Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football#NCAAFootballSingleGameHeader template usage

{{u|Dissident93}} made some edits to Template:CFB Yearly Record Subhead and Template:CFB Yearly Record End yesterday that removed gray background coloring for heading and total rows in the college football head coaching record tables. This has something do with rendering in light-on-dark color scheme ("dark mode") it seems. The gray background color is still present in the analogous templates for college basketball head coaching record tables. Doggie Julian#Head coaching record is a good example where you can compare the two. I certainly think the tables look better with the gray shading. Dissident93, can you explain what the problem was with the "dark mode"? Is there a way we could keep the gray shading by default, but change things as needed for dark mode? I know you also have some more general concerns about the layout of these tables. Jweiss11 (talk) 19:54, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

:I thought I was going crazy, my eyes are not fond of these all-white record tables. Thetreesarespeakingtome (talk) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

::It looks better with the gray. It's a little easier to distinguish between tenures when the whole table isn't white. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 17:28, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

:::{{u|Dissident93}}, can you explain the dark mode issue here? Jweiss11 (talk) 03:26, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

::::It is [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Recommendations_for_night_mode_compatibility_on_Wikimedia_wikis#Avoid_static_values_for_inline_background_and_text_colors recommended to not use inline colors] within articles and templates for better dark mode compatibility unless necessary, which apparently this was. I've re-added the color with a {{code|!important}} tag so they should look normal again in light (default) mode. Can somebody confirm? ~ Dissident93 ^(talk) 00:41, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::Dissdent93, thanks for the explanation and making the change. Yes, things look normal (or as they were before) in light (default) mode. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:10, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

There is a discussion occurring at the CBB wikiproject that raises the same question for CFB.

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College basketball#Are redshirts who didn't play considered national champions?

PK-WIKI (talk) 02:32, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

:From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search&prefix=Wikipedia+talk%3AWikiProject+College+football%2F&search=Redshirt+champion&ns0=1&searchToken=2r2555weuongpszwzxnvdzdpz searching "redshirt champion" in the archives], it looks like related issues have been discussed in this college football project twice before:

:*WT:WikiProject College football/Archive 10#Redshirts on championship team templates

:*WT:WikiProject College football/Archive 13#Redshirts on Champions' navbox?

:Left guide (talk) 06:01, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

:As it relates to college football, [https://www.buckeyerosters.com/player/t-j-downing/ T.J. Downing] redshirted (zero games played) on the 2002 Ohio State Buckeyes football team that won the 2003 Fiesta Bowl national championship game. He then recorded appearances in 2003 and 2004 before becoming a starter in 2005.

:In 2006 The Marion Star, a reliable third-party secondary source, stated that Downing [https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-marion-star-tj-downing-national-ch/170017612/ {{tpq|"could trump that by winning a national championship ring to match the one he received as a redshirt freshman in 2002."}}]

:Circa 2011, Ohio State came under investigation for Tattoogate. One of the [https://media.cleveland.com/metro/other/cicero-complaint.pdf pieces of evidence cited in the court records] of the case was "T.J. Downing's National Championship ring" that had been traded for NCAA-violating tattoos.

:This [https://www.landgrantholyland.com/2013/6/7/4406590/ohio-state-terrelle-pryor-tattoo-for-memorabilia-scandal-auction-pictures same ring was later sold on eBay], clearly marked "DOWNING" and engraved with the score of the 2003 Fiesta Bowl.

:T.J. Downing was a redshirt for this season and did not record any playtime but did receive a national championship ring. PK-WIKI (talk) 19:53, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

The "bowl games" parameter at {{tl|Infobox college football player}} (example usage Kyren Lacy) seems like clutter that fails to impart relatively meaningful information unique to that individual player; it's far more of a team accomplishment than a player accomplishment. To me, it would be like if NFL players had a "playoff finishes" parameter showing the result of their final playoff game each year they appeared. I'm inclined to remove it, but would be curious as to what others think first. I checked the talk and archives of both this project and the template, and couldn't find prior discussions about this. Left guide (talk) 06:50, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support. I agree with you, but bowl games have been in player infoboxes for many years. Accordingly, we will need a good consensus here to implement such a change. Cbl62 (talk) 18:14, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

:: To clarify, merely being on a team that plays in a bowl game isn't infbox worthy, but something like a Rose Bowl MVP can remain in the highlights. Cbl62 (talk) 19:39, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

:::Yes, that was implied, but thanks for clarifying. :) Left guide (talk) 20:10, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

• It's been a week with no opposition expressed, so the parameter has been removed. Left guide (talk) 07:24, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
• Agree here. Merely playing in a bowl game doesn't need to be listed in a player infobox. Jweiss11 (talk) 13:47, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

File:Symbol watching blue lashes high contrast.svg You are invited to join the discussion at :Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Are 'Sports-Reference.com' websites reliable sources for redshirt seasons and awards?. PK-WIKI (talk) 17:54, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

1899 Sewanee was demoted from GA to C. A part of me understands, but another part finds it hard to add anything more. What can be done to improve the article? The team deserves a proper article. Also, what is Fuzzy trying to say about Suter? I think that's the only thing hurting the article. If that were clarified, I'd be more bitter about the demotion. Any help appreciated. One thing to add might be the film Unrivaled suggests the reason for Sewanee's road trip was the disputed baseball title with Texas. Cake (talk) 04:28, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

:{{yo|MisterCake}} I assume this post refers to the article 1899 Sewanee Tigers football team. Have the concerns raised at Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/1899 Sewanee Tigers football team/1 been addressed yet? If not, that would probably be a good first step. Aside from that, expanding the article with reliable sources wouldn't hurt. If that's something you're interested in taking on, some of the best sources I found in a cursory Google search are [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/sports/sewanee-tigers-alabama-oklahoma.html this New York Times piece], a [https://www.pbs.org/video/unrivaled-sewanee-1899-1vp1hk/ PBS documentary], and a [https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ninety_Nine_Iron/FB7zAwAAQBAJ?hl=en University of Alabama Press book]. I hope this reply is helpful. Left guide (talk) 07:55, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

:: The article includes some unsourced assertions that appear dubious. For example, it says without sourcing that Sewanee played "on rocks for a gridiron on their home field." While they may have played on a dirt field with some rocks tossed in here and there, it seems highly unlikely that they played "on rocks for a gridiron." I will review in greater detail and leave comments on the article's talk page. Cbl62 (talk) 15:30, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

Skip Holtz has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 02:13, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

My work on GLIAC decade articles for the 2010s is making good progress. E.g., Ferris State, Grand Valley, Hillsdale, Michigan Tech, Northern Michigan, Northwood, Saginaw Valley, Wayne State. I would like to start such articles for the 2020s but first want to see if can form a consensus for those. Here are a couple options:

• Option 1. Start the article with a title covering only the current years. E.g., Grand Valley State Lakers football, 2020–2025. Then move the article at the end of each year to include the following season. Thus, in December 2005, we would move the article to encompass 2026. E.g., Grand Valley State Lakers football, 2020–2026.
• Option 2. Start the article with a title covering the full decade. E.g., Grand Valley State Lakers football, 2020–2029. Then just add each new season as it unfolds.

Both options are fine with me, though I have a slight preference for Option 1, so as to avoid "crystal ball" or "too soon" criticisms. I'd like to see if we can reach consensus before creating any such articles. Cbl62 (talk) 04:31, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

: The best option is a third one, already in use at Dakota State Trojans football, 2020–present. With "present", the article doesn't have to be renamed every year. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:38, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

:: Thank you. That works for me. We would then move such articles to a "2020–2029" nomenclature in December 1928. "Siri, set a reminder for December 2028." (o Cbl62 (talk)

::: Yes, once the decade is over, or we get to 2029, we rename the article accordingly. Until then, Siri! Jweiss11 (talk) 16:53, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

::Agree with the "present" option; spares a great deal of unnecessary editorial work down the road. Where possible, it's better to build things to last for the long haul rather than create a condition which requires regular maintenance. Left guide (talk) 07:41, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

I am notifying editors of this project that an IP-hopping vandal {{IPuser|2601:8C:982:1A40:C572:AC5D:84C9:14CC/32}} has been disrupting various college football team pages for about 2 days (also disrupted NHL-related pages, which I primarily edit so I ended up here after inspecting the IPs). It changes the number of national/conference/division titles in infoboxes. I am not a participant of college football-related pages so I cannot confirm the changes to conference and division titles, but I can clearly see the number of national titles by team at College football national championships in NCAA Division I FBS#National championship claims. I have already reverted the changes 3–4 times, but the IP hopper is coming back and changing back to incorrect numbers. – sbaio 12:51, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

Is there a good sources out there for award winners? The award winners section of Missouri Tigers football was tagged as having no citations (which is correct, there aren't any citations there) and I was just wondering if this project has a good source for this stuff. If not, I'll go through and find sources, just wanted to check here first. Esb5415 (talk) (C) 13:57, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

:{{yo|Esb5415}} Did you try checking the reference sections of the linked award articles themselves? Some of them appear to have several sources (i.e. John Mackey Award#References and Burlsworth Trophy#References). Left guide (talk) 10:15, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

The deletion rationale given was:

• {{tq|"Searches did not turn up enough in-depth coverage from independent, reliable sources to support meeting WP:GNG."}}

We have a series of 27 articles about All-South Independent football teams:

• :Category:All-South Independent football teams

All of these articles are similar to the 1969 All-South Independent football team article and each cites a newspaper article.

Also see this 2024 conversation about these articles:

• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Archive 28#All-South independent football teams

We should probably either keep this article or delete all 27. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 00:51, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

Pop Warner has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 12:55, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

The following deletion discussion may be of interest to project participants. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:09, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

There's a split proposal/discussion at WT:NFL#Split proposal for Field goal that involves some college football material. You are invited to join there. Left guide (talk) 21:51, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

Is there any opposition to creating more award categories like :Category:Fred Biletnikoff Award winners and :Category:Chuck Bednarik Award winners to match :Category:Heisman Trophy winners and :Category:Walter Payton Award winners? I would usually just WP:DOIT but they involve a large number of pages. My rational is that if a standalone article and navbox already exist for them, then a matching category should as well. ~ Dissident93 ^(talk) 19:54, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

:Are these awards really as defining as the Heisman Trophy? Looks like we have the following categories for college football player award winners:

:* :Category:Heisman Trophy winners

:* :Category:Jon Cornish Trophy winners

:* :Category:Maxwell Award winners

:* :Category:Walter Camp Award winners

:* :Category:Walter Payton Award winners

:* :Category:William V. Campbell Trophy winners

:I'm certainly in favor of keeping the Heisman winner cat. There others run the gamut from pretty obscure and probably not defining, like Jon Cornish, to kinda close to the Heisman, maybe, like Maxwell and Walter Camp. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:25, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

::The same defining logic should also apply to their associated navboxes, which nobody has stated any opposition to. ~ Dissident93 ^(talk) 00:46, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

Not sure whether there was discussion of this before implementation, but there's been a change this year of putting each captain's name on a separate line in the season article infobox. The impact is to make our already-long infoboxes even longer. The 1972 Iowa Hawkeyes football team infobox is an example of this. With two or three captains, the information previously displayed on one or two lines (depending on screen width), but now it spreads the same information over three separate lines. I'm not seeing the benefit of this change. Cbl62 (talk) 20:32, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

:It can be a bit much sometimes (see 2019 Anna Maria Amcats football team with seven) Thetreesarespeakingtome (talk) 20:38, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

::Cbl62, as part of a massive effort to cleanup and standardize these infoboxes and lots of other stuff, in recent months I've been cleaning up those captains fields. The template documentation always indicated that separate fields should be used for each captain. In practice, sometimes that was followed, but in many other cases a single field was used for multiple captains with break tags or commas separating each captain. A negative of the later practice was that a field containing multiple captains would carry the singular label "captain" instead of the more appropriate plural label "captains". That same issue applies to MVP fields. To make this all work better, we've expanded the number of captain fields from 6 to 8 and MVP fields from 2 to 4. Much of this was discussed at Template talk:Infobox college sports team season. There are still some rare cases of more than 8 captains (e.g. 2003 Louisiana Tech Bulldogs football team) and more than 4 MVPs (e.g. 1985 Iowa Hawkeyes football team). If we think it's better to have the lists of captains/mvps on a single wrapping line separated by commas instead of one player per line, we could easily tweak the code of the template. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:18, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

:I don't see captains as being significant enough to meet MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE. Note it on the roster, or temporarily in a section listing if a roster doesn't exist yet. —Bagumba (talk) 06:42, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

:We should generally design infoboxes to reflect the weight of sources. Are captains a key part of season summaries in reliable sources? If so, include them; if not, leave them out. Left guide (talk) 06:57, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

• I came upon this issue while building out the Iowa season articles. 1979 Iowa Hawkeyes football team is an even more egregious example: With five team captains, the list takes up a disproportionate space in the infobox.

:As for Bagumba's suggestion to delete the field: Team captains were much more significant historically than they are today, and I think the field should be maintained at least for older season articles. The significance of the captain has definitely diminished as teams went from having "a captain" to having two, three, five, or even seven co-captains. I'm open to deleting the captains display for modern teams -- though I'm not sure what the cutoff date would be. Or maybe we just adopt a rule that captain names aren't displayed when there are multiple captains. I'm open to suggestions, but displaying four, five, or even seven captains in the infobox is undue.

:As for the display format, I definitely favor going back to how it's previously been done by wrapping the captains on a single line. And FWIW, template talk pages don't generally get followed. For significant changes like this, it's probably best to discuss at the main college football talk page. Cbl62 (talk) 11:36, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

::{{tqq|As for Bagumba's suggestion to delete the field}} Is the suggestion being made to delete the captain field from the infobox template itself? If so, that would be a bad idea. The template is shared with many other sports, in some of which captains seem to be more important, like hockey and soccer. Such a change based only on football issues would also be a sort of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. If there are design considerations in CFB that drastically differ from how it's often used in other sports, it may be best to split off football into its own infobox template. Left guide (talk) 12:05, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

::: I didn't phrase that well. The issue is not removing the field from the overall teamplate. The issue is making a decision as a college football project as to whether to fill in the field when a team has three, four, five, six, or seven captains. At the extreme, when you have so many captains (maybe three or four on the field at the same time!), the concept of a "captain" loses its significance, and we can decide as a project that this is not the sort of core information that belongs in an infobox. Cbl62 (talk) 12:24, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

:::: I think this is an example of something that's not broken and doesn't need to be fixed. From the beginning of college football in the late 1800s through the mid 1900s it was most typical to have one team captain, maybe two. In the early days, rosters were much smaller and players played both ways. The same set of 11 guys played on offense, defense, and special teams, with maybe a few permanent substitutions late the game, similar to how soccer or baseball still works now. Since the two-platoon system and free, at-will substitution and re-entry was adopted in the 1940s, college football rosters have continued to get larger and larger, and players more and more specialized. And the number for team captains has often grown in like kind, first to 2 and 3 in the latter decades of the 1900s and then often to a handful, like 4 to 8. Take the 2023 Michigan Wolverines football team for example, which had 6 team captains: 3 on offense and 3 on defense. Captains have leadership roles not only on the game field itself, but in practice and the "lockeroom" development of the team. I think this remains core information about a team that belongs in the infobox. With respect to Cbl's suggestion, wherever possible we should avoid subjective cutoffs of articulated sets of coherent and objective data points. Jweiss11 (talk) 15:02, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

::::: Actually, the role of a team captain has changed dramatically over the course of college football history. In the early days, the captain had major responsbility in running the team. Today, it is often just an "honorary" title bestowed on a group of senior players. It is no longer core information worthy of infobox treatment. If it is to be included, it should absolutely not receive separate lines for each "captain" -- doing that makes it grossly undue in a modern team infobox. Cbl62 (talk) 16:03, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

There's a discussion at the lower portion of WT:NFL#TV / streaming networks in schedule tables about possibly removing TV-related parameters from {{tl|Americanfootballbox}}, which would affect college football articles that the template is used on. You are invited to join there. Left guide (talk) 11:22, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

Colt McCoy has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 14:01, 22 May 2025 (UTC)