Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/River City Rivalry


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. While some potentially-usable coverage was identified, rebuttals regarding the quality of the cited sources were not refuted, delete has a slight numerical majority, and late momentum. signed,Rosguill talk 16:20, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

River City Rivalry

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

This article discusses a rivalry between teams that are not traditional rivals and do not have enough coverage for a separate article. As a result, the article doesn't meet the WP:GNG. Let&#39;srun (talk) 03:07, 11 November 2023 (UTC) Relisting comment: Relisting, since there is disagreement over notability here, a source analysis would be helpful. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 03:10, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Sports, American football, Ohio,  and Pennsylvania. Let&#39;srun (talk) 03:07, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. To the extent any of this is encyclopedic and not indiscriminate local-sports trivia, it can be summarized at each team's article in a short section, and perhaps also summarized at a list a US college football rivalries, if that exists somewhere. This is basically "college cruft". A short-lived series of what amount to exhibition games is not a notable "sports rivalry". Googling around for this turns up various mentions of a rivalry that are not articles about a rivalry but about games and teams and players and such; and some coverage that is ostensibly about the alleged rivalry as such, but it all appears to be local and/or student press, aside from regurgitation of one of them at Yahoo!News. These materials all seem to be "of a piece" and recycle lots of the same language verbatim (like "after an 11-year hiatus" and "The two schools [...] created the trophy when they were members of the Big East Conference", etc., so this is a very strong indication they are just recycling a press release from one of the teams or its school's athletics department and thus lack independence from the subject. One tellingly says "It was only truly a rivalry when both teams played in the Big East", i.e. when they were in formal competition against each other in a league system. But this is not what much if any of the material is about; it's about the exhibition game trophy they set up, so it's a manufactured "rivalry". Wikipedia doesn't exist to memorialize short-lived "school spirit" PR shenanigans.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:12, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment, by 's standard, this problem exists in very large portion of the the college rivalry articles we have. Just look at Nebraska Cornhuskers football, they have 10 rivalry articles in the infobox! The proliferation of articles on rivalries, which are often only of importance to the schools involved, needs to be addressed. funplussmart (talk) 19:19, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * That is generally my view, yes. We have a tremendous amount of trivial fancruft of only local interest, and it makes up the majority of our articles on "sport[s] rivalries". The vast majority of this stuff should be reduced to a few sentences at the relevant team/school articles. But we also have some legitmate articles in this topic area that are of widespread notability, e.g. Liverpool F.C.–Manchester United F.C. rivalry. They probably have to be handled on a case-by-case basis, tedious as that is. There are other but related problems, such as the total trainwreck at List of association football rivalries, which is a morass of badly confused OR, that is mingling together personality disputes between players (e.g. over girlfriends or whatever, and completely unrelated to sport), alleged "rivalries" between team/club managers (what does that even mean?), actual sport rivalries as the term is generally understood, antipathies between fandoms of different countries (often going far beyond football but rooted in historical conflicts), and series of games between two or more places are just series of games and not a "rivalry" in any encyclopedic sense, and probably some other claptrap as well. It's basically the fallacy of equivocation compounded several times over, to glom together everything that could conceivably be termed a "rivalry" by anyone under any of many senses of that word.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:57, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * @funplussmart - Nebraska has played some of the teams listed 50-100 times over a span of 130 years. Rivalries sometimes don't even require a single game to be played to be created. KatoKungLee (talk) 01:12, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Newspapers.com has what appears to be plenty of coverage of this – not enough time to sort through it all right now however. BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:14, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep - Not really buying the argument of mainstream coverage of various games not counting as coverage for the rivalry. Here's 4 more good articles to add to the sources here - 1, 2, 3, 4 KatoKungLee (talk) 01:03, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't have a strong view one way or the other but FWiW here some examples of coverage (some of which cast doubt on how real the rivalry is): here, here, here, here ("UC-Pitt game has a trophy, but it's not a rivalry yet"), here ("the River City Rivalry trophy -- and while it might seem like a contrived 'rivalry game' driven by marketing gurus, the  players insist it is real because of familiarity among the players").  Cbl62 (talk) 01:26, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Keep. Even if the coverage has a predominant tone of "bet you didn't know this was a thing", it's still coverage that is good enough for our encyclopedia standards. Ab e g92 contribs 16:00, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Keep. Meets GNG (as WP:NRIVALRY requires) with sources presented above (even if excluding student newspapers). Meets WP:SUSTAINED as well. Cbl62's sources are quite solid and from KatoKungLee seems quite good as well. &mdash;siro&chi;o 07:27, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete The fact that the series was named as a rivalry by the schools should not be controlling. This was (as the sources confirm) an attempt by school officials to create a "contrived rivalry game". It lasted only eight years from 2005 to 2012. A number of publications picked up on the "River City rivalry" moniker, and accordingly one can argue that GNG is satisfied (and I do not agree that local coverage is irrelevant). But most of the proffered coverage is simple game coverage with passing mentions of the supposed rivalry. What I am not seeing is in-depth coverage of the rivalry itself. All said, this is, at worst, not a real rivalry and, at most, a contrived and short-lived rivalry between non-major programs. Processing the totality, reasonable minds can disagree, but my gut leans delete. Cbl62 (talk) 18:11, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Question. This has been cited as an example of SIGCOV, and I agree it has depth. Does anyone know what pittsburghsportsnow.com is and whether it's a reliable source. Cbl62 (talk) 18:34, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
 * They seem to have a full editorial staff with full-time sports journalists - usually that indicates reliability. BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:04, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Calling the author a full-time sports journalist is a stretch. His bio (here) says he "hopes to become" a full-time sports writer. Until a year or two ago, he says he was a grocery stock clerk and now works for a company called J.T. Enterprises where he wrote a brochure for an industrial supply company. Cbl62 (talk) 00:20, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Hmmm... I guess I read that too quickly - it does say though that his only job in the past three years has been with the website - it also says he previously wrote for The Pitt News, something we'd probably regard as reliable. BeanieFan11 (talk) 00:26, 22 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete. I agree with Cbl62. This was never really a rivalry except for a brief period between 2005 and 2012 when both schools were competing together in the Big East and were trying to create a rivalry between them. Had they remained together, it very well might have developed into a true rivalry, however, Pitt left the Big East for the ACC and the series ceased until a non-conference matchup earlier this year. And, even the newspaper coverage from the 2005-2012 era leaves a lot to be desired. Sources like this, this, this, and this are all basically saying, "this isn't really a rivalry yet, however both schools are hoping that it might become one in the future." Ultimately, because of conference realignment, that never wound up happening. Ejgreen77 (talk) 19:04, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. Scrounging for sources testifying to some kind of worthy notability of the subject brings forth a sorry harvest. Trying to make a mountain our of, at best, a molehill is what's that. -The Gnome (talk) 13:01, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete: Fails GNG. Agree with Cbl62 this seems manufactured for promo purposes. Not seeing any sources showing this meets guidelines.  // Timothy :: talk  15:07, 26 November 2023 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.