Talk:2010–11 Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball team

Champions list in infobox
Listing any non-post season tournament accomplishments, IMO, is dumb. However, most teams are listing their in-season tournaments, so there you have it, I defer to precedent. The current debate has been: should the Belfast International Basketball Classic championship, a meaningless trophy like the others, be listed as well in this infobox as well since it happened prior to the NCAA regular season for Pitt? If you have others, you should have it, and here's why. 1) There is no WP Policy or guildline covering this. 2) The article is called "2010-11 Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball team", not the "2010-11 Pittsburgh Panthers NCAA basketball season". Pre-season information exists for most yearly team articles, but few teams claim championships during this time because they rarely play in tournament events like Pitt did this summer. Rarity does not make it inappropriate. 3) The championship is meaningless, yes, but so is the Legends Classic Championship, the Cancer vs Coaches Championship, or any number of meaningless in-season tournament championships. International competition, such as the Melbourne Tigers, is better than many of the teams found in these US-based in-season tournaments. 4) Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia, and thus its audience is not restricted to those readers who are mostly familiar with NCAA seasons and its record books. Nor is Wikipedia necessarily NCAA-centric. Foreign clubs often play in these sorts of international tournaments. To give an analogy, for most of their history, football bowls were unofficial exhibition games whose records were not included in the Official NCAA Records Book. Teams still won them, still bandied them about as championship, and low and behold, they appear in Wikipedia infoboxes the whole way back to the early 20th Century without any regard to the fact they were nothing more than exhibitions at the time. Football National Championships are also completely unrelated to the NCAA, which has never in its history named or verified a national champion, but they still exist (see also Helms Athletic Foundation basketball national championships). Another way to think of this is the myriad of club football and basketball teams colleges used to play back in early 20th Century, prior to the NCAA, and they all count in their records as well. Admittedly, that's not a perfect analogy, but the point is that even today, the NCAA isn't necessarily the final determinant of competition of teams within its own membership, outside its officially sanctioned season and tournaments. 5) In light of that, because it happened outside of the NCAA season, does not mean that these wins somehow magically did not happen. Pitt's team, with the current players, won a championship, had a trophy presentation, the whole 9 yards. Just because it happened outside of the US- or NCAA-centric point of view, not not make it irrelevant or inappropriate to list. The simple fact is, the 2010-11 Pitt basketball team is the champions of the Belfast International Basketball Classic. It's hard to get around that fact. And if you are going to list all championships in an infobox, even the meaningless ones, than that one belongs too. CrazyPaco (talk) 05:24, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Key word's in your explanation is in season, get it, in season! not an exhibition that took place way before the season started. All other tournaments are at least in season. And, as I pointed out before which you just flat ignored, in the opening of the page it says The 2010-11 Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball team represents the University of Pittsburgh in the 2010-11 NCAA Division I men's basketball season. Plain and simple that tournament had nothing to do with the NCAA season. I do agree that listing those championships is meaningless, but at least they actually count in the win/loss coulmns. With that said, I'm done arguing, if you want to leave it, fine, I only try to improve pages and I think that detracts from the page. I would even argue that the scores shoulnt even be listed in the schedule since it has nothing to do with the season. But do whatever you want, I'll be busy actually improving other pages.Bsuorangecrush (talk) 05:24, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
 * No the article is on the "2010-11 Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball team". The opening line says that the men's basketball team represents Pitt in the NCAA season, but that in no way disqualifies  the team representing the university in anything extraneous to the NCAA season, either in the particular language and wording of the article, or in the actual real world. This an article about the team: recruiting season, pre-season,  NCAA-season, post-season...heck, there is nothing that says you couldn't include community involvement if someone wanted to take the time to write about a team's charitable/community activities. If that wasn't the case, none of the recruiting or pre-season activities would be included at all, and those details are part of all of the better yearly team articles I.e. Exhibition games don't count in the win/loss column either, but they still occurred, they are still reported on, and there are still records and box scores kept on all of them by the universities. Those also don't count in official win/loss records, but they still were games with a winner. Again, there is no precedent where these articles are restricted to what the governing body, the NCAA, lists as "in season", and by logical extension, lists of championships are also similarly unrestricted. Albeit, this is a very rare occurrence, even for teams that take international tours, to be involved in a championship event, but that doesn't make it inappropriate, although perhaps unusual. The championship was still won, whether NCAA deemed "in-season" or not. Similar things happen all the time in more international sports, like soccer, where club teams compete in their league, association, and international championships. Personally, I'd remove all these meaningless "championship" titles, but if championships of all magnitudes are going to be included, then I don't see why international pre-season ones shouldn't be as well, as long as they are won by the team that is the subject of the article. CrazyPaco (talk) 08:12, 22 January 2011 (UTC)