Talk:Football

Disambiguating sentence at the top of the page

The disambiguating sentence at the top of this page is really unclear. Most people going to the Football article will be interested to read about either American football or Association football. However, this page does not bring you there, which is confusing enough, but I think we should at least point users to those articles by showing these sports at the top of the page. What about the following:

This article is about all sports known as football. For the most well-known varieties, see American football and Association football. For other uses, see Football (disambiguation).

It's confusing enough that we have the separate pages we have now, but this at least points readers to the articles they are looking for. --Globe-trotter (talk) 10:53, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

"Most people going to the Football article will be interested to read about either American football or Association football" Do you have proof of that or are you making an assumption? That said, I do sympathise with what you are saying; and I also agree that the ball, in and of itself, should not be so prominent. I think this is a case for being bold and waiting to see if anyone disagrees! Pretty Green (talk) 09:52, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

I have to agree that most people who type in 'football' on Wikipedia are expecting to get American football or Association football, although it is an assumption and I cannot prove it. I still feel that would be very convenient to have the statement that Globe-trotter suggested at the top of the page. So you have my vote. DaffyBridge (talk) 20:04, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

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Intro

This article needs a longer intro. It's comfortably over 30,000 characters long and so according to Wikipedia's WP:LEAD guidelines should have three or four paragraphs. However, this page clearly serves some sort of disambiguating function; a shorter lead than the guidelines suggest is therefore acceptable, but certainly I think it would benefit from a second paragraph.

In particular, these guidelines tell us that the lead should establish significance of a topic, which the current lead completely fails to do. Merging a bit more history in with the establishment of the significance of the topic was aim in the paragraph that I created earlier today, which was reverted. I have reverted back, once, on the grounds that I think the editor's given objections are mistaken. Firstly, the added paragraph does not extend the lead too much; rather, it brings the lead closer to expected lengths (of which it still falls short; however, I can see a justification for a short lead on this article). Secondly, the added paragraph fulfils some of the tasks of the lead that were not previously being fulfilled. Thirdly, as per WP:LEADCITE, citations are not required in the lead in the same way they are elsewhere in the text; in particular, the lead adds little new information which is not already cited in the text (I note that the previously existing paragraph has no citations) and so doesn't require citations: they could be added by being pulled up from the body text, but this interrupts the numbering of footnotes somewhat and isn't necessarily desirable. The one new bit of information added to the lead is cited.

Now of course, I'd expect this addition to be edited and improved, that's the whole point of Wikipedia. But I really don't think it should be removed wholesale - its existence corrects flaws in the current article, bringing it closer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style. --Pretty Green (talk) 13:18, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

WP:LEAD states that introductions should be carefully sourced as appropriate. Your version's got a few problems:

• The lone citation does not contain a page reference.
• "Contemporary codes of football can all be traced back to the English public school football games of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, although other regional forms of football (for example, Caid in Ireland) influenced the development of the local code." This probably makes almost no sense to somebody not already familiar with the topic and would not become clearer even if they chose to follow the link provided. The section that mentions Caid does not make any claim regarding influence on "local code"; the only thing close to this that I was able to find were the final two sentences in the Gaelic football section: "Davin's rules showed the influence of games such as hurling and a desire to formalise a distinctly Irish code of football. The prime example of this differentiation was the lack of an offside rule (an attribute which, for many years, was shared only by other Irish games like hurling, and by Australian rules football).". All of which is WP:SYNTH and (yep) unsourced; so I'd advise against using it as the basis for specific introductory statements. There also seems to be some contradiction: if all contemporary football codes developed from those of 18th/19th century English public schools, how does Caid, as "[an]other regional form of football" fit in in terms of influencing local Irish codes? What were these local codes, how did they develop, and what happened to them, if all contemporary forms of football, including Gaelic football, developed from the 18th/19th public school game?
• "The influence and power of the British Empire allowed these rules of football to spread". I could have missed it, but I can't find this claim in the article. Either that statement is found somewhere in the article and is well sourced, or it's just more WP:SYNTH based on the history of football games played in the colonies. Use of the phrase "influence and power" in explaining the spread of the early rules of the game looks dangerously POVish too, but that's less worrying than everything else...

I'm not bothered enough to re-revert, but those are major issues in an article that is already overflowing with unsourced statements and synthesis. The lead could do without it. Bryccan (talk) 15:54, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough - I appreciate the constructive comments rather than the revert. Frankly, I wrote it quickly for others to improve because the article needs a longer introduction. I've taken on your comments. Although I strongly disagree the claim that the Caid example is contradictory - something can develop from one thing, but in doing so be influenced by something else - it does come from a part of the article which is itself not sourced. Accordingly, I've toned down that claim.

I think that the other two claims - that English public schools and the British Empire were the sources of the spread of these early rules - are in the article, though again I'll accept that they are implied via the overall article and not state clearly in one place. Accordingly, I'm quite happy to mark those two statements as {{cn}} for now and then go and get some sources over the next day or two - I've read this in books which I don't have to hand and need to go get a bus in ten minutes! Pretty Green (talk) 17:05, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

McGill? Really?

Wikipedia provides an endless source of entertainment to those who view it as a lens into the way that Canadians view themselves and their relationship to the rest of the world. Continuously underestimated and underappreciated, Wikipedia is the place to set the record straight!

Which brings me to a particular turd which appears in a few of these articles about football. It is claimed in a few articles that, "[m]odern American football grew out of a match between McGill University of Montreal, and Harvard University in 1874." Its source is this claim on the McGill website. I was unable to find a similar claim on behalf of Harvard, but not surprisingly, I was able to find a claim on behalf of the University of Toronto.

I won't deny that an innovation occurred at that game: the McGill players introduced carrying the ball to the Harvard players. But would anyone claim that the McGill players were the first to carry the ball in any type of football game? If McGill were the first to do this, then why don't they get exclusive credit? Some innovations occurred prior to this and many innovations, some much more significant, occurred after this. To take a frame out of the football-history "movie" and to claim that this frame represents the innovation that made the game "modern" is simplistic, and it doesn't take into account the fact that the rules of the game evolved over time, as opposed to being invented whole cloth. (See this page for a more realistic approach).

Distorting facts, or placing facts out of context, or only including those facts which flatter your prejudices, or in this case your country, makes for poor articles but entertaining reading. I can't even read an article about M.I.A. without being fed an excruciatingly large amount of information about her success in a small and not very significant market. (And look! There's even a link to Canada, unlike even Japan! ...woooooo, impressive). Wikipedia has become a Canadian cargo cult. Fashioning sentences, paragraphs, sections, and complete articles to summon the Plane of Significance and the Plane of Respectability seems to be an ongoing project of a large number of Canadian editors, and I sincerely thank them for never ceasing to bring a smile to my face. --AntigrandiosË^Talk 21:33, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

It's like being at a bar with God and listening to him brag about inventing lizards, and when you call him on it he shows you a picture of a coelacanth. --AntigrandiosË^Talk 06:12, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

It's a completely unreferenced section of the article and marked as such. I don't know anything about 'North American' Football, having only edited the soccer bit of this article. But you can always change the page rather than harp on about an imaginary Canadian cabal on the talk page. Pretty Green (talk) 13:43, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting it's a cabal, that would imply a conspiracy. I'm suggesting that there are too many editors who seem to edit on behalf of Canada, rather than on behalf of clarity and accuracy. I realize that this problem isn't limited to Canada, but promotional silliness on behalf of Canada is an endemic problem on Wikipedia.

At this time I have neither the time or inclination to remove this claim from this and the other articles where it appears. It's a depressing example of how Wikipedia has progressed: instead of evolving to be an increasingly accurate reflection of the world, it is becoming a platform for those wish to chip away at accuracy, perspective, and truth, nugget by nugget, in order to flatter their own prejudices. --AntigrandiosË^Talk 23:48, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

• I'm not Canadian, but the notion that McGill introduced rugby style football to the U.S. is fairly well represented in reliable literature. See this article pages 3-4, which describes the Harvard-McGill game in some detail. I'm pretty sure David M. Nelson discusses the importance of the Harvard-McGill in The Anatomy of a Game, I don't have a copy handy right now, but it's a fairly comprehensive work on the history of American Football. While the source in this article is a bit shaky, reliable sources do exist, and the notion is fairly uncontroversial and commonly accepted among historians of American football. --Jayron32 04:25, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Please reread my third paragraph above. I'm not sure that we're disagreeing on anything. As stated, my objection is to taking a single innovation and claiming that it demarcates the boundary between primitive or early football and "modern" football. (Scare quotes used because I would bet there is disagreement among experts as to which innovations and rule changes constitute the origins of the modern game). Games played by Harvard years after the game played against McGill would be unrecognizable to even modern Canadian football fans, much less American ones. Nineteenth century games with makeshift rules that differed from location to location were, as you mentioned, similar to Rugby. It wouldn't be at all similar to what you see people in the NFL playing today. This claim gives undue weight to a single innovation and is the equivalent of citing a randomly selected eighteenth century game of rounders as being the first game of "modern" baseball. --AntigrandiosË^Talk 23:14, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with the statement, insofar as it is factually correct. Modern football did grow out of those contests in a very direct fashion. Modern humans grew out of Australopithecines, though modern humans look distinctly different. If "grew out of" is a problem, perhaps a term like "evolved" may imply more changes between the McGill-Harvard contest and the modern forms of American football. But there is a direct and undisputed line between the McGill-Harvard games --> "Concessionary Rules" games between Yale & Harvard --> Walter Camp from Yale. Check the sources I provided above. That the game changed from the first McGill-Harvard games over the next few decades doesn't diminish the fact that the game was crucial in later devlopments. Before its influence, the predominant form of football played in America was association football, or something darn close to it. That was the game that all of the schools except Harvard preferred. It left Harvard without anyone to play, which is why the scheduled the rugby match with McGill. Most of the other schools playing football at the time were playing some variation of "kick a round ball in the goal" type games; the introduction of the "run the oblong ball across the line" game to the United States came directly from the McGill-Harvard contest. It is quite correct to state that modern American football evolved in a direct line from the McGill-Harvard game. McGill did not invent that style of game, but they certainly introduced it to the United States. --Jayron32 23:33, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

You seem to be arguing against the following proposition: Nothing of significance "grew out of" the Harvard/ McGill game of 1874. That's an easy windmill to tilt, but it's not what I wrote. Again, please reread my third paragraph above. You differ from both your source and mine by seeming to argue that a single event or a single game somehow demarcates the line between early and modern football. (Although I'm not quite sure that that's what you're arguing, you don't directly address my concerns and don't seem to be arguing against what I wrote). I just reread the article that you cite, and I would argue that it supports my position more than it does your's. It states that, "Some historians have gone so far as to call the Oneidas' victories the first games of American football, maintaining the hybrid Boston Game was neither soccer nor rugby and, therefore, was what Americans recognize as their favorite autumn sport." The Oneidas were youngsters in Boston who played this game prior to Harvard/ McGill game. It goes on to mention that Harvard's game, prior to McGill's "invention" of modern American football, was as follows: "The emphasis seems to have been on kicking, but the ball could be caught and run if the catcher was pursued." Obviously my earlier statement that "the McGill players introduced carrying the ball to the Harvard players" is incorrect. It seems that the McGill's rugby game simply introduced rule and scoring innovations to the Harvard game. It was a step along the evolutionary ladder, but so was kicking a ball with your foot, and so was the line of scrimmage and the forward pass. It seems pretty arbitrary to claim that this event was what modern American football "grew out of."

And SPEAKING of the evolutionary ladder, your example of Australopithecines relates to exactly the point I'm trying to make. Australopithecus is one of our ancestors, but they didn't magically appear whole cloth, and there were species between them and us. Australopithecus was an innovation on the way to modern humans, but it is both a descendant and an ancestor of other equally important species. It doesn't hold a privileged position in the evolutionary trajectory of our species. Humans no more "grew out of" or "evolved" from them than we did from earlier or more recent examples of humans. No one would mistake a bunch of Australopithecines for modern humans, even if they were running around with a ball and were playing something that vaguely resembled modern rugby. (Also, and I just have to add this, if the Australopithecines were playing by the rules played in the Harvard/ McGill game, there wouldn't be a line of scrimmage or a forward pass). Case Western Reserve University doesn't take credit for discovering fossils of "modern" humans, but McGill is making an analogous claim. Modern American football is the result of many innovations in many different times and places, and by oversimplifying that, we loose a lot of the richness of its history. --AntigrandiosË^Talk 17:54, 13 February 2012 (UTC)