Talk:Notre Dame Fighting Irish football

Gatewood's First Name
While at ND, Gatewood played under the names Thomas and Tom. Sometime since, however, he has spelled his name with an added "h', and it is under this spelling that he has been inducted into the CFB HOF, per this [] and this.

And Now - Coaches and Seasons
The treatment of Notre Dame football on Wikipedia is woefully lacking compared to that of other major programs, many of which have Good or Featured Articles or Lists associated with coaches, seasons, teams, bowls, and players. The only Good Article appearing on the list of WikiProject College football is on Ara Parseghian.

This is certainly not a matter of design or intent; it is simply that the work has yet to be done by editors interested in creating a comprehensive and accurate presentation of ND football on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has about 250 million page hits per day, a staggering figure. It is the 8th most-visited site on the entire internet, and for better or worse Wikipedia is the default first source for hundreds of millions of readers worldwide. If the profile of Notre Dame's football program and its rich history is to be preserved and presented in detail and with accuracy and accessibilty to fans of the sport and people in general, it must be on this site.

I believe the first step to ameliorate this is to improve this article itself and then work from there. The most visible fault with the article is its approach to the history of coaches and seasons. The section on Knute Rockne has been tagged as too long, and it could be trimmed somewhat while retaining its emphasis on the coach's significance to the university and the sport overall. ND's 4 other HOF coaches (Dan Devine is there too) include two badly underdevelped sections and one much too long. Frank Leahy won 3 NCs for the Irish and is behind only Rockne in national HC all time winning% but gets 2.5 paragraphs; Ara Parseghian won at least 2 NCs and brought the program back into national prominence but gets the same as Leahy while mediocre performers like Davie, Weis, and Kelly have massive and overly-detailed sections. The Lou Holtz section is far, far too long and has rightfully been tagged as such. The proper places on Wikipedia for much of the bloat on Holtz are the articles on the individual seasons.

Here is what I would propose for a collaborative effort to fix this and begin to bring the article at least up to GA status.
 * Establish a hierarchy of importance for information to be included for each coach.
 * Maintain the relative brevity for the average coaches and limit the treatment to 3 to 4 paragraphs.
 * Standardize the sections on the 5 HOF coaches and develop a hierarchy of information, such as leading with number of FCs, then overall W-L at ND with winning %, noting best seasons and why, alluding to two or three significant games in those seasons, perhaps noting Heisman winners and other prominent players.
 * Somewhere in the article, it should be mentioned that ND's success helped to promote national interest in CFB beyond its somewhat narrow origins in the Northeast, and likely more importantly became a source of pride for U.S. Catholics, many of whom still felt marginalized by the larger American society in the exact time period that the Irish rose to prominence and who felt a vicarious connection with the university (as in the Wikipedia article on Subway Alumni). This last point would of course need to be carefully sourced but most definitely can be.

Once this base article is improved, I think that we can begin work on lists and other ancillary matters to help bring ND's position in college football to its rightful position here on Wikipedia.

The fact of the prominence of the program makes developing solid sources for virtually anything regarding ND football possible. In any event, as both an ND alum and an overall fan of CFB, I think that ND football deserves a better representation on this site than it currently has. I will begin soon to standardize the coaches' subsections as mentioned above, and I hope that others who have an interest in ND and CFB will consider working on this or other areas as well. Sensei48 (talk) 23:34, 27 April 2022 (UTC) Jim Moran, BA 1971

Kyle Hamilton
Kyle Hamilton is in the NFL as an Notre Dame alumni, but not listed. 2600:1011:B040:94C:DDB3:D474:4D46:D06B (talk) 16:51, 22 December 2022 (UTC)