User:SMcCandlish/Rivalry game mess

Adapted from: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Grand Canyon Rivalry

As a series of annual games with a name, articles like Grand Canyon Rivalry can often pass WP:GNG, but would be much better at titles like Grand Canyon Trophy Game, and rewritten to make it clear they are an annual (or otherwise periodic) organized series of games, instead of us claiming they are actually sports rivalries in the usual sense. What's happened is several things of this sort have "Rivalry" in their names and are a class of things that are called rivalry games, but they are not sports rivalries as WP and most sources are using that term. That is, rivalry is ambiguous, and writers of these articles have confused one meaning with the other just because of the term being used in the name or being used in vague, amgiguous ways by some source material. A rivaly game is simply a periodic game (often a form of exhibition game) between two teams for the entertainment of themselves and their fans, or sometimes as part of the applicable league system but given a name and sometimes a trophy as a promotional mechanism.

The entire Category:Big Sky Conference rivalries and several others like it have completely confused the idea of such a game series with the idea of an actual sports rivalry: a subculture of animosity or faux-animosity between two teams/institutions and especially the fandoms thereof, a rivalry that has a life of its own and garners source coverage unto itself as a social phenomenon, not as promotional lingo used by coaches or athletic department administrators, not just passing use of rivalry as a word in routine game coverage, and not simply a game or game series name that happens to have "Rivalry" in it. These articles simply have not been properly framed as articles on series of games (which is what the subject actually is) instead of sports rivalry phenomena (which they are not in any sense that is notable or what Wikipedia should care about).

The whole category structure relating to this stuff needs to be cleaned up so that rivalry games are classified as series of games and no longer classified as "rivalries". And lots of these articles need to be rewritten. E.g., to pick one at random, Beehive Bowl (which was quite properly moved away from Southern Utah–Weber State football rivalry in 2016, but was never rewritten) misleadingly opens with "The Southern Utah–Weber State football rivalry, known as the Beehive Bowl, is the annual football game between Southern Utah University and Weber State University"; clearly this is about an annual game series, not about a sports-fan subculture of rivalry. The article has ridiculous WP:OR in it, like "In 2011, Southern Utah joined the Big Sky Conference, making it a yearly rivalry." Two teams coming into competition with each other by being in the same conference or other league system does not make them "rivals" (any more than any other two competitors in any sport are "rivals"). As Frank Anchor put it in an AfD discussion: "two teams simultaneously being competitive for any stretch of time does not make them rivals".

• I think the "nexus" of all of this, now that I've dug a little deeper, is List of NCAA college football rivalry games. There really does seem to be a term rivalry game but this is not the same thing as a rivalry in the sense WP means in its category system and as the term is used in more clearly written journalism than some of the sources at these articles. What's happened is that rivaly game sometimes get shortened in sports writing to rivalry (and in a few cases even in the name of such an event), but this is a different meaning, along the lines of 'organized series of periodic match-ups between a pair of teams in geographical proximity to each other'. It's an ambiguity we are not accounting for. We need to have a category on rivalry games (a series of such matches between two such nearby teams, often but not always with a trophy, and often but not always with a distinct name for the game series), and move the keepable articles to titles that make it clear they are about an event series not about an alleged rivalry in the other sense, of 'a subculture of sports-related antagonism between two teams' fandoms'. E.g. Central Michigan–Eastern Michigan football rivalry and pretty much every other article misnamed and miscategorized like it, are not about "rivalries" but about an organized series of "rivalry game" matches.
  • List of NCAA college football rivalry games correctly names them rivalry games and describes them as series of events, not as a sports-subculture phenomenon (covered at List of sports rivalries). But most of the NCAA list is of articles predominantly mis-titled as if they were rivalries instead of rivalry games.
• Things are complicated further by the existence of the article University and college rivalry, about the institutational establishment of rivalry games as a means of boosting college athletic event ticket sales. This page mis-calls them rivalries, and confuses them with unrelated concepts like academic rivalry; it is chock full of WP:OR of multiple sorts.

While AfD can make a few dents in the problem by picking off articles that claim to be about rivalries that don't have sufficient sourcing to exist as articles no matter how the content is reframed and renamed and recategorized, a more systematic approach is needed for dealing with the mess that has been created, because a lot of these articles on named series of games have been mis-written as rivaly articles, as if they are something like Liverpool F.C.–Manchester United F.C. rivalry, which they demonstrably are not. I'm not even sure where best to address this. The issue seems most common in American college football, but actually crosses sport and national lines. Maybe WT:SPORT is the place?

• Salient comment from Reywas92 at another AfD: "Okay, so some in the media have called [these games] a rivalry because that's a fun word that gins up interest, but that doesn't mean we need an article that compiles [game score] results. A pair of schools is more likely to be called that if they are geographically close and play often, but that can apply to countless combinations of teams and it doesn't mean we have to have an article on it. Games being on the schedule another three years out doesn't change that."
• A probably actually legit sports rivalry in American college football: Navy–Notre Dame football rivalry – not just a series of games, but an student subculture of sports rivaly in and of itself ("most Notre Dame and Navy fans consider the series a sacred tradition for historical reasons", etc.)

Present too-bare wording of WP:NRIVALRY

Rivalries

Sports rivalries are not presumed notable. Articles on sports rivalries, such as Yankees–Red Sox rivalry, should satisfy the general notability guideline.

Some editors make arguments at AfD that various factors matter, like: geographic proximity, length of the period(s) that two teams have been playing against each other, whether an event series has a distinct name and/or a trophy, whether there is real competitiveness between the teams (a particular one-sidedness issue), whether there is evidence that both teams and their fans consider there to be a rivalry (another one-sidedness factor). But these are not questions covered by WP:NRIVALRY or WP:N or WP:NSPORT (yet?). And they seem to blur the distinction between rivalry game and sports rivalry anyway, at least for several of these points.

With more demonstrable salience, common arguments are that the "rivalry" must itself be given significant independent coverage (SIGCOV), and that frequent journalistic mention of the word "rivalry" is not by itself particularly significant (it's both a buzzword and in this context ambiguous). However, the "does it have SIGCOV?" question is still confusing rivalry game and sports rivalry; SIGCOV of a game series that has "Rivalry" in its name and/or which is a rivalry game is not itself evidence of a sports rivalry in the broader sense, only evidence of use of the term rivalry as an athletics-department marketing idea.