, otherwise, there's no need to list the walk-on backup punter. Seancp 20:16, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I also like the idea of a sortable table. We should be making more use of that technology. Johntex\talk 23:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
What about putting it at WikiSource since it'll just be a list of players. I personally would vote it for deletion if an AFD came up, as I feel like these are quite "indiscriminate" Corpx 22:01, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Then perhaps you should AfD Boston Red Sox all-time roster. Seancp 22:15, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Too many people hate me at AFD for me to start a nomination.  :/ Corpx 22:24, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't think they hate you. They may hate having to continually defend useful articles from deletion. It consumes time we could be using to write/improve articles. :-) Johntex\talk 23:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I totally agree. I feel like its a shame that I should even have to ask questions before I create an article. The spirit of Wikipedia is to "BE BOLD" but I can't be bold because I fear that everything will be challenged. It's frustrating and discouraging. It's not supposed to be this way. Seancp 00:17, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
The problem is that the line between "indiscriminate collection of information" and encyclopedia is crossed way too much on a variety of topics. (I'm not referring to your proposed article here, but just saying in general). I just do not feel like an encyclopedia should serve as a school's media guide Corpx 02:21, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Yea, well, the people at Encyclopedia Britannica feel that an encyclopedia shouldn't contain a List of Pokémon characters, but Wikipedia does, and that's what makes it great. Making Wikipedia exclude information that many people are interested goes against the spirit of the project. Seancp 02:45, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
That's exactly what I feel will make this be the place for anything and everything. Corpx 03:06, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
It's not being a part of a school's media guide if the articles are written in WP:NPOV.
Corpx, let's look just at UT articles for a moment. Don't you want our coverage of The University to be comprehensive?
I think we are trying to be as up front about Charles Whitman as we are Vince Young. The Godzillatron article talks about its claim to being the biggest scoreboard in college sports, but also explains the criticism it has received for all the advertising it spews out. Texas Fight, and Hook 'em Horns and Bevo all give credit to rival schools in helping forge these traditions.
The Big Bertha explains Big Bertha's claim to being the biggest bass drum but also explains rival claims to the title. Just because we have these articles does not imply anything about trying to promote the school or whitewash its history.
The 2005 Texas Longhorn football team article talks about the successes, but also explains when they stunk it up, such as in the 2005 Texas vs. Texas A&M football game. The 2006 Texas Longhorn football team goes into just as much, if not more, detail on the losses as the victories. The 2007 Texas Longhorn football team article already has a sizable section on player arrests and suspensions. Comprehensive coverage has nothing to do with being a media guide - it has to do with being complete, balanced, and informative.
We are not making a "a place for anything and everything". We are making a place for comprehensive, NPOV encyclopedia articles. Johntex\talk 06:51, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Idea to add to Coach infobox

I don't have the time to add this until next week, but I had the idea to add contract information to the Coach infobox. Length, guaranteed money and buyout information. Something like "Contract: $45M through 2013, $1.5M buyout", would require a cite of course. So this article would be a good example of things to start including. I don't expect this to be controversial, but feel free to comment. MECU≈talk 12:24, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't be against that. I think the buyout is a little extraneous for the infobox, but the salary would be nice. You may also want to check out this website. I may add that field to the infobox today if I have time.↔NMajdan•talk 13:47, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Is this information released for private school coaches? Plus, I know coaches get a 1 time bonus every few years they're at an institution. How do you factor that in? Corpx 14:57, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I added the field. The bonus structure for coaches is so complex that I think it should be left off the infobox. I mean, if somebody asked you how much you made, would you factor in your bonus? For the Bob Stoops and Mack Brown article, I just added their yearly salary. I am not sure about private schools, its a good question.↔NMajdan•talk 15:03, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I know Mack was technically the highest paid coach two or 3 years ago because of a 1 time bonus of 3 million (I think). So, would you add bonuses like that to the salary of that year? Corpx 15:18, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Again, I think when you add in all bonuses, it gets too complex. Only the contractual yearly salary should be listed in the infobox, in my opinion. More details on bonuses could be in the actual article.↔NMajdan•talk 16:02, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Slight fix of Template:NCAATeamSeason

I changed the format of the links to the previous and next seasons on the above template. It looks cleaner and is better centered, which was an issue we've had in the past with the template. Let me know what you think and definitely let me know if you find an article my change broke. I checked several football articles and a basketball and baseball article and they look fine.↔NMajdan•talk 17:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I do not know if this is what did it but after a check of a few CFB 2007 articles, none of the team images are showing up (and the image's name is still shown on the edit page). Just thought I would bring this up as I was doing a random check of all the articles that needed to be updated with today's early results. SolonHawk 20:51, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't think so. I think it was User:Soxrock trying to employ some fair use requirement with an edit that wasn't appropriate (in my, and another user's, opinion). MECU≈talk 01:25, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

We have our first Featured Article

I am incredibly pleased to announce that 2005 Texas Longhorn football team has been recognized as a featured article. I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this article through edits, suggestions, and peer review.

Now that we've gotten one through, hopefully we can start progressing others through the FA system.

It seems that every FA nomination is unique in terms of what gets scrutinized. However, certain things took a lot of tedious time to fix and so I will list them out here in the hopes that other editors can avoid these problems while the are writing, instead of having to go back and fix them all:

  1. WP:HYPHEN problems - sports scores are supposed to be separated by an "–", not a "-". So it should be "42–38", not "42-38". That is a pain in the *ss.
  2. Likewise, WP:MOS specifies non-breaking spaces between numbers and the following word, like "220 yards rushing".
  3. Consistency and completeness in the reference citations, including the name of the publisher, page numbers for a non-web reference, etc.

You can check the nomination page for more detail. The nomination even got restarted once because there were so many little things being flagged and fixed.

Thanks again for everyone's help. We can all be proud of this milestone for the project. Johntex\talk 05:35, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Congratulations! --Bobak 17:38, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Combine coaching templates

Can anybody think of a way for us to combine all the coach templates that may be on a coach's article into one? Take a look at Howard Schnellenberger. He has five coaching templates. I would really like to have a way to keep the individual templates, but, to have another "container" template that combines them into one and hides them. Basically, kinda like {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} except for coaching templates. Of course, we want to keep the custom colors that exist for the individual school. Any ideas? Should we request assistance at WP:VPT or WP:WPT?↔NMajdan•talk 03:18, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Why can't we just create something like the BannerShell that encompasses all the coaching templates (there are worse examples, I can't remember who at the moment tho, but there are some stubs that have like 7 of those and that's it)? It would just collapse itself like "Coaching templates".. and we only use it when there are 3 or more? If anyone could figure out how to colorize the hide/show link so it's not the default blue we could just use that and have it collapse when there are 3 or more to also help keep it smaller... That's the only reason we didn't incorporate the hide/show in to the CFB nav template. That would be the first option to pursue I think. MECU≈talk 01:30, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Papa Bowden vs JoePa

There is a tremendously disruptive dispute between PSU fans and FSU fans at Bobby Bowden (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) and Joe Paterno (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). The PSU fans want it noted that some of Bowden's wins were at a school that is currently in the division formerly known as I-AA (although at the time he was there, it was before the DI split happened). The FSU fans want to retaliate by noting that JoePa was hospitalized during some of his wins. It would be great if some more uninvolved people would help revert vandalism, opine, and referee. --B 00:34, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

I have no issue with both of those points included in the article (properly cited, of course) but that should not affect the total win count as given by the NCAA for each coach. Also, given that both coaches have been coaching a LONG time, isn't it very possible that Paterno also played teams that are in a lower division now?↔NMajdan•talk 15:04, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Before I begin, I'll start by stating that I'm a Penn Stater and I've been editing JoePa and the other Penn State pages for a while now. The info about JoePa's and Bowden's wins against non-I-A teams has been on the JoePa page for a while after some talk on its talk page, but this all came to a head (and in turn an edit war) when some PSUer went over to Bowden's page and tried to add the same I-AA info and started an edit war over there. Some childish FSUer then started vandalizing the JoePa page and now we have a mess of an article.
I could frankly care less whether the info about non-I-A teams is in there or not. It looks like JoePa will probably overtake Bowden again at some point based on how the teams are doing this season so this will all be moot anyway. (Btw- Nmajdan, I believe the numbers currently cited are based on wins over teams *currently* not in I-A.) Billma 17:14, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Whynot just have the same standard applied to both? Wins overall. Wins vs. current DI-A. Wins when they were actually at the game. ? MECU≈talk 01:32, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't know that the latter is a readily available stat. The former would be an interesting chart to add to both articles. --B 01:49, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Here are two more FAs that are related to college football:

The Aggie Bonfire tradition was formed to help pump up Texas A&M prior to their rivalry game against Texas. The tradition would not exist if not for college football. The Aggie band is a marching band and those have a military tradition. Therefore, one could argue that A&M would have a band even without college football, but I think it is safe to say that their half-time performances are what has made the band famous.

I think the pageantry of college football (traditions, mascots, rivalry trophies, etc) are a large part of what makes college football great. I believe those two articles (and others like them) should be tagged as being a part of this project. Thoughts? Johntex\talk 00:12, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I think the bonfire is okay, but the Band has their own project. We can co-sponsor it, but since they're both FAs, some people might get upset if we just stick our banner on it like we helped, but didn't since it's already an FA. Unless of course we improve it... MECU≈talk 01:27, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
(darned edit conflict...) I definitely think the bonfire is a part of this project, as the most famous (and awful) moment was when it collapsed before a game back in the day. I'd also like to think bands are a part of us, but I'd like to get more opinions. --Bobak 01:30, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Who hoo! I beat bobak! MECU≈talk 01:31, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Since there is a freely licensed photo of the fire being used in the article, why is there a non-free one in the lead? --B 01:51, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
  • They are two different types of bonfires from different years. The top on is an actual Aggie Bonfire from the days when the event was school-sponsored (before the tragedy). The other one is one of the more recent, unofficial "student bonfires". Johntex\talk 01:58, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Spam to be on the lookout for

I've seen a lot of player "fan sites" lately. A lot of them are just link aggregators. They usually have the athletes name as their domain name. See [1] for an example. Several times, I've seen ones like this where the person adds a link to the website and an interwiki link to a non-existent page. (I'm not sure what that accomplishes.) I imagine that a lot of these websites are owned by the same person or organization. These aren't real fan sites where there is an actual community. Has anyone else noticed links like this? --B 07:05, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I imagine the interwiki link is included to make it look more legitimate when editors glance at diffs on recent changes and watchlists. AUTiger » talk 13:47, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Hmm ... take a look at this - [2]. Subsequent to me posting this, a Tagalong article for Darren McFadden was created. There are several articles on athletes over there ... all started out as copy/pastes of the English and I would bet that they were translated using a Google translator. All of them have "fan site" links. Call me paranoid, but I bet that this is just an advertising campaign and that someone is using the Tagalog Wikipedia to promote their spam links. With only 7000 total articles, somehow I doubt that American college athletes are high atop their priority list. --B 17:07, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Massive_spam_campaign_on_athlete_articles. --B 17:18, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Good news aggregator

Found a site that links to a lot of news articles about a given topic, whether that topic is a team or a player or a specific sports writer. SportsUltra.com. Definitely handy when writing game updates for the yearly articles. For instance check out the articles about Sam Bradford or Colt McCory or Western Michigan. If you login, you can select what teams and players you want displayed on your main page. And no, I'm not affiliated with this site at all, I just know it will help me write the game updates since I can simply go to this one website that links to many different articles.↔NMajdan•talk 04:31, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Tennessee Volunteers football

A new editor, User:Drw859001 has been editing this article with text that clearly violates WP:NPOV; I have tried to have this user discuss the changes on the talk page, but he refuses to listen. Additionally, I have already reverted him twice, so I cannot do so again without violating WP:3RR; any help would be appreciated. Dlong 23:31, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

I left a message with him ... it's important that when interacting with a good-faith user, you leave a welcome message (like {{subst:welcome}}) if they haven't already been given one in addition to whatever other messages you leave. A new user doesn't necessarily know about our content policies so it's important to give them something to look at. --B 00:06, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Help please

In the wake of Syracuse's upset over Louisville, I noticed that this Sports Illustrated page claims that Syracuse's victory is the biggest upset ever in terms of points spread (at 36.5 points). However, there's currently an article called 1985 Oregon State vs. Washington football game that claims that title at 38 points against the spread. Only one source claims that the spread was 38 points and two others say 37 points (and the SI article says it's at 36 points). Who's right here? Does the 1985 game even deserve an article?

Thanks in advance. CardinalHawk 21:28, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Covers.com says that the 1985 game was -33.5 [3]. It's distinctly possible that they are comparing apples to oranges. 38 could have been the line at kickoff vs 33.5 as the opening line or vice versa (that would be a huge move, but stranger things have happened.) --B 21:37, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
Or they could be comparing the line from different sources. Perhaps SI does a line on each game and uses their stats for that. It's like ESPN always uses the ESPN/Coaches Poll for the rankings of teams but other sources may use the AP. MECU≈talk 13:07, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Request a review of an article

Now that we have our first FA, we have a good template for the perfect year-specific team article. I have been making little changes to the 2006 Oklahoma Sooners football team article over the last few days including some of the changes that were requested for the UT article. I think I've made all the dash changes and added non-breaking spaces. I've tried to remove all the little NPOV/fluff wording. Anyway, I am asking that project members, especially those active in the UT FA process, take a look at the article and let me know what you think. Thanks.↔NMajdan•talk 21:21, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

  • Hello NMajdan, I am reading the article right now. It is very good. Congratulations on some very engaging writing. I do spot a few problems throughout the text:
  1. References - there are several complete paragraphs that have no references.
  2. Verb tense - there are a lot of places where the present tense is still used; I think past tense would be more appropriate.
  3. Reference format - There are a lot of nit-picky problems here. For instance, some publications are italicized, others are not. Some give the date of publication, others do not.
  4. Tone - this is something of a judgment call. I firmly believe in the general concept that encyclopedia articles do not have to be dull. I think overall, you have done a very good job of making a neutral presentation of the facts. However, there are a few places where I am a little concerned about the encyclopedic tone. For instance this passage:
"After the previous year's "disappointing" 8–4 season, the Sooners looked to return to form in 2006. Standout running back Adrian Peterson came into the season healthy and ready to present his Heisman credentials."
"Return to form" and "present his Heisman credentials" both side somewhat casual to me.
Would you like to open up a peer review on this article? If so, then I will put more detailed thoughts at the peer review. Again, great work. Johntex\talk 03:43, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks for your comments.
  1. Yes, I am aware of this and I hope to resolve this next week. Mostly, I'll need to go back and find summaries of the games that I can cite. I have emailed SoonerSports.com because a lot of their 2006 game summaries are dead links.
  2. I thought I took care of this but I guess I missed some. I'll read through again.
  3. I feel I have been detailed enough with my references. If for some reason something is not italicized, then that is an issue with the cite template. I have used a cite template with every citation. If a date of publication was not provided, then the source did not have one. But, I'll take another look at this to make sure.
  4. I tried to go through a remove a lot of the unencyclopedic tone. I am aware of these lines and, well, I have no defense. I'll try to rephrase "return to form" to something like "return to prior success" and I'll probably just remove the Heisman reference. I hope there are not too many other instances of this. I did remove quite a bit of "boosterism" already.
  • I'm hesitant to open up a PR mainly because I do not believe they work. Once you get to the GA or A (near FA quality) level, I think the effectiveness of PR diminishes. Besides, the prior peer reviews on this article (1, 2) have been less than helpful. However, I will start a third if you feel it necessary.↔NMajdan•talk 04:04, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Hi Nmajdan, a peer review may not be the best way to go. I was more thinking of it as a place to put comments. I don't know if this page is the best place. If you prefer, I am happy to just use the article talk page. That may be simplest. Best, Johntex\talk 15:06, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Article talk page will be fine.↔NMajdan•talk 15:54, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I've been busy adding references to the article over the past month. I would appreciate it if anyone would take a look at it and leave whatever comments on the talk page. Thanks.↔NMajdan•talk 17:33, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Take a look at College rivalry

Someone who knows the score ought to take a look at College rivalry and Talk:College rivalry. It appears that IP editors have been inventing rivalries. One editor who wanted to stop the vandalism seemed to write up a request for page protection but posted it in the College rivalry article instead of at WP:RFPP. I'm going to be bold and try to clean up the mess but I have very, very little knowledge in the subject area so someone else might want to look a bit more carefully. Sbowers3 23:47, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


Charts based on Jeff Sagarin rankings

This is a discussion of whether a chart that interprets copyrighted material is itself a copyright violation, also whether forward-looking statistics violate the "crystal ball" tenet of Wikipedia. I, personally, don't think so. I've included my rationale below.--Robapalooza 01:14, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

At the suggestion of B, I am bringing this matter to the attention of the present forum. I am the author of several charts that I've recently posted to various wikipedia sites regarding 2007 seasons (current event) of various college football teams, most of which are in the Atlantic Coast Conference. I have conducted an additional analysis of statistics prepared by Jeff Sagarin and posted at: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/fbc07.htm

Although Mr. Sagarin creates the statistics that underly the analysis used to ultimately generate the chart, the chart is entirely my own work and believed to be within the scope and spirit of Wikipedia's policies.

Although the analysis is forward-looking, the statistics are compiled weekly and are, therefore, believed to be current and not a "crystal ball" type of observation. That is, Sagarin's statistical analysis and my separate analysis have already happened. Also, I have included these charts on sites that are dedicated to this year's season of college football for the various teams. The sites for these teams carry an appropriate current event tag, so I think the charts are appropriate for such pages. Sagarin's webpage is protected by copyright, which means you can't copy his content without permission. The charts do not copy his content. Rather, my analysis in an additional analysis of a selected portion of his statistics, and, I believe, is properly attributed. The chart is entirely my own work. If you look at Sagarin's statistics page, it's merely a list of numbers, and he suggests that you can "predict" the outcome of a future game by comparing numbers, but he does not perform such calculations for the reader. I've merely picked up where he left off and applied it to the ACC teams and South Carolina. Maintenance doesn't bother me. I run this analysis every week regardless. The images are easily updated using Wikipedia's tools.

I sincerely welcome your comments and suggestions in this matter.

Complete list of sites that include the charts in question:

2007 College Football

College Football

--Robapalooza 20:29, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

  • I see no problem with the charts. I don't believe they are any sort of copyright violation. Copyright does not apply to facts, it only applies to presentation of the facts. (That is not a legal definition, of course, and this is not legal advice). I also don't think they violate the "crystal ball" tenet of Wikipedia. We are allowed to cite predictions, such as who ESPN predicts will finish in the top 10, win the Heisman, etc. It is not a violation if properly sourced. I'd love to see a similar chart at 2007 Texas Longhorn football team. Johntex\talk 20:37, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
    • Facts are not copyrightable ... Texas gained x number of yards against Central Florida is a fact - it's not copyrightable. The AP poll is not copyrightable because there is no creative aspect to it. But this data may be copyrightable - he isn't just reporting raw statistics. --B 21:09, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
      • So we can better analyze whether this is a copyright issue, here are the facts as objectively as I can give them to you. Here's a link to Sagarin's numbers [4]. The "rating" number is a synthesis of the "ELO Chess" (only winning and losing matters) and "Predictor" (only the score matters) numbers. Sagarin says the "Predictor" is the single best predictor of future games. The way Sagarin's "system" works, you take the number for one team, and compare it to the number for another team, then add or substract the "home advantage" for the home team. The difference is the predicted point margin. He ends his analysis there. He doesn't matchup teams for future games. In a way, he almost invites the user to matchup two teams on their own to create a "prediction."--Robapalooza 23:10, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
      • Additionally, my contribution is as follows: (1) I created an Excel spreadsheet with every team in the ACC, plus their entire schedule listing each opposing team (and I added South Carolina for personal interest) (this is all public domain information). (2) Each week, I punch in Sagarin's "rating," "ELO chess" and "predictor" numbers for each team in the ACC and for each opponent, and the "home advantage." (3) After many hours of tweeking and experimenting, I came up with a spreadsheet that takes all this information and crunches it into a raw number margin of victory for each future game, carried out all the way to the end of the season. (Also, for the ACC, I have created a hypothetical list of the final standings for the ACC, which gives one an idea of who might compete for the ACC championship and in the various post-season bowl games; however, I've not posted any of this information on wikipedia.) (4) Arguably, the raw number margin-of-victory is directly derived from Sagarin's system; however, it's just a number, i.e. a fact. (5) After that, I decided that the raw number margin of victory isn't easily quickly understood, so I created charts for each team, plotting on the x-axis the opponent, and on the y-axis the predicted "margin of victory" based on Sagarin's statistics.--Robapalooza 23:10, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Eh, I'm definitely not a fan of the tables - especially how they're used on the two articles I've looked at (Miami, Clemson). Regarding the issues, you brought up, I agree with Johntex. I don't feel it is violating any Wikipedia policies. However, if I were adding this to an article, I would thumbnail the image; I think it is too dominate on the articles. Also, I would fix the section header. Give a header like "Prediction" and then give detail on what it is. Just my 2 cents.↔NMajdan•talk 21:07, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks again for your input. I've updated all the pages so that the charts are 700px so as to not dominate the page. thumb doesn't work well because of the use of tables in some pages. I've also fixed the section headers.--Robapalooza 23:25, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
While interesting, I am not convinced the table is particularly encyclopedic. (WP:CBALL, WP:IINFO). Until/unless a convincing majority opinion can be formed that can change my mind, I've taken it off the 2007 Miami Hurricanes football team. It seems too arbitrary to mention, much less have its own section and such a dominating graphic. --mc machete 02:39, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm on the fence as to whether it should be included as I have to agree that the information is borderline encyclopedic; why Sagarin's predictions vs. those based on other computer systems or even the Vegas line for that matter?
I definitely disagree with the format for displaying the info - i.e. a bar chart graphic (not a table). The chart image is far too large for the information it conveys. The chart form really adds very little to the raw margin of victory (loss) number. Also it has the disadvantage of being completely inaccessible to the visually impaired, unlike plain text.
A table (not a chart) could be used with some coloring to convey the same information in a much smaller space and still be accessible. The predictions table could be expanded to include other methods, the line, and the actual result once the game is played. See here for an example. AUTiger » talk 03:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Even though it means more work for me, I have to admit I kinda like the idea of using something along the lines of: User:Autiger/Sandbox#Sample_Sagarin_projection_tables. Other thoughts? --Robapalooza 04:11, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
This sounds like original research to me. Especially when you stated "my analysis in an independent analysis" above. I would remove these from the article. It's not our job to create content for articles, but to include content that is included elsewhere with a citation. MECU≈talk 12:52, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
That was a poor choice of words on my part and leads to the impression that the charts are original research. The charts are original works by me, but they are most definitely not original research. The charts are, quite simply, a new expression of research conducted by Jeff Sagarin. Nothing more, nothing less.--Robapalooza 16:39, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I see your point. Since we only display information about future games, it seems very crystal ball-ish to me. Especially with the title "Predicted..." I do like the table format rather than the bar chart, but I'm a numbers guy. In the end, what information does this really provide? A computer system things they will or won't win. Is that encyclopedic and useful? In 20 years will that information make this a better article? I doubt it. MECU≈talk 18:49, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks MECU for your further input. I think the usefulness of the charts will be fully realized at the end of the season when a time series of charts is accumulated for each team, thus creating a trendline through the season. For now, the information is highly interesting from now until the actual games are played. As the year progresses, the charts will diminish in size and eventually disappear. But, there is still value from the collection. I think, at the end of the season, when we're writing the more-encyclopedic account of this year's 2007 teams, the charts may be useful in determining how much a particular team's outlook changed going into and coming out of a game. The statistics capture a team's strength at that given moment. Such nuances might be lost if you just look at the record book. (Granted, a review of the week-by-week change in the rankings reflects this as well, but, personally, I think there's too much politics in the national rankings and not enough objectivity, thus, the reason for statistical analysis.) At the end of the day, I'm happy to contribute this information. I'll being doing the analysis regardless, so I'm happy to contribute, or not contribute, to these articles.--Robapalooza 01:11, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Robapalooza: while I appreciate your efforts, my objections stand: "While interesting, I am not convinced the table is particularly encyclopedic. (WP:CBALL, WP:IINFO)." As such, please discontinue placing this graphic or anything pertaining to Sagarin predictions from 2007 Miami Hurricanes football team. I'd rather not have to keep taking it off. Thanks. --mc machete 06:20, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Rankings on schedules

I think all of the season articles should include rankings on the schedule. The ranks would give readers an idea of how tough the team's schedule may be. ESPN does this. The ranks, however, will have to be updated weekly as they change. What is everyone's opinion about this? BlueAg09 (Talk) 18:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

If the teams are ranked, then yes, that should be reflected on the schedule. However, I believe the rankings should remain as they were when they played. This is what we do on individual game pages, we include the rankings as they were when the teams played. I would think any end-of-year ranking for a team could be included in the game summary.↔NMajdan•talk 13:56, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Absolutely: the ranks in a schedule and initial descriptions of a game are when the teams played. Now, if a team won/lost a close game to an unranked team that ended up in the top-10 (which has happened), then by all means mention it as Nmajdan's noted. --Bobak 16:29, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
As others say, the primary ranking in the schedule table is that of the opponent when the game is played. I don't see a need (and have little interest) in maintaining current rankings all season long on each opponent (or even prior to gameweek ranking). However, it does occur to me that a Final Ranking could be of interest after the season, since (theoretically) the final ranking most accurately reflects the teams' strength. AUTiger » talk 14:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree with the comments so far. The schedule should show the opponents ranking as it was coming into the game. Ideally, the text should be revisited after the year to show where the opponents end up. I also recommend the schedule section should include a "see also" link to 2007 NCAA Division I FBS football rankings so readers can easily access rankings for all teams through the season. Johntex\talk 17:28, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
The schedule template already has a variable that makes the "Rank" column header a wikilink to the respective year's ranking page.↔NMajdan•talk 18:35, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

This is not a big deal, but it would be best to link the following TV stations on the season schedules this way:

BlueAg09 (Talk) 20:02, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Just linking, correct? Not actually writing them out? e.g.: [[ESPN on ABC|ABC]] --Bobak 20:14, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, sorry for the confusion. BlueAg09 (Talk) 01:37, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Coaches' articles using CFB Coaching Record template

FYI: on 10/12, User:Darkwind (not a self-identified member of WP:CFB) AWBed many college coaches' articles using {{CFB Coaching Record Team}} (deprecated) to convert to {{CFB Yearly Record Start}} etc. but unfortunately, the params for bowl information do not match between the templates so you'll probably find your favorite coach's career record bowl info no longer displays correctly. Check Darkwind's contribs for possibly affected articles. AUTiger » talk 16:14, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Proposed deletions

Rather than discussing PROD-nominees here, it is better to contribute to the talk page for the article nominated for deletion. If you agree with the proposed deletion, you don't have to do anything or you may second the nomination. If you think the article merits keeping, then remove the {{prod}} template and make an effort to improve the article so that it clearly meets the notability and verifiability criteria.

Resolved

Result Deleted
--User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 11:18, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
updated --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:38, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Proposed football player, coach, etc. biography work group

There is now a proposal at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals#North American football players for a group which would work specifically on articles relating to biographies of individual players, coaches, and other related individuals. Any parties interested in working with such a group are encouraged to add their names there, so we can see if there is enough interest to start the group in earnest. Thank you. John Carter 13:25, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

BCS standings

I would like to suggest you add the BCS standings to {{NCAATeamFootballSeason}}. Thank you.--Monnitewars (talk) 02:59, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Gary Moeller

There's something wrong with the article, it should be greatly expanded. For one his career at Michigan is less then a paragraph, while his 7 game stint with the Detroit Lions is given undue weight. Also I don't think it was a drunk driving incident that got him fired, I can't find any sources for that. -MichiganCharms 15:39, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

2008 team pages

There's currently a dispute over whether or not it is too early to create 2008 team pages. One such discussion can be found here. From my point of view, it can never be too early to start collecting information about upcoming seasons. Input from the anyone in the college football community would be very helpful. Thanks. -- Hawk17 02:37, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you. It is never too early to inform the reader about planned events. If we can have 2008 Summer Olympics we can have articles on 2008 football teams also. I have created Category:2008 NCAA Division I FBS football season. It currently has 6 articles:
I encourage anyone creating 2008 articles to link to the this discussion and to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2008 Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team in the hopes of heading off future AfDs that would just be a waste of time. Johntex\talk 19:17, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Top 25 rankings and beyond

I was editing a team page and noticed that they were adding the rankings beyond the top 25 (Others Receving Votes) and a wikipedian asked me the reasoning as to why I changed the teams rankings that were not in the Top 25 and I told him that we were trying to keep with the consistency of other pages and only include tne Top 25 rankings on the teams schedules and he told me that "It shows that the team is on the verge of cracking the top 25, and that they are garnering respect on a national level." My question to everyone is that; Should we include those who are "Others Receiving Votes" in the rankings on the team schedules?Dawg1279 04:42, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

No. Those teams that received votes are not considered "ranked number 27" or whatever. If the article wants to state that they received votes, thats fine. But the rankings do not extend past 25. That is my opinion at least.↔NMajdan•talk 14:13, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
It's not just opinion. The polls themselves specifically state that "others receiving votes" are NOT considered to be ranked #26, #27, and so on. Seancp 14:36, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
The convention for including non-Top 25 rankings is NOT settled. There has been VERY LITTLE DISCUSSION AMONG A WIDE SWATH OF INTERESTED CONTRIBUTORS, and certainly NOT a concensus. As I have experienced in editing wikipedia articles since it started in 2001, it is often the case that in newer subject-articles, the most active users bully their POV regarding content, conventions and so forth for wikipedia articles. The exchange above is typical; as if the convetion used by Bigblue, me and others who agree with us is less appropriate than Dawg1279's and the 2 others who mostly agreed with him...So they take 3 votes and act as if they own the articles. The fact is the PURPOSES of the AP's and Coaches and "other" polls DOESN'T matter for how those polls are to be used for WIKIPEDIA'S PURPOSES. If those polls don't rank non-TOP 25 teams but still show votes, that doesn't mean that it has to be treated the same way in wikipedia. Putting a rank where the polls themselves do not is a natural and easy way to show, this team got more votes than this team. In this case, removing any reference to the Top 25 votes excludes information on how well a team is doing or is respected. THAT VIOLATES WIKIPEDIA'S PRIMARY PURPOSE TO PROVIDE INFORMATION. Wikipedia should include as much correct information as possible on the subject while avoiding offensive content as much as possible. Arguments so far not to include non-Top 25 rankings because of "relevance", "uniformity", "or that's not the way the polls work" are all specious. At any rate, Dawg1279 can congratulate himself on driving away a useful contributor to these articles...who is going to keep 2007 BYU Cougars football team current now? 'Cause it's not going to be me. Allowing a little dis-uniformity at first until a convention is settled will go a long way in keeping useful contributors, but apparently having their way is more important than having useful contributors and helping the articles progress. B 15:36, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
I will offer a couple of suggestions or comments. Perhaps use the BCS ranking as is shown on
Sports Illustrated since it is more robust than the Coaches Poll and perhaps the most relevant and accurate poll any way. That would also avoid the issue about votes, since no one can credibly argue that Top 25 votes should not be included...that's simply ignoring/excluding relevant information....and how are you going to show votes AND make present that information in a way that helps people easily see how teams stack up against each other? That's an issue that is not going to go away unless you come up with a convention that is generally acceptable. When you all settle on a convention by concensus, maybe I'll come back and contribute. B 16:06, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

You can't argue that the "Others recieving votes" aren't ranked 26-whatever number of teams there are recieving votes. If the polls were to expand past 25, those teams would have a number right next to them which corresponds past 25. As a matter of fact, Sportsline.com uses this method to show that the team recieved votes to be in the top 25 by both the AP and Coaches. Connecticut for example on sportsline is ranked 29th or somewhere in the general area because they have the corresponding number of votes which make them the 29th ranked team in the NCAA. I also don't understand how on a website which is a public domain mind you, people have the ability to decide which information can and cannot be displayed on a page. As long as the information is factual, there is no reason for it to be removed. If I take the time to create a page, and chose to include information which someone else doesn't agree with, they have the right to edit it, but they don't have the right to tell me that it shouldn't be included because it doesn't "mesh" with the other articles. If i take the time to make a page, and want to include information which is factual, and contributes to the use of he page, there is no reason as to why it shouldn't be included. 

 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bigblue1222 (talk • contribs) 22:23, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm with NMajdan and Seancp on this. It's been clearly established both by the community and WP:CFB that "others receiving votes" does not equal #26 and beyond. Including such "information" is both inaccurate and misleading. If it was from the CBSsportsline120 then okay, because they rank ALL the teams, but it should be clearly marked as such and not in the schedule where we previously decided to only use the Coaches Poll for such (or Coaches & AP). MECU≈talk 03:21, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

So you're going to tell me that the team that got the 26th most votes isn't the 26th ranked team? That's kind of hard to believe. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.76.132.27 (talk) 04:32, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

In response to the negativity regarding my edits, I did not drive anyone off, they left on their own. My feelings about the whole thing is that, going along with what MECU was saying about the rankings on the team pages not being the CBSsportsline120, therefore if they are not in the top 25, then they should not be included on the team pages. I understand fans of a particular team wanting to show that THEIR team is on the verge of breaking the top 25, by including their ranks from "others receiving votes." In keeping with the formality of ALL team pages, we just need to stick with ONLY those in the Top 25. Also, if what BoNoMoJo was saying is true, then the Rankings on the 2007 NCAA Division I FBS football rankings page should include those that are "others receiving votes," in order to keep with the unity of OTHER Wikipedia pages (i.e. Team Pages and their Rankings). Dawg1279 04:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
To reiterate what others have said, in the longest-lived and most commonly used polls (Coaches/AP) to dub teams in the Other receiving votes (ORV) grouping as the #26, #27, etc teams is incorrect; both because the polling organizations say so (they don't publish those teams with a ranking number) and because of the type of preference voting used (i.e. because poll voters only vote on 1-25). With this type of vote, the ORV teams are basically statistical outliers and there is little confidence that they are accurately ranked (assuming for the moment that teams actually can be accurately ranked). If the poll voters were asked vote for 1-30, there is a strong possibility that the 26-30 would not be the same as the vote order currently seen in ORV. Due to the nature of the vote, those outliers can be easily manipulated. For example, say the coach or a beatwriter for Whatsamatta U. votes the Whatsamatta Playas #15 on their ballot earning 10 points for ORV and placing them in the "30th" position while Upstate Tech was voted #25 by eight different writers or coaches in their respective polls earning 8 points for ORV and placing UTech in "31st" in ORV. Which team should really be #30; the team with one biased voter or the team with eight unbiased voters?
Additionally, the further you get from the extremes (good/Top 10 or bad/Bottom 10) the less distinction you can really make in the middle of the bell curve of team performance. Among 21 5-win teams, how accurately can you distinguish their ranking? It's bad enough determining the ranking of seven 7-win teams. AUTiger » talk 16:51, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Good points, AUtiger, but this isn't the proper article to make those arguments...that is for a guideline article, and there still is no published guideline (or even a proposal) reached by concensus on this subject, and until proper wikipedia procedure is followed, no editor has a right to delete information based on their personal preference. If any of you folks care to make that a guideline to enforce, then start the guideline article and get a formal discussion going and a concensus reached. B 18:36, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Ummm, no. There is no need for a guideline as this falls under policy. The USA Today/Coaches Poll only ranks teams from 1 to 25; claims that BYU has been ranked #29, #39 or #43 by the that poll are false and unverifiable and "may be removed". AUTiger » talk 19:30, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
My own two cents is that the "others receiving votes" shouldn't be construed as #26 onwards. While it is tempting to use the first several (e.g. 26-29) that have a lot of points/votes, I feel the process would be flawed and, in the case of the Coaches Poll, result in Duke getting an artificially high ranking every pre-season that Steve Spurrier votes in. --Bobak 20:23, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
The polls themselves call themselves Associated Press Top 25 and USA Today/Coaches Poll Top 25.[5] Not Top 27, not Top 30. Top 25. Extending beyond this would be misleading.↔NMajdan•talk 21:50, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

No concensus reached, nor proposal or guideline even started

As I heard a law professor state one time, as soon as someone claims that something has been "clearly established" you can rest assured that it likely has NOT been clearly established. So, MECU, please link to the discussion(s) (i.e proposal or guideline articles in wikipedia) where this convention has "been clearly established both by the community and WP:CFB". Currently there is NO Official Wikipedia guidelines on this subject...indicating that it is NOT a settled convention. Please note that a wikiproject article is not the same as a guideline article. NONE OF YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO CLAIM THAT REASONABLE EDITS ARE VANDALISM OR OTHERWISE VIOLATE WIKIPEDIA POLICY WHEN THERE IS NO GUIDELINE ARTICLE ON THIS SUBJECT THAT HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED BY CONCENSUS. B 16:30, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

They're in the archives of this page or the season guideline/format talk page. I'm not going to search for you with that attitude. MECU≈talk 00:29, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
If you want to give readers an idea of how the team compares to other teams around the country, why not add their weekly NCAA rankings? Here are BYU's. Another thing, have you ever heard a sportscaster give a ranking to a team that received votes from the polls? Per the discussion above, I don't think it's wise to add such rankings either. BlueAg09 (Talk) 18:34, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
But which one(s)? Updating those rankings would get pretty tedious and while stats are interesting, they don't always track well with the only stats that matters, the final score and wins/losses. I definitely think a link to each team's NCAA stats page would be a great addition to the infobox, however. AUTiger » talk 19:36, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

NAIA and NJCAA College Football?

I do not see any references to the NAIA or NJCAA (junior college) football programs here. I believe that they do belong as the topic is currently named. I'd be willing to put work into the NAIA section.

If NAIA and NJCAA should be separate, then should this project be renamed "NCAA Football"??

Also, I could use some help on the infobox for Malone College Athletics--NCAA still shows up where the blank "division" category is.

What are everyone's thoughts? Combine forces? Separate projects?--Paul McDonald 14:36, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I'm for separate projects. There aren't enough editors on this project for all the articles we have and I think we would be diluting it even more if we added those articles that probably will get very little attention. However, I have fixed that infobox to allow for NAIA and/or NJCAA and made the appropriate change to the article you mentioned.↔NMajdan•talk 15:26, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Another editor changed the code which would remove the NCAA/NAIA line from nearly every article that uses the template. I have reverted his change and detailed my reasoning on the template's talk page.↔NMajdan•talk 16:15, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, it looks great!--Paul McDonald 14:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
The reasons I would like to "piggyback" NAIA college football (and NJCAA college football) on this project are: 1) It would promote uniformity in Wikipedia; 2) we wouldn't have to start completely over for NAIA and NJCAA; 3) A lot of coaches and some players go back and forth between NAIA/NJCAA/NCAA -- especially those that play in one division and coach in another; and 4) since it's basically "me" and maybe a few others focusing on NAIA/NJCAA right now--we won't "eat much" ! Could really use your help in doing simple things like standards, uniformity, etc. Not looking to "swipe" editors, just ideas.--Paul McDonald 18:37, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm not a decision maker or anything, but I don't see a problem with NAIA/NJCAA stuff being included in this project. After all, it is called "Wikiproject College Football" and that leads me to believe that it is inclusive of all college football division. I won't be doing any NAIA/NJCAA editing but someone else wants to, I don't see why we should discourage that. I think you should have full use of all standards and template this project has created. Seancp 18:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
I like Seancp's reasoning. We might as well keep them together if we can. I do agree with NMajdan that most of the curretn WPCFB contributors are focused on more "major" schools but I think we also agree that our ultimate goal is to be comprehensive. Including NAIA and NJCAA is consistent with that goal. Johntex\talk 13:41, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Charts based on Jeff Sagarin rankings

Continued from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Archive-Oct2007

User:Robapalooza has continued to inclued this temporary, non-encyclopedic information into the articles. While I appreciate his efforts, my objections and the objections of others had been noted, and yet the charts continue. The information is definitely interesting, but it does not belong (WP:CBALL, WP:IINFO). I feel the simple "betting line" serves this purpose best. --mc machete 00:44, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd also like to add that the graphs themselves are difficult to read as they do not have a legend. --mc machete 02:21, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
From my recollection, it seemed we all pretty much agreed they aren't useful. Removing them would be okay it seems to me. Perhaps getting some outside input would help? I hate to start going down the 3RR vandalism dispute resolution arbitration path. MECU≈talk 19:34, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

NCAA Division I-A National Football Championship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Division_I-A_national_football_championship This page has evolved into an unacceptable original research and synthesis project under Wikipedia guidelines. The tables listing national championships by year and total championships are synthesized from various sources, incompletely in some cases, and represented as an "authoritative" list. It inappropriately conveys the misconception that most of the pre-1935 champions were consensus picks, when in fact the opposite was quite true for reasons that I have added in the discussion in the article.

I am currently trying to resolve this issue with Iowa13, but have not gotten an adequate response other than a brush off. I urge that this article be demoted to "C" quality until this issue is resolved and the original research removed. Gvharrier 20:19, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I believe that we have come to a preferred solution that meets everyone's concerns on this issue. Gvharrier 17:43, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
The issue is how the information is combined. A synthesis represents a judgment-based combination. Compiling from multiple sources is a non-judgmental basis of combining. To the extent that additional information can be added to that compilation is another goal of combining. I believe that is where we are directing the revisions on that page now. Iowa13 is doing the work on that process now. Gvharrier 18:47, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Head coach salaries

I would appreciate any input about adding salaries to the coach infobox. A similar discussion is ongoing here. BlueAg09 (Talk) 19:19, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

hmmm... I think "no" because in 100 years, the salary itself may not be relevant information due to inflation/etc. However, I do think that it may well be wortwhile information--I've heard that many states report that the hightest paid state employee is the college football coach. Perhaps instead a separate article on college football salaries would be better.
Also, I think "no" because often times those salaries reported do not include (or do include) endorsements and other incomes. I think it's just too complex of an issue to have in the infobox for the coach.--Paul McDonald 19:31, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Uhhh.....that is already in the template. It uses the Contract parameter but appears on the infobox as salary. You can use it to say what their contract is (i.e. $8 million for 3 years) or their actual salary (i.e. $189,000/year). The latter is better for assistant coaches. Check out Bob Stoops and Brent Venables. Also, Paul, I would agree that this information only belongs on the infobox while the coach is active. It should be removed when the coach retires.↔NMajdan•talk 21:54, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Concur that it's not particularly useful for former coaches, but certainly is relevant for current coaches. My extended remarks on the subject are at the Tuberville Talk page linked by BlueAg09. AUTiger » talk 22:20, 31 October 2007 (UTC)


FAC Help Requested

I've recently submitted 2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl for a featured article review. It's already been checked off as a good article, but I could really use some help in checking it over for redundant sentences, help in trimming the prose, and just general NPOV checks and clarity. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Together, we can make this the third featured article for the College Football Wikiproject. It's almost there... it just needs a little more help.

Project Page

JKBrooks85 21:16, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

  • This article is getting close. Good work so far.
My main concern is that the {{NCAAFootballSingleGameHeader}} header is way down the page instead of at the top of the article. Other articles, such as 2006 Alamo Bowl, 2007 Fiesta Bowl, 2005 Texas vs. Ohio State football game, and 2007 Trinity vs. Millsaps football game put it at the top. This template introduces several important things at a glance, including who played, who the coaches were, who won, who was home team, etc. I believe that the consensus of this WikiProject is that it should go at the top. I think it is important to try to keep some consistency.
I will note other suggestions on the FA candidacy page as I spot them. Johntex\talk 21:17, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

2007 Trinity vs. Millsaps football game

There is some discussion at Talk:2007 Trinity vs. Millsaps football game about what is a more appropriate "title" to use in the infobox for this game. We could use some outside opinions to help reach a conclusion. Thanks, Johntex\talk 18:43, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, if this is a dumb question - I'm really new. What's with the red links at the top of this page, about the portal? Can anyone make those? —Preceding unsigned comment added by GTBuzzer (talk • contribs) 19:37, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Its just a reminder that the selected image/article pages haven't been written for the portals for december. That message will go away when those pages are created. The image and article for December have already been picked, but nobody has created the entry yet. I think that warning should only come up during the last week or two of the month, but oh well.↔NMajdan•talk 15:11, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Policy Discussion on use of logos

There is a policy discussion that could affect articles created by this project. Please see this discussion about whether policy should forbid team logos to be placed on articles pertaining to individual seasons. You are invited to contribute to the discussion, if you wish. Best, Johntex\talk 15:10, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Reminder on infobox use for bowl games

With bowl season approaching, I just wanted to remind everybody on the templates we have. {{Collegebowl}} should be used on the general bowl game article (such as Poinsettia Bowl or Rose Bowl (game)). {{Infobox CollegeFB Bowl}} should be used on the specific yearly game article (such as 2007 Poinsettia Bowl). At least, that is my general understanding of how these were meant to be used when they were created. Also, if anybody has some free time, {{Infobox CollegeFB Bowl}} needs documentation created for it.↔NMajdan•talk 15:37, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Should this template also be used for other "named" games that are not offical bowls? Example Coca-Cola Classic (college football) ?? --Paul McDonald 15:58, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
I think it could be, yes. Also, I added documentation for {{Infobox CollegeFB Bowl}} and made some parameters optional. That way, the template doesn't look blank if added before the game is played. Before, all fields were shown so for the 2007 bowl game articles, the anthem, announcers, halftime show, odds, etc were all there but blank. I also removed some automatically added brackets which will require manual fixing on the articles themselves. I removed brackets from the stadium name since some stadiums need disambigs such as Rose Bowl (stadium).↔NMajdan•talk 17:53, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Image question

Hi. I'm new here, so I was wondering how I could upload a couple images from flickr. Here's a link: pictures. They are listed under some rights reserved so I think they can be uploaded. I think a couple could really work well in some Iowa articles. Thanks. - djkdan —Preceding unsigned comment added by Djkdan (talk • contribs) 03:05, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Those images have the noncommercial symbol, thus forbidding commercial use. Images that forbid commercial use or derivatives are generally not allowed on Wikipedia. Look for images with the "Attribution License" or the "Attribution-ShareAlike License". You can ease the process of searching for these images by using the advanced search and checking all boxes by the "Creative Commons" section.
After you find suitable images, upload them to the Commons. Images uploaded to the Commons may simultaneously be used on Wikipedia and Wikipedia's sister projects. Hope this helps. BlueAg09 (Talk) 07:54, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
You could also ask that Flickr user that uploaded the image that you would like to use their images on Wikipedia and request they change the license. All of us around here have had success doing that in the past.↔NMajdan•talk 13:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
A good way to find image is to put a category such as Category:2007 NCAA Division I FBS football season in the Flickr tool at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/fist.php - Peregrine Fisher 16:17, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Proposal of Policy regarding Top 25 Rankings on team pages

That ONLY the TOP 25 ranked teams should be included on Team pages. Dawg1279 06:15, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that's a good move. Top 25 teams change from week to week and year to year, so we would potentially be adding and then deleting artilces every week. That's a lot of maintenence!--Paul McDonald 15:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure this proposed policy is in regards to the earlier Top 25 Ranking discussion. I agree that only those teams in the Top 25 should be ranked because the polls themselves do not consider other teams receiving votes to be ranked #26, #27, etc. Gopherbone 15:21, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
If Gopherbone is right, then I agree. Though we did discuss this somewhere before and I don't think it really needs to be stated so explicitly, just with new folks every year, we get people that don't understand how the polls really work so we have to explain to them each time. Perhaps a "FAQ" about WP:CFB where things like this would be a good thing to have on it? (National Championships would be another.) MECU≈talk 18:06, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
Agree with proposal that there should be a CFB guideline re rankings on team pages. Perhaps BCS ranking would be better than the USA ranking on the team schedule, and if USA rank is used, a "V" should be used in place of a ranking for teams outside of the Top 25 yet still received votes. B 16:25, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
I think "RV" is traditionally used in other places (means "Received Votes"). I'm against using the BCS because it isn't available for the entire season. We selected the Coaches because it's part of the BCS calculation, traditional and covers the entire season. MECU≈talk 19:32, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Agree re: "RV". However, the current template for game schedule/results automatically places a "#" symbol when a value is given for rank so that the value "RV" would look like "#RV" in the article. The template will need to be edited to allow for "RV" and a footnote to explain "RV" at the bottom of the template. B (talk) 22:23, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to remove 2007 NCAA Division I FBS football season "Key games" section

Comments requested here.↔NMajdan•talk 18:48, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

New template/infobox

I created a simple infobox for our main yearly article such as 2006 NCAA Division I FBS football season called {{Infobox NCAA Division I FBS season}}. Long winded, I know, but I was going for accuracy (also, {{Infobox NCAA Division I-A season}} redirects to the FBS one). So far, I have put it on the 2006 article and the 2007 article so you can see the difference between a completed season and an in-progress one. I modeled it after {{Infobox NFL}}. What I like about this template is it automatically discerns between Division I-A and Division I FBS depending on the year, so the editor doesn't have to worry about it and it is always accurate. Take a look at it and let me know if I should make any changes or if you spot any errors. Also, any help on adding it to the other articles would be appreciated.↔NMajdan•talk 16:04, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Is there any picture/logo that would go well with it? Right now, it's pretty small and might be easily overlooked. I like the idea. How about some of the other awards as well -- Bednarik Trophy, Ray Guy Award, things like that? JKBrooks85 (talk) 18:44, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

CFB Schedule Colors

Someone changed the colors on the CFB Schedule template. I find them to be hard on the eyes. Just wondering what everyone else thinks. Template in question: Template:CFB Schedule Entry Example: 2007 LSU Tigers football team#Schedule I think the old colors were better. Seancp (talk) 00:32, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Looks like its been reverted. I'm not seeing a difference.↔NMajdan•talk 19:01, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
User:Fbdave changed the colors again. I reverted and asked that he discuss any color changes, which replicates to dozens of articles, on the template talk page.↔NMajdan•talk 22:32, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

NCAAFootballSingleGameHeader template usage

be placed at the top of all single-game college football articles, or just those without well-developed lead sections and infoboxes?  !! time=18:22, 7 November 2007 (UTC) }}

Johntex and I have been having an interesting debate over the usage of the {{NCAAFootballSingleGameHeader}} over on the FAC page for 2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl (Shameless plug: stop by and leave comments if you get a chance). The debate centers around whether or not the template should uniformly head every single-game article or not.

My position is that for longer articles (like 2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl), all the information in the template is already given in the infobox and in the lede paragraphs, so there's no need to put the template at the top of longer articles. Putting it at the top forces all the other information down the page and really overshadows the infobox and the lead paragraphs. I'm not saying that the template shouldn't be included at all — in my 2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl article, I put it in the statistics section. It's a valuable way to express a lot of information in a short space, and looks pretty nice. I'm not even saying that it shouldn't head up a page — on shorter single-game articles, especially those without infoboxes, it's a great replacement for an infobox. But on longer articles, its size overwhelms the lead paragraphs of text and the lead infobox. My suggestion is that for longer articles, it should be placed at the end of the game recap section or in a separate game statistics section where it won't clutter up the top of the article and overwhelm the text.

Johntex's position (and please correct me, John) is that the template should be at the top of all single-game articles in order to achieve a common style for single-game college football articles. He feels that the template isn't distracting and doesn't overwhelm the rest of the text, even in longer articles. For an example, he suggests 2006 Alamo Bowl. John, please let me know if this is correct.

Any and all comments would be greatly appreciated. JKBrooks85 00:30, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree that it's a nice template, but I don't think it should be placed at the top of the page. It's my belief that the top left of every article should quickly describe what the article is about. Most people looking up football games know what they are reading about, but if someone who doesn't know what a football game is sees that template at the top I think it could confuse them. I think using it at the top of a stats section is a good idea. By that point in the article all readers should understand what the page is about, and people who just want the stats can get there pretty quick by clicking on the TOC. I didn't find anything at Wikipedia:Manual of Style that specifically addresses the issue, but my guess is that it's assumed that a lead paragraph is always the first thing in an article. Another thing to consider is monitor resolution. Computers with low resolutions will have the their first look at the page overwhelmed by the template, in extreme cases the first sentence won't even show without scrolling. - Peregrine Fisher 02:20, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
As JKBrooks85 correctly mentions (thank you, JK), I favor putting the template at the top of the article. We are currently doing this on most of our single game articles. For several examples, please see:
2006 Alamo Bowl, 2007 Fiesta Bowl, 2005 Texas vs. Ohio State football game, 2006 Insight Bowl, 1987 Fiesta Bowl, and 2007 Trinity vs. Millsaps football game
These articles have been started and edited by a wide variety of editors. Several have reach Good Article status. I think it is safe to say the usage is very widespread and indicates a consensus on how to handle these types of articles.
Such a template is not unique within Wikipedia. There are many other templates in Wikipedia that go on the top of the article and that can span the entire width. Most of them are not nearly as informative as this one. For examples, look at the templates splashed across the top of these articles: Free content, 2007 Tabasco flood, and ABBA. Or see {{in-progress tvshow}} or almost any of the templates at Wikipedia:Template messages/General
This template is bigger, yes, but it tells the reader so many useful things:
Who was playing, including tiered links to the school, athletics program, football program, and the specific season (if applicable)
Who the coaches were
Who won
What was the score - quarter by quarter, including over-time, if applicable
Rank of each team coming in
Nickmame or title of the game, if applicable
This is a case where the template is more informative, pixel-by-pixel, that prose. As such the template should be given prominent placement at the top of the article.
As to monitor resolution, I suspect that people with low-resolution are vanishingly rare these days. Even if someone with a low-resolution monitor comes to the article, I don't think they will have any trouble realizing immediately that they need to scroll down. It is very common these days for web pages to have header information that readers scroll past. It really is how the web works.
Therefore, I support the existing standard of putting this template at the top of single-game articles. I look forward to hearing additional views. Best, Johntex\talk 02:53, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
These days the most common screen resolution is 1024x768 (according to display resolution). With that resolution, the header appears to take up about a third of the screen (at least in Firefox) so I'm not sure if that would be too overwhelming. To me, it looks fine on top of the page, and most of the other single-game articles have their headers on the top, so I think it would be a good idea to maintain this consistency. Information presented in a consistent manner eases searching for certain things. Besides, not all of the info in the header is included in the infobox and lede, as shown by Johntex above. In a way, I think the header can be considered a lead—if a reader wanted a brief overview of the game, they can just look at the header, which pretty much sums up the whole game. BlueAg09 (Talk) 03:42, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
To me, a third of the screen is a hell of a lot, especially when another third is taken up by the Wikipedia tabs and left-side bar. That leaves less than a third of the screen for the lead paragraph. Why limit yourself with a single template when you can provide even more information with text and an infobox at the top? For shorter articles like the 2007 Trinity vs. Millsaps football game, there's more of a reason to put it at the top since the lede doesn't tell you as much and there's no infobox, but when you've reached the level of 2005_Texas_vs._Ohio_State_football_game, there's no reason to put it at the top. The infoboxes and lede give you even more information than the header can provide. In that article, the header is so big that I can't even see the lower half of the Texas infobox, and I won't even know that there's an Ohio State infobox until I scroll down. JKBrooks85 14:09, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
If you will permit me to turn around your last sentence, "If the Ohio State and Texas infoboxes go at the top, and the single-game header comes later, the reader will not even know the single game header is there until they scroll down". Everything in the article can't be shown in the first screen-height. At 1024x768, with the single-game header at the top, the lead paragraph is certainly at least starting to show in the first screen. The reader should easily see to scroll down for the text. Johntex\talk 14:37, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
But that's my point -- effective communication should require as little effort as possible. You shouldn't be forced to scroll down in order to get the information you want. A good lead section, coupled with infoboxes, can give much more information far more quickly than just the header. JKBrooks85 15:35, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
But everything can't be seen at once. If you put the text and other infoboxes above the header, then you have to scroll down to see the header. So, you have to scroll down to see everything either way. Therefore, your point does not make sense to me. In terms of effective communication, the header is an extremely effective communication tool. It gives a great deal of information in an extremely easy-to-read format. Therefore, we should put it right at the top. Johntex\talk 19:05, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I'm simply saying that a well-written lead section coupled with an infobox or two will present more information in a single screen than the template would coupled with whatever else is visible. The sheer size of the template bumps everything else down, so you're artificially limiting the information a reader can access in a quick viewing. A good lead section will include everything that's in the template and a whole lot more. That's why I wouldn't support bumping it down in undeveloped articles -- they tend to not have completed lead sections. But in developed articles, the lead contains far more information than what's given in the template, and so you can get more information in one screen without the template than with it. A well-written lead makes the template a useful addition instead of the keystone of the game summary. JKBrooks85 16:01, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
It should go at the top. It's why it's called a "Header". But more so, presents a game summary at the top and consistent presentation (hence why we developed a season page layout!). I've seen it in other places and it always looks silly and out of place to me. I refute the argument it takes up 1/3 and that Wikipedia takes up 1/3 so there's little else for the reader to see. 1/3 is a lot of room for text and the start of an infobox alone, but Wikipedia doesn't take up 1/3. Show me a screenshot before I'll believe that. If there is/are duplicate information in this and the infobox, it should be removed from the infobox for clarity and condense information. So, keep it at the top. We can discuss reducing the size if needed. I am the template designer, for what that's worth. MECU≈talk 18:00, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for creating it, btw. It's really a useful tool. I'll get a screenshot once I get home from work. JKBrooks85 18:09, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Here's the screenshot. It was taken at 1024x768 on Windows XP, using Mozilla Firefox. Admittedly, at higher resolutions it isn't as big a problem, but 1024x768 is a pretty widely-used resolution, particularly by elderly users. JKBrooks85 01:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Incidentally, would anyone mind if I put in an RFC on this? I'd like to get as many opinons as possible (especially disinterested ones) so we're not overlooking anything. JKBrooks85 18:13, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
The RFC is a good idea; it would be nice to hear more opinions. Anyhow, what about adding a contract link to the header? If a reader finds it overwhelming, they can contract it to reduce some of the space it takes up. BlueAg09 (Talk) 19:07, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Great idea! Is that possible, MECU? JKBrooks85 19:47, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

I think that box is awesome. It is really useful and it should go right at the top of the article so it is the first thing seen. —Preceding unsigned comment added by GTBuzzer (talk • contribs) 19:44, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

800x600 is 25% of users, 1024x768 is 50%. My guess is that 95% of readers who visit these pages know about NCAA football, and would like the template since it quickly conveys info when you know what you're looking at. These people also probably run higher resolutions. Basically people like us. A small percentage of readers don't know much about american football, and would probably be better served with the lead paragraph at the top. Probably the same people who have low resolutions. I guess it depends on who we want to serve. I've kind of convinced myself that the template is useful at the top. The one thing I don't like is that it just doesn't seem standard practice to me. When I visit a page that has the template at the top, it doesn't look right to me. I've gotten used pages looking a certain way (normal text and then TOC, with infobox on the right). Above someone mentions other templates that are placed at the top, but they aren't the same kind of template. They're meta information about the state of the article, not article specific summaries. Are there any other templates like it? I'd like to look at them and see how they do it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Peregrine Fisher (talk • contribs) 01:53, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

(reset indent) So people like it. I've seen many thousands of WP pages, and we're creating something new with this template. Is NCAA football so special that it needs different formatting from the other 2,000,000 articles we have? I think the answer is no. Let's extrapolate what using this template means to other articles. Should war/battle articles have a template at the top that list casualities? Probably not, that kind of info goes into the infobox. Should university articles have templates that list their cities and enrollment at the top? Again, that info goes in the infobox. TV shows could have templates at the top that list major characters and ratings. Basically, every major category of article could have a template at the top, but instead we put the info in the infobox and lead paragraphs. Articles on football games are a new phenomenom so they haven't been scrutinized, but there's now way that they can get their own WP:Manual of Style guidelines that allow strange stuff like templates above the lead. It looks like there are enough people who like the template (and frequent this page) to keep it for now. Instead of a temporary solution of ignoring the problem, we should just solve it. My first guess is that we include quarter scores in the infobox, and whatever other info the template has that the infobox doesn't have. Either that, or all the templats will be removed at a later date by people who know less about the subject than us. It's a no brainer, unless we think that using the templates for as long as we can (1-2 years at most) is the best thing to do. Anyways, if you don't agree I would like to hear why you think that it isn't inevitable that these templates will be prohibited from being at the top of the article. - Peregrine Fisher 06:13, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

We are not creating anything new here. We have had this template for over a year and it has gone on the top of many articles, read and edited by many people, during that time. Not a single editor or reader has complained that they have not been able to figure out how to scroll down to find the introductory paragragh.
This is a pretty standard layout even off Wikipedia. Many sports articles/websites report similar information. and not jsut college football. The same template could be used with small modifications by other projects such as WikiProject:Baseball. Instead of looking to remove or change the template, we should be looking to spread its usage.
There is no problem here, so there is no reason to "solve" anything. Your "solution" would lessen the utility of this template and hence make the article harder to understand at a glance. Wikipedia evolves as people come up with good improvements.
This template is an improvement, and we've been using it successfully for quite some time. Also, please note that some of these single game articles, such as 2006 Alamo Bowl, have been made GA status. Some, such as 2005 Texas vs. Ohio State football game have been nominated for deletion (and kept). So, it is not like we have these articles hidden away somewhere. The layout has been accepted by the community as a whole. Johntex\talk 15:07, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
John, calm down a little; you're sounding a bit defensive and owny. Remember consensus can change. The issue is this template does break standard article style which places article text explaining the subject first at the top of the page. The template is a conceit based on a traditional horizontal scoreboard and the assumption that a sports-related article makes the scoreboard appearance ok. As it happens, for some of these notable single games, the score tells you nothing about the notability of the game; Trinity-Millsaps is a case in point as it's not the score or teams or coaches that mattered, but rather that there were 15 laterals. That game particularly needs text first. Also, the current template as it is has quite a bit of redundancy. I'm pretty sure the columnar infobox (as a sidebar) evolved so that text and highlighted summary information can co-exist at the top of the page. How about we look at a compromise that can incorporate a similar scoreboard look into the vertical format of the infobox. Here's a mockup. AUTiger » talk 17:12, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
I don't think I need to calm down at all, I am very calm. I don't think my comments are "owny" either. I did not create the template. Never-the-less, I apologize if I came off as un-calm or owner. That is not my intent. My intent is merely to emphasis that I am adamantly against changing the current paradigm of placing the template at the top of the articles. This is where the template does the most good and that is where it should remain. Johntex\talk 19:03, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
I may not agree with you, but I definitely agree that you've been civil and helpful through the entire argument. JKBrooks85 20:57, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for being open-minded; did you look at the mockup at all? It conveys the same information while taking up less space. AUTiger » talk 20:05, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
I like it, especially if we can integrate it with a template like Template:Infobox CollegeFB Bowl. A combination of the two would be applicable for every single-game college football article, it'd look nice, and it'd help make all the college football articles consistent. JKBrooks85 20:57, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for proposing a new version. I looked at it with an open-mind and I still prefer the original. There is no reason to shove the template off to the right-hand side. It is most visible at the top and it is most useful at the top. The top is the best place for it. Any reader who prefers to read the text is not going to have any problem doing so. Johntex\talk 19:40, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Comment was requested at Wikipedia policy, so I am here. This is the first I have seen of this template, and I do not think that it should be at the top of the article. It is so large as to push the textual introduction off the first screen of the browser. As a properly written article defines the subject in the first sentence, this shold be on the first screen. Readers should not have to scroll down to find out what an article is about. I can think of several ways that a reader unfamiliar with NCAA football would come upon one of these articles. The most obvious is the Random article link. Football players also have lives beyond their college careers and there are many former players who have prominence beyond there college careers. (Gerald Ford, Steve Largent, and J. C. Watts come to mind off the top of my head). Articles on these players can very easily contain links to individual games that may be followed by people only or mostly familiar with the player's later career, and who are not familiar with college football. Dsmdgold 16:57, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

A show/hide collapse solution could be possible, but arguing over the initial collapse state would leave us nowhere. And if someone has to set hide once, it'd be nice if they could do it once and then anytime they encounter a page with this template, it would stay that same state (with a cookie-like setting perhaps). I know that is impossible, but I'm trying to think outside the box. Also, the screen shot provided above of the 10xx X 7xx screen size shows that most users do not have to scroll down to start reading the article, so that is a moot point now. I like the "mockup" design and layout provided by AUTiger, but it seems like we'd have two infoboxes going down the side that seems odd to me. I agree with Johntex that this could be easily expanded/modified so other sports could use something similar at the top of their articles. Further input by a much wider group would be needed to determine if it should become a standard for sports on Wikipedia to include such an item though. MECU≈talk 21:23, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
What do you think about combining the mockup design with an infobox along the lines of Template:Infobox CollegeFB Bowl? That would create an infobox that would contain everything in your design, fit neatly along the right side of the page, and save space to boot. It'd be applicable to every single-game college football article (even the bowl games), and we'd be even further ahead on standardization than we are now. How about it? JKBrooks85 21:55, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
I certainly think that some sort of right hand info box would be preferable. Ideally we should not be striving for a consistent look just within the NCAA football articles, but across the entire encyclopedia. In most fields the right hand info-box is the standard. As a thought, having a standardized info-box across all team sports would be a good thing, if it is possible. Dsmdgold 23:09, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
From a very outside view of someone who has looked at so few of these articles (over the last year?) I never even noticed this template. It is pretty drastically different than the other article's layout. It may be useful information, but I think a consistent, encyclopedic style is important. A stock ticker might be useful on NASDAQ, or flight delay information on Delta, but they aren't there. I feel like people who want a extremely quick view of sports games would be better served by espn or something similar. Not that this information shouldn't be provided, but it should be provided in an encyclopedic context, like all the other information available. - cohesion 16:28, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
I think the comparison to a stock ticker or a flight delay status is not a good analogy. In those two cases, they are displaying information that is only current as of a particular moment in time. In contrast, the single-game header is portraying historical information which will always be a true reflection of what happened in that particular game.
If we were putting the single game header on top of season articles, or team articles, or university articles, then your analogy would be valid. That is not the case, however. Johntex\talk 19:33, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
As a regular and long-time and in-depth editor the Manual of Style, and I can say quite firmly that yes, the MOS's position is that, aside from disambiguation headers and the like, the lead paragraph as described at MOS is expected to be the first thing in an article and that it is stylistically very un-Wikipedia to make weird special exceptions to this for one random topic like US college football's "single games". Wikipedia has a widely and rather (though not 100% perfect) consistently implemented system of right-hand side infoboxes to present summarized tabular information. We do not need a second system to present similar information in a different way, that interferes with the reader accessing the lead paragraph. I stress the word "access" here too, as in "accessability" - inserting artsy tables of sportsgeek details before the main content is a major disservice to users dependent upon screen reader software. If necessary, upgrade the relevant infobox(es) to handle additional details that a consensus of focused editors of American collegiate football articles (i.e. the relevant WikiProject[s]) consider to be crucial, and avoid creating a new entire class of template structures that do things in ways that are not done in any other type of article here, or users will rapidly become confused and even irritated. WP has a very, very consistent user interface for quite solid usability reasons. PS: The template in question, aside from using visual features like cute but grossly pixellated rounded corners that clash strongly with the rest of WP's design aesthetic, is more like a navbox or succession box in nature, and thus belongs at page bottom like all other such templates, to the extent it cannot simply be obviated with an improvement to right-side infoboxes. I don't mean to knock the work that has been done on it to present summarized, useful information, but I think far too much time has been spent on this template to make it "cool" by someone or other's estimation, instead of making it truly useful within the Wikipedia context. The coding work that has been done to make it useful can be ported to infoboxes or navboxes, and the coding work done to make it "pretty" but clashing has been misplaced effort. Anyway, the MOS is pretty clear about this: The lead is the lead; it is not the kinda-lead that can optionally come after a bunch of SCREAMING-HUGE FONT claptrap.  :-/ — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:32, 12 November 2007 (UTC) (PS: Lest anyone be confused about this, I should note that while infoboxes typically come before the lead in the source code, they are float:right in CSS, which takes them out of the normal document flow, and thus in screen readers they are not in fact "before" the lead at all. This is not the case with the template in question. It will appear before the lead in the rendered code, just as will a DAB template, which in that case is intentional. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:38, 12 November 2007 (UTC))
Your only complaint seems to be that it doesn't comply with the MOS, and you seem to imply that the MOS is an unchangeable document, which is false. If we were to include a template such as this on every single-game article for every sport, then it would be the standard and not just an "artsy table of sportsgeek details", but the standard. Further, you seem to also imply that Encyclopedias must be standard boring text presented in the standard encyclopedia way. We aren't paper and doing such things perhaps could improve the overall ascetics of an article to invite the reader in closer. There is no "standard of what an encyclopedia article must look like." Welcome to Wikipedia where we redefined that. Lastly, I AGF'ed here, but including some of the terms you choose to are quite inflammatory (I quoted one already) whereas choosing different words would have been better to keep the debate from turning hot. Just a little feedback to help you in the future I hope. The only valid argument you had was for screen readers, for which seeing how a screenreader would interact with it would be useful. Can anyone do this? MECU≈talk 14:27, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
You're not reading what I wrote, then, since I raised many more issues than MoS compliance. Wikipedia does in fact have standards for what articles should look like. WP:MOS and its subpages go into this in great detail in many, many way, as do Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles and various other documents. The "Wikipedia will be boring without this" argument you raise is a red herring, since Wikipedia has tables, charts, illustrations and other "not just boring text" features, which are pretty well standardized and consistent at this point. I agree with whoever above suggested that you sound WP:OWNish about this. Please stop taking this personally. No one is saying that the information presented is not important in its context, only that this particular presentation of it doesn't work well on Wikipedia. That said, I apologize if I was inflammatory; someone else said that about a CfD I filed the other day. If I hear from two different editors in two different XfDs that I need to moderate my XfD tone, I take that to heart, and I will endeavor to be a little more sensitive in the future. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 22:46, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
You want to brush off the violation of the MOS as no big deal, but really, there should be some compelling reason for any exception. I've already shown that a similar look and feel can be done in an infobox and convey the same information more efficiently. The only objection to that so far is that JohnTex "prefers" the wide scoreboard style at the top; and his, yours, or anyone else's personal preference really isn't a good reason. If an infobox can do the same job, more efficiently, where is the compelling argument to keep it at the top and carve out an exception to the MOS? AUTiger » talk 18:25, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
My two cents: I think this template should be rewritten when practically every other infobox on Wikipedia is placed in a column to the right side of the page (see WP:IBT). This template takes up the space normally reserved for article message boxes, such as cleanup templates, deletion templates, and dispute templates. There should be some sort of general layout consistency here. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 20:45, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
So the template is bad for disabled people and doesn't follow our manual of style. On the other hand, some people like it. Seems like a no brainer. We should just put whatever relevant info we want in the infoboxes and remove these templates. - Peregrine Fisher 21:22, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
This template is being considered for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2007 November 23#Template:NCAAFootballSingleGameHeader. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 22:37, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
I'd encourage everyone to vote keep on this. Even though I'm against putting it at the top, I still feel that it's a valuable addition to our toolkit here. JKBrooks85 (talk) 16:22, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

LSU article naming

User:SportsMasterESPN keeps moving the 2007 LSU Tigers football team article to a new name. I have asked him repeatedly to keep it as 'LSU' and not 'Louisiana State' but I can't revert it again because of the 3RR. Please see my comments on Talk:2007 Louisiana State Tigers football team. I would like a final determination made so we can put this to rest. Thanks. Seancp (talk) 20:51, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

I'd personally go with whatever's in the university's style guide or the latest football media guide. JKBrooks85 (talk) 05:11, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Template:NCAAFootballSingleGameHeader up for deletion

This has been discussed at length above, but not for a few weeks and since then the template was put up for deletion. Since it has been up for two days here and only four editors have participated I thought I should bring it to some of the active editors working here since a discussion is going on right now about how it could be redesigned and many of the editors here work with the template. Phydend (talk) 18:42, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

I also mentioned that TfD up above, in the original discussion, which is still at least somewhat ongoing. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 22:47, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

New Single-Game Infobox

This TfD looks destined to finish successfully. So, in the meantime, we should work on a replacement that fits the normal Infobox style guidelines before the current one gets deleted that way we can salvage any and all information currently in the infoboxes. Converting this to a normal infobox shouldn't be too difficult. The center column in the current design would remain at the top then the home team information (currently on left of template) would be next followed by away team information. If I can get the time, I'll try to work on a design but hopefully somebody else can.↔NMajdan•talk 22:56, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
I'd like to work on a new model, based around the single-game Bowl infobox. I think we can get one going. I'll send out some emails and see if we can't get something going. JKBrooks85 (talk) 03:34, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've created a mockup of an alternative, based on Nmajan's design of the single-game college bowl infobox. Please check it out and let me know what you think. It's still a really rough draft right now. JKBrooks85 (talk) 16:17, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
I like his design and will be working on coding it in my userspace.↔NMajdan•talk 17:08, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Don't forget to make it OT friendly. CJC47 (talk) 17:10, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
OT? What's that? JKBrooks85 (talk) 17:55, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Overtime?↔NMajdan•talk 18:14, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Good point. For something like those seven-overtime Arkansas games, it could get a little tricky. JKBrooks85 (talk) 18:46, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I think I've got a pretty good working copy up at User:Nmajdan/Test. I made a few small changes to your design, but not much (namely, the format of the rankings). Hopefully, we'll also be able to get rid of the CollegeFB Bowl template since this template will work for bowl games or regular games. Let me know what you think.↔NMajdan•talk 19:57, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Awesome work! I filled out one on the page directly below yours as a test. Just a few things came to mind:
  • Do we need a "year" call right below the date?
  • Should we re-include the broadcasters and national anthem?
  • The types are a little difficult — wouldn't it be easier to just have a plaintext "nickname" category?
  • Can you blow up the main title a little bit? Maybe 2-5pts should do it.
JKBrooks85 (talk) 20:51, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
A year call below the date? Can you be more specific? The broadcasters and anthem are still there, but the parameters are blank and thus are left off the template. They are still in the code, though. What to you mean the types? I'm trying to use all the same parameters as the original infobox which will make the transition easier. Also, I like the way it is handled now. The team's short name is used in more than one spot, for instance. Yeah, I can make it bigger. Just bear in mind some game names are pretty long.↔NMajdan•talk 21:06, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Third line, right below the date, there's a call for a year — I don't see it displaying anywhere. I do see the announcers now — thanks for pointing that out. I must've been blind to miss that. As to game names, if you think that they'd be too long, is there an alternate way we could display it? I just thought that the example I came up with looked a little orphaned, but I think you're right — something like "Mississippi State vs. University of California Berkley" would probably be too long. JKBrooks85 (talk) 21:29, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
When can we start using this template in articles? I'm anxious to include it in the 2007 SEC Championship Game article! Seancp (talk) 22:06, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
I would say if you want, go ahead and use the regular template that is up for deletion. I don't want to replace the current one until the TfD completes. I've designed the replacement to make the transition between the two as smooth as possible. I'll probably work on the documentation tomorrow for it.↔NMajdan•talk 22:30, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Very impressive. I'm sure someone will complain it is too wide, but I have seen a handful of other infoboxes this wide (and infodense) and they seemed okay in their contexts. So, great job! And kudos back, ultimately, to the creator of the original template, which while problematic for a couple of reasons, obviously influenced this one greatly. PS: I hope this helps demonstrate that XfD processes are not necessarily destructive. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:52, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

New design implemented

I have implemented the new design so I ask that everybody take a look at articles that use this template and make sure that the template is working in all situations (always hard to test). Some things to look out for, the {{{city}}} is a required field and its missing on most instances so this field will need to be populated. Also, this template was designed to deprecate {{Infobox CollegeFB Bowl}} so on bowl games articles, they will have two infoboxes. Delete the Bowl template and add the appropriate data to the GameHeader template. Thanks↔NMajdan•talk 21:17, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Also, to make updating the old design easier, I have added to the template documentation just the fields that are new here.↔NMajdan•talk 21:23, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
Fantastic work. I've added it to 2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl, and it looks great. JKBrooks85 21:57, 30 November 2007 (UTC)


Thank you and welcome back

So anyway, mine and User:Bender235's 24 hour ban for edit-warring at Houston Nutt has ended. Bender has dove right back in reverting things that got us both banned in the first place. So rather than revert him, I'd just like to ask that others involved with WikiProject College football stop on by the Talk:Houston Nutt page and participate in some consensus discussion I am about to start. Thanks -- ALLSTARecho 05:56, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Nebraska Cornhusker subcategories

Category:Nebraska Cornhuskers football players has a large list of subcategories for each player position and I haven't been able to find a another school with a similar setup. I'm just wondering if they need to all be eliminated, since the football players category suffices. DandyDan2007 (talk) 01:07, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

  • I think it's fine. There's enough in the way of articles to justify it. Hopefully other schools will eventually have that many articles as well and will then need that many categories. JKBrooks85 (talk) 02:18, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I do know that the players' should be in only one cat or another, not both. For instance, Zac Taylor should be in the quarterbacks category only since its the highest level, not the quarterbacks cat and the regular players cat.↔NMajdan•talk 13:02, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Interim coaches in templates

Should interim head coaches be listed in the team head coach templates? What is the consensus on this, if there is one? BlueAg09 (Talk) 23:11, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I say yes because they were in the official position as head coach, even if it was only temporary. Seancp (talk) 23:23, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
  • I'd say yes if they coached at least one game for that team. Otherwise, they're not really fulfilling the role that most people associate with a coach... they're acting more like an athletic director. That's just my opinion, however. JKBrooks85 (talk) 02:31, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
I concur. A good example is Nebraska: Bo Pelini served as interim in 2003 and coached the bowl game. He should appear on the head coach template. On the other hand, Tom Osborne served as interim head coach for 4 days in 2007 and did not coach a game, thus he should not appear on this template. ––Bender235 (talk) 01:03, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
  • The situation should be explained in detail here. This is regarding Houston Nutt, who resigned from Arkansas and was hired the next day at Ole Miss. As a result, Arkansas' defensive coordinator Reggie Herring is interim coach for their bowl game, assuming Arkansas doesn't hire a new head coach before the bowl game. I just don't see it valid to add interim coaches to the head coach template. If we did that, some colleges templates would be full of 1-game coach names. -- ALLSTARecho 03:08, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
I didn't mention this, but it's not only about Nutt. I noticed Nmajdan removed Texas A&M's interim HC, Gary Darnell, and replaced him with the new HC, Mike Sherman (see this revision). Darnell will coach the bowl game. Also, someone added Tom Osborne (who's really a nominal coach now) to the Nebraska template. BlueAg09 (Talk) 03:54, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
I would say that anytime an "interim" coach coaches a team in an actual game, they should be listed. If Herring coaches Arkansas in its bowl game, then he counts even if he doesn't get the job permanently. Conversely, Tom Osborne named himself as Nebraska's interim coach today. Since Osborne presumably won't coach Nebraska in any games, he doesn't get listed as having a second tenure as Husker head coach. But Bo Pelini, who coached Nebraska as an interim coach in its 2003 bowl game after Frank Solich was fired, should be counted. Jsc1973 (talk) 04:29, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
I agree with you 100% there. Another way to look at it is this: The schools with an interim coach record that win/loss in the history books as being coached by the interim coach. I know for LSU in 1999, Hal Hunter coached the team against Arkansas and the LSU record books all acknowledge that, therefore he should be listed on Wikipedia. And even another way to look at it would be the confusion that some people might have if they just saw a progression from Frank Solich to Bill Callahan...someone might incorrectly think that Solich coached the entire 2003 season, even the bowl game. Seancp 03:12, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
Actually, they should only be listed if they are officially recognized by the school as having been a head coach. For example, Brian Cabral was the interim coach for the bowl game (even though Hawkins had been hired even) at Colorado after Barnett left, but Colorado doesn't attribute Cabral as having been a head coach and attributes the bowl loss to Barnett. I think we should recognize that as the school is the defacto source of their history, and if they don't wish to recognize someone as having been a coach, we should respect that. In the end, having a NPOV, then perhaps we list interim coaches separately from the lineage of coaches on a seperate line, or make sure to mark them as not officially recognized or (interim) at the least. But I definitely prefer recognizing the school's choice on the matter, as some will recognize the interim as having coached, some will not. MECU≈talk 14:05, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Bowl Games

It's bowl season again, and I believe as a project, we need to try and agree on a uniform setup of bowl articles. Furthermore, we should ensure that all links included with each bowl article points to the correct bowl article. Remember, in order of preference, on bowl articles, links should point to:

  1. The year's football team article
  2. The school's football article
  3. The school's athletics article
  4. The school's page

I was browsing some of the bowl articles and I noticed we don't adhere to the general trend most of the time. Some bowl articles haven't been updated to the new formatting of Template:Collegebowl and some have last year's matchup as the "current" one. Please help out if you have the time. Comments? If you have any questions, please contact me at my talk page. Ian Manka 02:47, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Ian, I was under the impression that we're now using the new Template:NCAAFootballSingleGameHeader for all our single-game articles now. It seems to serve the purpose for both regular-season and bowl-season games. JKBrooks85 23:33, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
I was talking about bowl-wide articles, such as the Alamo Bowl, not year-specific bowls. A lot of the bowls that use Template:Collegebowl haven't been updated in a while, from what I can tell. Is that a little bit clearer, or am I completely misguided? If you have any questions, please contact me at my talk page. Ian Manka 00:11, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Do we have a policy here for which bowls even get articles? It seems overboard to have an article of every bowl played in every year. We have some articles on some fairly run of the mill bowls (e.g., Alamo Bowl, where my beloved team is playing). The Evil Spartan 06:46, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Every bowl is deserving of its own article. Some may not be as important, but they still give money to the schools, they are still broadcast on television, and they are still the subject of numerous news articles. And Ian is correct, Collegebowl goes on the main bowl article while the singlegameheader goes on the year-specific article. The Collegebowl template has fields for the previous and next matchup which we have a tendency to fall behind on.↔NMajdan•talk 12:58, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Oh, okay. I was thinking of another template. Sorry about that. In regards to bowl articles, I agree that each should have its own article. Wikipedia already has articles for single television episodes, so why shouldn't it have articles for single bowl games? At a very base level, all these bowl games are is television shows as part of the "series" of college football. JKBrooks85 15:05, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Getting back to the main topic of discussion...

If anyone has any time, we need to ensure that bowl-wide articles have the appropriately-directed links to the articles as described above. Thoughts? If you have any questions, please contact me at my talk page. Ian Manka 19:24, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

New section added to main page without prior consultation

I have added a new section to the main page for listing articles being considered for deletion. This section is entitled Articles & Pages being considered for deletion, a subsection of College football articles needing help. I would understand if you prefer to not have such a section or to place it elsewhere, particularly since it was placed a non-Member of this WikiProject. Regards, User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:31, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Warning: The following pages will break because of #ifexist:

Reading this signpost and then searching through the reported articles that will break once the limit of #ifexist is set back to 100, I came up with the following list of pages within this project that will break and the source needs to be fixed before next Monday when the temporary limit is reduced back to the hard limit:

I may have missed some pages in the list. I didn't look at the pages to see what the problem could be as I don't have time. MECU≈talk 14:10, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Possible issue with 2007 NCAA Division I FBS football rankings and template

There was a discussion last week on the Village Pump about there being too many #ifexist statements on some templates and these were causing load issues on the servers. According to the Signpost, they have implemented a limit on the number of #ifexists an article can have, similar to the template limits that already exist. I was going through the list of articles that have an issue (its a long log file in the Signpost article) and one of our big articles is listed. They are going to limit the number of #ifexists to 100 per article and right now that article is using nearly 1000, so its definitely an issue (you can see the number by viewing the generated HTML, just as you would when viewing the template limit). However, looking at the code of the article and the code of the template, I do not see any #ifexists. I have asked about this at the VP to see if I get a response. Just thought I'd let all of you know.↔NMajdan•talk 14:26, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

How in the world did I miss the post above. Ugh, nevermind, its been brought up.↔NMajdan•talk 14:28, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
The issue is with {{cfb link}}.↔NMajdan•talk 14:33, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm still trying to understand this issue fully, but what we need to do as a temporary (or permanent) solution, is to limit the use of cfb link. We can do this by only using it when we know a yearly article hasn't been created. For instance, when I start the 2008 Oklahoma Sooners football team article and I'm creating the schedule, I know that an article already exists for 2008 Texas Longhorn football team, so I will not use cfb link on that one. Also, go back and revisit articles that have already been created and make the change. Similar example, if I'm using cfb link on 2006 Oklahoma Sooners football team and, at the time, there was no 2006 Texas A&M page but there is now, I can replace cfb link with the specific link. Just an idea.↔NMajdan•talk 14:43, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

{{cfb link}} could be modified to help find "pointless" transclusions of the template - if the "best available" article exists, eg, year teamname football team, then add the page to Category:Transclusions of cfblink to fix or something along those lines. --B 15:39, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Something else that can be done ... right now, the template is looking for {{{year}}} {{{team}}} football team and {{{year}}} {{{team}}} football. The latter is incorrect and NOT our naming convention. Similarly, it is looking for {{{team}}} football team, which is also not our naming convention. If we remove these two, we risk missing an incorrectly named article, but probably fix virtually every problem page - unless an article uses the template 25 times, it would be under the limit. Thoughts? --B 16:01, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
I thought about this too. Removing those two reduced every call.↔NMajdan•talk 16:05, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Can we subst: it when we know that the season article is known to exist, which is going to be the final/best link from the cfb link? The only downside I can think of is if the season article gets deleted, we'd have to go back and re-do the link instead of having it automatically done. MECU≈talk 16:03, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
just replacing it produces cleaner code, but I see what your saying.↔NMajdan•talk 16:05, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
If the article is ever deleted, hopefully the deleting admin has the good sense to either create a redirect or fix the references to it. I have modified the template to place articles in Category:Uses of cfb link linking to incorrectly named articles or Category:Excessive uses of cfb link, as appropriate, so that should help us find what needs to be fixed. --B 16:12, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
There don't seem to have been any links to incorrectly named articles at all ... so I've deleted that category and removed those checks from the template. So now it's down to three uses of ifexists, which should bring everything other than rankings pages under the limit without any effort. Category:Excessive uses of cfb link still needs to be depopulated, but it's not as big of an emergency. On the other hand, we need to figure out something for the basketball version - {{cbb link}} - basketball teams might have 40 opponents and only a few season articles exist. Maybe we should just not use the template except for major conference teams? --B (talk) 02:07, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
I'd be inclined to leave that up to WP:WPCBB. But, make sure they are aware.↔NMajdan•talk 13:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Coordinators?

Wanted to bring up an administration question. With the rate this project is growing, the number of templates, infoboxes, and other tools used to build pages is growing rapidly. In addition, we're starting to get quite a few pages that should go through a GA-class or FA-class review. They're good, but don't have the peer reviews to get them through. With all that in mind, isn't it time that we voted on a few project coordinators/managers?

These people would be in charge of maintaining the project main page, keeping track of templates and infoboxes, give project members a heads-up on AFDs and other things, and take the lead on peer reviews and things like that. They'd also be the ones who would approve project awards — imagine a barnstar-like system that would award things like the Ray Guy trophy barnstar (example) to someone who did a particularly good job on an article or segment of the project. They'd run a project newsletter, and in general volunteer to help out folks interested in the project and maintain the portal.

Until yesterday, we had a dead link for the selected article on the portal — that's never a good thing for people looking for college football things on Wikipedia. If we really want to improve the project, we need at least some sort of structure. I'd propose elections for three coordinators who would fill the position for six months before a new election. What do you think? JKBrooks85 (talk) 18:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we need coordinators, just more people helping out with some of the routine tasks such as the Portal, monitoring AFD, assessment, etc. I don't think there needs to be an approval committee for barnstars. We have a WikiProject award/barnstar, and if you or anyone wants to give it out, give it out. We have some pages of organization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_College_football/Templates for starters. I just don't think any sort of "hierarchy" of control is useful or warranted in Wikipedia or this WikiProject, just more people helping out with these areas. MECU≈talk 15:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps coordinators would be a bad term for it then ... maybe just a few designated volunteers who agree to take the lead on maintaining the portal and pages and all that other stuff for a set period of time. JKBrooks85 (talk) 17:23, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
We pretty much have that now. Several of us help out with the Portal when we can, several of us maintain the front page when it needs attending to, etc. While I commend your call for organization, I don't know if this project is big enough to warrant it (unlike WP:MILHIST).↔NMajdan•talk 20:34, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if we need coordinators or not. I do know that I have had no trouble getting help from anyone on my NAIA work. The College Football gang has done a great job of stepping up and pitching in when I ask. So I'm saying that if it ain't broke, don't fix it...--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:08, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Okay, then. Sounds good to me. Any ideas about the rest of the stuff — creating a set of CFB-specific awards, maybe starting up a newsletter, etc.? I know I'll be working on cleaning up the front page of the project now that my last FAC wrapped up. I'll probably do that alongside my next project. JKBrooks85 (talk) 15:01, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
We do have College football barnstar. What else is needed? If you want to do a newsletter, go for it. I don't see much use for it, but I'd signup for it. Especially with the off-season coming up when participation slacks off, it may not be too useful. In season I could see a bi-weekly one that lists AFDs and other issues, but we do that here anyways. I tried setting up a collaboration of the month subgroup, but that went nowhere and is "archived", see Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Collaboration of the Month. MECU≈talk 21:07, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
On the contrary, I see more of a need for a newsletter in the off season. During the season, all my wiki-time is pretty much devoted to maintaining the yearly season article for Oklahoma and other little tasks. With the off-season, I (hopefully) have more time to devote to other pursuits. A monthly newsletter would be nice since we could send it out to all members (of course, tell them how to opt out) and get some of the lesser active one to contribute.↔NMajdan•talk 21:26, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
That's what I was thinking about... something that could let people know about new FACs, new GA reviews, new templates and other goings-on. AfDs would, of course, be included, and it'd be a forum to let people who don't post here know what's going on. Can't have too many communication tools with something like this. JKBrooks85 (talk) 22:01, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Team X football under Coach Y

Someone has nominated Minnesota Golden Gophers football under Jim Wacker for deletion, suggesting that its content be merged onto the Jim Wacker page. I know this page format and its purpose has been discussed here before, so I wanted to mention this AfD so anyone who wants to discuss it can do it at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Minnesota Golden Gophers football under Jim Wacker. Gopherguy | Talk 22:50, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

How many pages are there like this? It seems reasonable to me to merge this information into the coaches page.--Rtphokie (talk) 22:55, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
There are dozens of them. Search for "football under" (use the quotes to limit your search to pages that have the words together) and you'll see them. And there will be more. These pages are not about the coach himself, but about the teams he coached. The Jim Wacker one takes the place of having individual pages for the 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996 Gopher football teams.Gopherguy | Talk 23:19, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
Well, it brings up a good question... should we start to separate these pages in accordance with the newer year-by-year standard? It'd be a hell of a lot of work, and I honestly don't think we have enough editors to pull it off. On the other hand, if we don't separate the pages now, we'd eventually have to tackle the beast. What do you all think? JKBrooks85 (talk) 00:43, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
What is the newer year-by-year standard. I thought the consensus before was that season pages shouldn't be created for non-notable (ie, non national championship) seasons in the past, only to do so going forward with the present. Did this change at some point? I don't see any reason to create an individual page for each past season unless it was a championship season. (I only want to know this because I created two articles like this one). Phydend (talk) 00:54, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
It's not a newer standard; the coach grouping standard is subset of the season standard that our newer members are just not aware of. Here's the original discussion. AUTiger » talk 01:53, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Ah, I see now. Thanks for that. Is this written down somewhere in a non-discussion format? JKBrooks85 (talk) 14:47, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

(od) Oops; looks like no-one ever thought or got around to writing it up like Yearly team pages format. Guess we should. AUTiger » talk 19:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Newsletter

Well, I thought I'd be bold and get the ball rolling on a newsletter for the project. It may work out, it may not, but it could be potentially useful, and it might be a good idea to put the framework down even if the idea doesn't take off on a big basis. JKBrooks85 (talk) 04:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

College Football article up for Featured Article

2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl, an article that's been in the works for several months now, is up for its second FAC attempt. It failed the first time around due to a lack of support. I'd really appreciate it if folks could take a swing by the article and the comments page to leave suggestions or support. There aren't all that many featured articles in this project yet, but by just lending your support, this article will finally make it into the end zone. Thanks for your help. JKBrooks85 22:00, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, the regular season is over and we have nearly three weeks until the next game. I urge all of you to review this article and make any comments you can to help get this Featured. This project needs more FAs.↔NMajdan•talk 22:15, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Congrats to JKBrooks for helping this WikiProject get another Featured Article. Now, if I were you, I'd go here and request this FA be featured on Dec 31, the day of the 2007 edition of the game.↔NMajdan•talk 13:07, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
At the least, we should use it on the Portal ASAP. MECU≈talk 13:30, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. I have scheduled it to appear in January. Still need to create the actual page, though.↔NMajdan•talk 14:13, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
I'll take care of it. Unfortunately for the TFA thing, it looks as if there's pretty much a dogpile on the nominations page. We'd have to be lucky to hit it right when a spot opens up. JKBrooks85 (talk) 15:12, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
I don't see any nominations for the 31st.↔NMajdan•talk 15:31, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, but unfortunately, there can only be five nominees on the page at any given time. JKBrooks85 (talk) 15:34, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
I did not know that. Seems to be the source of some controversy on the talk page.↔NMajdan•talk 15:44, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
Yeah. Kinda sucks for us since there's so little time before the date, but it's not a big deal. We'll be able to get your featured article done and nominated in time for the spring game, I think. JKBrooks85 (talk) 15:56, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Good news! Someone submitted it to the list, and it's currently taking on supporters to be featured on the front page for December 31st! JKBrooks85 (talk) 03:15, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Another

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/2006 Oklahoma Sooners football team.↔NMajdan•talk 19:57, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

It's a good one. I'd encourage everyone to come out and take a look and give input. JKBrooks85 (talk) 20:15, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Highlighting eventual BCS champ in rankings article?

I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this edit to 2006 NCAA Division I FBS football rankings which highlights Florida within the pre-season rankings collection. Is this desirable (and should carry through for this year and future years)? Should it be expanded to track the champion's performance through the other polls for the season? All or just BCS rankings and components (USAToday/Harris)? Thoughts? AUTiger » talk 02:39, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Works for me. It makes the information about the BCS champion that much easier to access, and I'm always a fan of making things easier for the readers. JKBrooks85 (talk) 03:18, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
Sure. Needs to be added to the Legend though. MECU≈talk 16:48, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

BCS Football Schools template

User:Cbl62 and I have been refining {{Michigan Wolverines Football}}. I think almost any BCS school may want to emulate it so we are bringing it to your attention. It looks like this:

--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 23:49, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Eh. Too much in my opinion.↔NMajdan•talk 02:17, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Mmmm.. I think you mean way too much. AUTiger » talk 03:16, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
TMI? Don't forget that those templates have to conform to template policy and I don't think what's been done to it is acceptable. I know since someone decided to come along to the Ole Miss Rebels template and remove the first names of all the coaches and said it was policy. So if you get away with this, I'll be sure to use it as reference when I restore the Ole Miss template back to its original state. haha -- ALLSTARecho 03:24, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
I agree with AUTiger. Way too much. It takes too long to even scan it and find something to click on. -- Billma (talk) 12:07, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
WAY too much info. Templates don't need to summarize the whole article. I think I'm the one that did that to the Ole Miss coach template. I don't think (I hope) I called it policy, but something more like "like all the other coach templates from WP:CFB". Using first names is largely irrelevant in a template and don't help, unless there are multiple people with the last name. I did a lot of the coach templates which is why they are that way and others copied my method. I'm open for discussion though, but I think this is the best, most professional, looking way. MECU≈talk 14:09, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
A vast majority of templates with names just include the last name. Look at the nav templates of politicians. The Presidents one lists first names but a lot of the governor ones just use last.↔NMajdan•talk 14:18, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I think everyone is missing the point. This is not an attempt to summarize Michigan Wolverines football. Much of the info on the template is not in the article. This is a navigational template to link most articles that are important to the football program. If I am looking at Desmond Howard and I want to know about other Michigan stars this directs me to them much the way {{Heisman Winners}} would direct me to other Heisman templates. It has the advantage of replaceing multiple template for retired numbers, coaches, and each other section of the templat.e It is a useful navigational template and was inspired by the template at Walter O'Malley for the {{Los Angeles Dodgers}}. It is common for other sports to use such summary navigational templates. See {{New York Yankees}}. The Michigan template is longer than most would be because we have the 2nd most All-Americans and among the most active NFL alumni. I would guess that an Ole Miss template might be slightly shorter and an Auburn one might be as well but less so. The real chore of the template is the creation of articles for all the All-Americans that you will discover who don't have them. This will push programs to create articles for All-Americans who don't have article or who have stubs. You can see all the DYKs on my user page to see what we at Michigan have had to do in the last few weeks to make this look good.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 07:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I should note that User:Cbl62 got this going and I just started cleaning up his work after seeing the template added to Greg Skrepenak, while it was at the WP:GAC queue. My problem with the template before was it lumped important players together and no one knew who was who. We have split the players into classifications of important players for the program to add some clarity to the template.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 07:34, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm not missing the point. Its flat out too big for my taste. I'm on a 1280x1024 monitor and that thing takes up my whole browser screen.↔NMajdan•talk 17:16, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
Please see WP:NAVBOX. Here are some key thoughts:
  • "A navigational template is often a small list..."
  • "Try to avoid navigation templates that are too large."
Just because {{Los Angeles Dodgers}} and {{New York Yankees}} are ridiculously large doesn't make it acceptable; if everyone jumped off a cliff... AUTiger » talk 21:22, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

WOW that's not a Navbox, that's a freaking article in itself: "LIST OF ALL COOL THINGS MICHIGAN FOOTBALL-ISH THAT WE CAN THINK OF" ... I don't like it, looks too busy to be useful...--Paul McDonald (talk) 22:31, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Navboxes are supposed to help readers located related articles. They should not be repositories of knowledge. This one navbox would be better broken up into a couple of nav boxes. (1st rounders, noteworthy seasons, players in the pros, etc.) There is already a head coaches nav box. Also, this navbox duplicates {{WolverinesCoach}}. It doesn't fit on my 1680x1050 screen.--Rtphokie (talk) 22:37, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Issue with misalignment in {{College coach infobox}}

Some of you may have noticed that in a lot of the {{College coach infobox}}es, the years and the teams at the bottom don't line up. It appears this is being caused by the <small></small> tags that are going around the coach's position. As I see them, I'm going to remove them. This is just a heads up in case anybody else notices the same thing, now you know how to resolve.↔NMajdan•talk 18:39, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Lists of Michigan Wolverines football receiving leaders

Please consider supporting Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Lists of Michigan Wolverines football receiving leaders.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 15:56, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Single season pages and champs from non-D-IA(FBS) divisions

I was watching some of the Championships games last night (yes, I am a pro-playoff person) and a thought came to me: As UW-Whitewater won their first title in D-III, I could theoretically see a dedicated fan trying to create a page here. Now, going into the season, I wouldn't want to see season pages on every D-III team, or even the top-25 from D-II. However, I think once a team has won their title for that season (or even been the runner up), they are probably notable to warrant a single season page like the top-25 of D-IA. There might also be exceptional situations, like when a transitional team (moving up divisions) is #1 or #2 but is not qualified to be in the playoffs. Not that these pages must be made, but that, if they were made by editors, we would already agree that they have notability. That's my thought, I was hoping to get more input. --Bobak (talk) 17:59, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I think 2007 Appalachian State Mountaineers football team is certainly a justifiable article, with the potential for Featured Article status, consider this season included their 3rd straight NC plus the win over Michigan. I don't know about the other champions. I think a better idea might be an article like 2007 NCAA Division I-FCS tournament, similar to how we do the 2007 College World Series and NCAA basketball tournaments. Seancp (talk) 19:15, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
I'd definitely support the creation of articles for each of the championship tournaments, and potentially for the teams participating in them; particularly for the champion and second-place team. Beyond that, I think notability is an issue. JKBrooks85 (talk) 21:07, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Football Good Articles

FYI: There is an extremely large backlog of articles under the Sports and Recreation category over at Good Article Nominations. A number of college football articles are waiting for GA review, and if you have the time or inclination, I'm sure the authors would appreciate someone taking a look at them. I'll be digging in as well, but the sheer number of articles means that more hands are needed. Obviously, you shouldn't be reviewing an article to which you contributed, but it only makes sense that if you have knowledge of a subject that you should review it. Any help would be great. Thanks. JKBrooks85 (talk) 00:47, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations#Sports_and_recreation

Stay on top of the discussion here: Use RSS/Atom

For those of you that use an RSS/Atom reader, you can easilly keep track of the discussions here by going to the history part of this page, and then in the toolbox click RSS or Atom for your needs. MECU≈talk 13:39, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

NCAATeamFootballSeason infobox Template Question

Why don't the 2007 season articles have a link to the 2008 season? If you look at 2006 LSU Tigers football team you'll see that the infobox links to the previous and next years at the bottom. The 2007 LSU Tigers football team article only links to the previous year. And the 2008 LSU Tigers football team links to both the previous and next year. I have looked at the text and haven't seen anything noticeable that would cause this. So what gives? Now that 2008 season articles are being created, it would be nice if all the 2007 articles linked to them in the infobox....wouldn't you agree? Seancp (talk) 15:29, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd imagine (I don't know that this is the case, but it's my best guess) that the reason it wasn't automatically included was because people were hesitant about creating a link to an article that may not be created. For bigger teams, it's obvious that a season article would be created. For smaller teams, however, it's not a guarantee. That being said, there should definitely be a next year link in the season summary infobox. JKBrooks85 (talk) 15:39, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

WP:FLC

Lists of Michigan Wolverines football receiving leaders passed yesterday. Today, I nominated Lists of Michigan Wolverines football rushing leaders and Lists of Michigan Wolverines football passing leaders. Please consider supporting them as well.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 18:03, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Small College Update/Feedback

Hey gang, I've made what I think to be some progress on the small college articles, particularly in the area of small college coaches. I'd like to get some feedback and pointers.

First, a list of samples: Ed Sweeney (football coach), Art Kahler, Harold Elliott (football coach), Jerry Kill (football coach), Craig Schurig (football coach), and Mike Gardner (football coach) are some of the articles that I've put solid work into.

Second, another list of samples: Tony DeMeo (football coach), Samuel Colgate, Jr. (football coach), Dick Biddle (football coach), and Jake Cabell (football coach) are samples of the 100 or 150 or so stub-articles that I've assembled on coaches.

Third, let me give you my procedure that I've been using so far: I started with my Alma Mater, Southwestern College (Kansas) with their press guide, which gave me a list of all coaches in the history of SC. One was a guy named Dennis Franchione, who we've all heard of... but the others didn't really have articles about them. So I put together a coach's Navbox for Southwestern, and realize that there are a bunch of coaches to work with. I assemble a stub article skeleton (like J. J. Thiel (football coach)) for each coach in the navbox and put it to Wikipedia if an article does not exist, or integrate it in to existing articles if it does exist. Then I start going through those coaches one at a time to write articles about them, create navboxes for other teams where they have coached, etc.

So I do that for Southwestern, and the very first coach I pick was |Bud Elliott. Turns out this guy has been head coach at six different colleges: [{Washburn University]], Emporia State, UT-Arlington, Northwest Missouri State, and Eastern New Mexico (plus Southwestern). So I've got some Navboxes to build there (can't find information on UT-Arlington, program discontinued. Drat!).

Anyway, that leads me to several other colleges, so I hit Washburn--about 40 coaches there, including a guy named John Outland (outland trophy) and another name Ellis Rainsberger, among others. So I build some quick stub-artilces there and make a navbox for Washburn.

My next stop for Elliott was Emporia State, which led me to Coach Kill, who went on to Southern Illinois University. I put a quick article together on him. The next day, ESPN announces he's been hired at Northern Illinois University, a Division I-A (or was that FBS?) school. Hallelujauh! Stub article is in place, and some NIU fans take over!

I go back to Southwestern and hit Art Kahler, which takes me to Dickinson College, which takes me to Colgate University... you get the picture.

Bottom line is this: I now have a SAS program that can take a "Coaching Record" page from the College Football Data Warehouse (Kansas State Example) and not only create a navbox, but stub articles. I can create an entire team worth of coaches and navboxes in about thirty minutes to an hour, depending on the number of coaches.

There's still some manual work to do, but it makes for a great start. But before I go any further on this, I want to get some feedback from everyone--should I attempt to add some more to the process or articles, or what? Suggestions? Comments??--Paul McDonald (talk) 19:24, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Holy crap....that's a lot of information!!! Awesome work. It's always great to go learn how all these coaches just moved around everywhere. Thanks for the excellent contributions! Seancp (talk) 20:01, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Magnificent work! I wish I had the programming talent and motivation that you've got. I'd say the best route from here would be to run through a formal bot process, and get your program certified (if that's what you want) and make it a permanent part of the Wikiproject. That program would definitely take a lot of drudgery out of creating stubs for coaches, and if we can categorize them and organize them so they're easy to find and expand as needed, it'd be probably the biggest addition to the wikiproject in a long, long time. The only thing I could see to add would be a talk page for each of these with the college football wikiproject box on it. That box automatically adds the article to our list of college football articles, and is a big help when we're improving and categorizing. If that could be added as an automatic function to your program, it'd be a huge help.JKBrooks85 (talk) 15:24, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, gang! I'm moving forward with it. Yesterday I did Wichita State, and today I did Drake and Saginaw Valley State University coaches. Missing from this process would be a nice "team page" or even an athletics page, but I'm not getting that into it just yet... smaller schools may not need a specific "football" page methinks...

By the way, requests for me to process a smaller school can be made here or on my home page. Remember, they'll need to be in the College Football Data Warehouse...--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:49, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Need some help making sure I maintained a NPOV

Fumble Rumble

Anyone know if this is legit? Fumble Rumble MECU≈talk 16:31, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it is legit. Don't know if its worthy of an article, though. At least not in its present form. Needs more context/references/etc. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22fumble+rumble%22+cunningham ↔NMajdan•talk 16:36, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
This article appears to have been created and deleted before. Note that the article does not tie in clearly with the current Las Vegas Bowl and it is unclear if it was during an all-star game or a different incarnation of the Las Vegas bowl. Group29 (talk) 16:14, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
You're right. It was deleted on May 2, recreated, and redeleted on May 3. Should we go ahead and delete this again per CSD G4?↔NMajdan•talk 16:44, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

FBS national champions table

As documented here, a new FBS national champions table has been created and can be seen on my user page. The table documents both consensus and non-consensus champions from 1869 to the present (-1871), in accordance with the National Poll Champions and Consensus National Champions sections of the official NCAA record book and the table on the official NCAA sports site, along with notations of contemporaneous and retroactive champions and selectors. It also includes records for each team, and coaches, excluding the period from 1869 to 1887, when none of the teams had coaches, and Princeton (who did not have a coach until 1901) from 1889 to 1899. I have double-checked the information about a thousand times, and, although most of it is extremely in-depth, I would appreciate as many reviews for errors as possible before it "goes live". I plan on updating the table in the FBS national championship article as soon as possible, along with (a) new Most National Championship table(s). I also hope to clean up the rest of the article, with help from other users, as it is in dire need of revision (see StiltMonster's comment on the FBS national championship talk page). Iowa13 (talk) 19:31, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Very nice work. Spot checks on random listings turned up all right. The only thing that bugged me were all the acronyms. I know it's the best way to do things, but would it be possible to insert an abbreviated index every 20 years or so? You wouldn't need the full thing that's under rankings overview, merely a quick-access index that wouldn't force you to scroll up to figure out what the hell R(FACT) means. JKBrooks85 (talk) 02:33, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
Nice suggestion, hadn't thought of that. I was planning on a full acronym table, and that would probably still be necessary, as it would also list years, but I'm glad you brought up that issue. Something else that might work would be an in-article link to the acronym table, every decade or so. It would basically require the same amount of time as an index within the table, but would take up very little space. That's the only issue with inserted indexes — there were quite a few selectors, as you saw, so it would be kind of a stretch space-wise, depending on how it was done. Obviously, with in-article links it would be tedious to then scroll back down to the year, though. We could probably work out something with one of those possibilities. Any other ideas? Thanks for reviewing the table, by the way. Iowa13 (talk) 03:51, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
You'll have to see how it looks, though. Who knows... it could end up looking like crap and end up more confusing than without the extra table legends. JKBrooks85 (talk) 14:53, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Single game naming convention

This is a matter of styling and I cannot find if this has been discussed. Also, I do not know what the NY Times manual of style or otherwise might say about it. Anyway, I always understood that when naming a single game it was either

  • Home team vs. Visiting team

or

  • Visiting team at/@ Home team

There are a number of regular season single game articles where it is the opposite (Visiting team vs. Home Team). I just need to know who belongs on what side of the vs. Thanks, Group29 (talk) 16:14, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the two different forms are mutually exclusive. The second example, I imagine, would be preferred for normal games. But what happens when you're at a neutral site? That's when you'd use the first example. Visiting team at X is standard, but if it's at a neutral site, use Home team vs. visiting team. JKBrooks85 (talk) 16:43, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
The convention we have agreed to use is "Visitor vs. Home team" as in 2005 Texas vs. Ohio State football game where Ohio State was the host school. We decided to stick with vs. instead of @ to avoid confusion in neutral-site games, such as the Red River Shootout. Johntex\talk 17:56, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Help/verification...

Hmmm, I think I'm on to something but I'm not exactly sure how to prove it... Samuel Colgate was the football coach at Colgate University from 1890-1892, and may have been the only person ever to be a head football coach whose name was the same as the university or college where he coached... any takers on that one??--Paul McDonald (talk) 22:41, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, that'll be a tough one to prove. Unless you luck out and find a fairly recent source that confirms that. But, good luck. Not even sure where you would begin to look. But, that's possibly true given a lot of universities/colleges are named after cities/states/etc and the ones that aren't are not usually named after somebody in athletics. I'm not implying Colgate was named after him, merely coincidence. But, yeah, few and far between I'm sure.↔NMajdan•talk 22:43, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Actually, Colgate University was indeed named after William Colgate (grandpa), Samuel Colgate, Sr.(dad), and James Boorman Colgate (uncle) -- the name change happened in 1890, the year coach Samuel Colgate, Junior started the team. I should have been more clear...--Paul McDonald (talk) 22:50, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Fight song proposals

Anyone interested in possible policies (guidelines) about inclusion of university fight songs should review the discussion and offer your input at Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Fight songs. AUTiger » talk 07:28, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Beware of copyright issues. Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? 08:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, seems to be a nest of worms with that issue. JKBrooks85 (talk) 14:24, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

The big issue I see there is that "fight songs" don't necessarily belong to the football team. There are several good quality band pages where the topic is well-covered. For example, Kansas State University Marching Band (okay, I'm biased) but go to the bottom and see the category for University Maching Bands--and, of course, Wikipedia:WikiProject Marching band. HOWEVER, I would be very much in favor of listing the marching band project as a kind of "family member" to our project.--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:13, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

In fact, since the marching band project says they "live across the street" from us, I'll go ahead and put it on the project page (I ran across and knocked, it's them--they were having a party).--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:16, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry if I was unclear, I didn't bring it up here proprosing that fight songs be a part of this wikiproject, but merely to inform likely interested editors about a discussion debating whether fight songs should be covered on Wikipedia at all. Good idea about the marching band project; I can't believe I didn't remember them since I'm a member there too. LOL. AUTiger » talk 21:26, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

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