User:Murphanian777

Cue intro song
Good day! I'm not sure how or why you've ended up on my userpage, but if you're lost I am happy to show you the exit.

I am user Murphanian777, also known as Gabon or Beocca if you'd like to change it up. Admittingly, I first joined the wiki to add my name to a list of notable alumni from my local high school, an endeavor that was quickly reverted by John from Idegon as obvious vandalism (my reason for inclusion was "knows how to edit a Wikipedia page"). I thought that since the page was so obscure, I could actually pull it off, but it didn't take more than three hours for the page to be fixed. That was when I started to wonder about Wikipedia's organizational structure and I discovered just how many policies, people, admins and bots made this site possible. Since then I have only worked to add my knowledge to this massive encyclopedia, and the extent of such knowledge has been almost exclusively in American football, particularly on the college level (although I have done decent work on military, athletic club and intramural programs as well).

Origins of Murph
Murphanian, or Murph in general, has a couple of different meanings that exist only within the parameters of Urban Dictionary. The first and most paramount definition is that Murph means "anything and/or everything". It is essentially a nonsense word that could mean anything in any situation you want. "Murphanian" is the official name for a citizen of the Murph Empire, which I elaborate on below. You could argue that my citizen numeral is 777, although the real reason is that the number 7 is also synonymous with the fraternity that was created around this term.

To my knowledge the word was first used by one of my friends in the 3rd grade, and by 4th grade I had created that definition. The word itself came to symbolize our friend group, which in itself functioned as a sort of fraternity or exclusive club known at various times as the "purple group" or "Murph club". The color Purple and the number seven also became strongly associated with the club during this time, along with some minor symbols like Tacocat and Churro Panda. We established the fraternity with four members and added a fifth two weeks later, but the premise fizzled out for the remainder of the year. However, By the 5th grade the club had been revived and was expanded into a functioning society carried out during our recess time. It had its own declaration of independence, Constitution, judicial system, military command, and national anthem. After some deliberation over the name for our new nation of about twenty-two kids, we eventually settled on the Malice Universe Republic of Peanut Butter, or more commonly as the M.U.R.P.H Empire (yes, the last word does not match its abbreviation, deal with it). The Empire lasted for a few months before it was taken down by an insurrection led by a group of friends who called themselves the Orange club. After a brief period of hiding, the other founding members and I recreated the original Murph club, and it has not changed much since then. Today there are only two members who still adhere to the, admittingly almost cult-like, premise of the power of the word we created to make each other do absolutely anything. Over the last few years I have been the most substantial contributor to the society. During the "postbellum years" I created the official MURPH seal, and spent almost a year writing a chronology of the alternate universe associated with Murph that ended up at around 130 pages and detailed the history, demography, geography, religious practices, conflicts, and royal lineages of the made up world.

It was such a strange, significant part of my life growing up that I feel an obligation to uphold the honor and presence that we gave to the term, and if I'm giving the chance I hope its the last word I say on this pale blue dot. BUT ANYWAY... you can go about your business now.

Gabon
In 7th grade I completed a project in my French class on Francophone countries. My first pick was Canada, but my best friend loved the country and claimed it right before my turn, so I went with Gabon instead. Since then it has acted as a sort of pen name for me, and I have used it often when I sign emails.

Project history
I like to compartmentalize the bulk of my work on this site, so I usually split my tasks into a number of projects that I totally make sure to see the whole way through... *cough*

Power 5 seasons
I set out on my initial "project" after I joined the WikiProject on college football and discovered the master team list that detailed every uncompleted season history of the football programs. One of the goals at the top of the page was to create a season article for every Power Five FBS school, so I got to work on that. On the original version of this userpage I mentioned that I was the one who completed this project, and while that is true, I only finished the very last and very small piece of a massive goal that took hundreds of hours and many, many other users besides myself. The only Power 5 team that did not have all of its season articles by the time I arrived was NC State, who was missing articles in 1896, 1898-1904, and 1915-1924.

Notre Dame opponents' seasons
The premise of this project was to create a season article for every single opponent of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. There were around 200 season articles to create, most of them minor, defunct or obscure teams from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they were all incredibly interesting! I loved this project because I felt like I was discovering things that had never been compiled before into sources of information, and even though nearly all of the pages have less than 500 total views I was proud to have contributed to my dream school.

While I once again cannot claim full responsibility for the completion of this goal, I consider this to be my first real project because A) I came up with the goal, and B) It took a hell of a lot of time, effort and research to finish. It has also been my largest project in terms of the number of articles I had to create, although I think the NDNV page has surpassed the overall size of every article here combined. Anyway, the first page I created that belongs in this category was the 1895 Indianapolis Light Artillery football team, which was also technically my first (non-deleted) wikipedia page, although by the time I took it off of that silly beginners approval waitlist and gave it its own page I had already completed the Power 5 project. The project itself started around May 13 when I wrote down all the seasons I needed to research on a sheet of paper and began to cross them out one by one. I created exactly 150 articles, the last being the 1941 Carnegie Tech Tartans.

Here were some of my favorite pages from this project:
 * 1888 Harvard Prep School of Chicago
 * 1895 Rush-Lake Forest COMBINED TEAM
 * 1895 Indianapolis Light Artillery
 * 1901 South Bend AA
 * 1903 Wabash
 * 1945 Great Lakes Navy

In the future I may also complete this same process for opponents of major college football teams, with some options being Michigan, USC, or Navy.

Military and Athletic club seasons
During my time on the ND opponent's project, I would take a break from time to time to work on unique athletic club or military football teams. The athletic club teams were mostly amateur teams from the 1880s to 1900s, while the military teams were largely found around the World Wars.

The projects started rather informally, but I eventually wrote down lists of season articles I wanted to write for them both. The most substantial contribution I made to the wiki in my opinion was the 1942 AP service poll, an end-of-season ranking by the Associated Press of the ten best military football teams of the 1942 season. During the world wars, many of the best college football players had been enlisted in the armed forces, and were subsequently stationed on military training bases around the country that then created dominant football teams. During the first world war the AP poll did not exist, but by 1942 the rankings were booming, although they did not allow military teams to be ranked with college teams (this would be rescinded for the next season). To combat this ban, and to recognize some of the incredible teams like Great Lakes Navy and the four pre-flight schools in Iowa, Georgia, North Carolina and St. Mary's (CA), the special AP poll was instituted by a panel of 91 sportswriters and released on December 2nd.

AFU
The AFU project was to complete an encompassing and thorough article on the American Football Union. Established in 1886 around the New York metropolitan area, it is the oldest American football league in the world.

I stumbled across the American Football Union while working on the 1895 Orange Athletic Club football team, which would go on to play two seasons in the NFL in 1920 and 1921. I noticed that the Orange had membership in some mysterious athletic league called the AFU, but when I searched online I found absolutely nothing. I decided to dive deeper and over the next few weeks I wrote season articles for all the teams in the Union, which included an extensive number of old athletic clubs, and rediscovered a lot of their early history from 1886 to 1890.

However, my progress slowed when I began to focus on bowl teams, and this was effectively abandoned when I started on the NDNV project. I hope to get back to it when I'm done.

AFU season articles I created:
 * Brooklyn Hill Football Club: 1886
 * Crickets of Stevens Institute: 1886
 * Staten Island Football Club: 1886
 * Unions of Columbia: 1886, 1887
 * Staten Island Cricket Club: 1888
 * Orange Athletic Club: 1887, 1888, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1895
 * New York Athletic Club: 1887, 1888, 1889, 1890
 * Staten Island Athletic Club: 1889
 * Manhattan Athletic Club: 1891

NCAA Bowl teams
This was a short-lived project of mine to create a season article for every FBS football team to take part in an NCAA-sanctioned bowl game. I created about 15 to 20 articles before I switched over to NDNV.

NDNV
The Notre Dame Non-Varsity football project was officially established at 5:43 pm (ET) on August 17th, 2019. The goal of by far my most ambitious project to date is to fully document the extensive history of intramural football at the University of Notre Dame. That includes all the reserve, freshmen, junior (high school), minim (grammar school), oddball and interhall (dormitory) football teams over a span of 133 years. On top of all that, this was the first time that there was absolutely zero work done for this subject on Wikipedia, and very little done elsewhere.


 * Reserves (1887-1960s?)
 * Minim department (1888-1928)
 * Junior department (1888-1921)
 * Interhall (1890-present)
 * Freshman (1913-1971?)

If you want to look at the draft version of this massive article, you can click here.

I have to give Jweiss11 some credit for giving me the inspiration for the project. During my work on the Unions of Columbia, Jweiss mentioned that if I wanted to create season articles for such a minor football team, it would be better to put all the information in a single comprehensive article. That's what I'm doing at the moment, although after realizing just how gargantuan the article was becoming, I am eventually going to need to split it into decades or separate the different types of intramural teams into separate articles.

Some of the most useful sources I've discovered so far have been:
 * The Notre Dame Scholastic
 * Notre Dame Football Review
 * Newspapers.com
 * yearbooks.com

NDAAs
My most recent project has been to create a comprehensive list of every All-American football player. I have gotten through everyone from 1903-1945, but I am trying to include every selector and selection I find, and sourcing is so tedious, that I don't expect to be done for a while.

The Old Timer's and Blue-Gold game
I started a new project on January 20 to account for the old-timer's (alumni vs varsity) and blue-gold (varsity offense vs varsity defense) games that occurred at the conclusion of the spring football season since 1929.

The project is developed here.

Other projects I would like to undertake

 * Primary sources for all Notre Dame football games
 * Interhall basketball and baseball at the University of Notre Dame

Page creations
This is a list of all my page creations.

Trophy Room
Does this Wikipedian have enough awards to call it a room? If you feel like taking this to court, I'm more than happy to play Juror 8.