A few years back, I embarked on an ambitious project. I reviewed every single football game story ever written in our small town's paper. The goal was to compile a high school football record book for our county, which at any given time has had 4-6 teams. I ended up spending an afternoon or two at the library, and scanning through microfilm at the office for an hour or so after deadline, for about six months.
Finally finished it, reviewing every game story I could find back to the early 1920s. I compiled team and coaches' records, touchdown records and yardage records. darn near went insane doing it. I checked and rechecked stuff, and sometimes checked it a third and fourth time when I thought I might have missed something or found a slight inconsistency.
Near as I can tell, I now treat this thing as gospel. It's as good as we're going to get.
At the end of it, we ran the full and complete record book along with a story explaining the methodology of the research. Over the last five years, it's become the basis for a ton of follow-up stories and even game stories as some of the records were broken.
I'm pretty darn proud of it.
So anyway, a year or two later some guy's kid is closing in on the career pashing record. He's touting his kid's achievements, and rightfully so. The record was more than 30 years old. It was quite a feat to even approach it.
And then the kid finishes about 200 yards short.
The guy's tune changes. We start getting e-mails thanking us for the coverage, and hinting that the reason the kid didn't get the record was because the coaches changed their playcalling to feature fewer pashes as he got closer to the mark.
Later on, on a statewide high school sports message board, there's a thread about football records. I made a post mentioning my project and what we had published. This guy goes on there and says it's all bunk, because there's no way to verify any of it.
First, he insinuated that we made it all up. He wanted to see our work. I told him exactly how I did it and that he was welcome to spend the next six months at the library if he wanted to verify it. I welcomed him, even challenged him, to do it.
Then he changed course and said that because there's no film of the older games, there's no way to prove what was printed in those old game stories is accurate and thus none of it can be trusted as fact. Basically, saying everything we've printed in the paper for the past 100 years is utter bullship.
After again politely explaining the research methods I used, that the old game stories were as close to historical record as there is, and that he's welcome to build a time machine and travel back to doublecheck our stats, I decided it was time to stop feeding the troll.
A couple years later, another guy came along and obliterated the longstanding record anyway, and we made a big deal of it. Didn't hear a peep from the guy. Go figure.
Finally finished it, reviewing every game story I could find back to the early 1920s. I compiled team and coaches' records, touchdown records and yardage records. darn near went insane doing it. I checked and rechecked stuff, and sometimes checked it a third and fourth time when I thought I might have missed something or found a slight inconsistency.
Near as I can tell, I now treat this thing as gospel. It's as good as we're going to get.
At the end of it, we ran the full and complete record book along with a story explaining the methodology of the research. Over the last five years, it's become the basis for a ton of follow-up stories and even game stories as some of the records were broken.
I'm pretty darn proud of it.
So anyway, a year or two later some guy's kid is closing in on the career pashing record. He's touting his kid's achievements, and rightfully so. The record was more than 30 years old. It was quite a feat to even approach it.
And then the kid finishes about 200 yards short.
The guy's tune changes. We start getting e-mails thanking us for the coverage, and hinting that the reason the kid didn't get the record was because the coaches changed their playcalling to feature fewer pashes as he got closer to the mark.
Later on, on a statewide high school sports message board, there's a thread about football records. I made a post mentioning my project and what we had published. This guy goes on there and says it's all bunk, because there's no way to verify any of it.
First, he insinuated that we made it all up. He wanted to see our work. I told him exactly how I did it and that he was welcome to spend the next six months at the library if he wanted to verify it. I welcomed him, even challenged him, to do it.
Then he changed course and said that because there's no film of the older games, there's no way to prove what was printed in those old game stories is accurate and thus none of it can be trusted as fact. Basically, saying everything we've printed in the paper for the past 100 years is utter bullship.
After again politely explaining the research methods I used, that the old game stories were as close to historical record as there is, and that he's welcome to build a time machine and travel back to doublecheck our stats, I decided it was time to stop feeding the troll.
A couple years later, another guy came along and obliterated the longstanding record anyway, and we made a big deal of it. Didn't hear a peep from the guy. Go figure.
