General Forum

 I was perusing Jeff Torborg's bio on the TCDB (baseball).   For college, it has Rutgers, which is correct.   It also has Montclair St.   Jeff got a masters from Montclair.     Are we doing graduate degrees too on bios?   And no, he didn't suit up as a grad transfer as they do nowadays.

If he attended the college during his lifetime, then it counts. Whether he played sports there or not is irrelevant. 

Next we'll be including honorary degrees.

Why is it irrelevant?  I disagree and think the college or university that an athlete played at is completely relevant for their athletic profile.  But if they attended an institution and didn't compete there I don't see it having any bearing on their athletic profile.  <shrug>

I can see both sides of the argument. If we're doing a personal profile on a person, we should list all of their schools attended, athletics or not. 

If this were just a sports card website, I could make an argument for only including colleges that someone played at.

However, this is a trading card site, so one could also make an argument to say only schools where someone played athletics doesn't truly represent a personal bio.

It doesn't bother me either way. The guys that I collect, I know where they went to college, and I don't particulary concern myself with every biographical detail of current and former Reds players, so that knowledge isn't necessary for me personally. I think this is another one of those issues where TCDB as a whole needs to decide if we're going to try and document each person's profile as detailed as possible.

As an aside, if we do include every college someone attended, I would like to see a team listing of each team an athlete played for during their career included somewhere on their page in addition to their current team. But that's another topic for another thread and another time!

Lot of work to do on the colleges if you want to include every college.   Start with Rodman and his Cooke County College before his Southeastern Oklahoma State days.     Many guys went to community colleges first, so someone better get busy here.     Also   J.J Watt has an honorary doctorate from Baylor

As for the honorary doctorate, I don't think that's the same as earning a degree at a college, unless the school giving him the honorary doctorate is where the athlete attended.  If Lebron James took some courses at UCLA and they gave him an honorary degree, sure, include it in his bio.  If he never took courses there and they gave him a degree, then no it shouldn't be included.

As for playing a sport at that college, not all athletes playes their respective sports in college.  Carl Edwards didn't join a racing team at Mizzou, they didn't have one.  Gene Snitsky wasn't representing Mizzou as a pro wrester in his college days even though he did play football for them.  Evan Bourne wasn't in the pro wrestling ranks either at Mizzou while he was getting his business degree.

To expand it a bit, some actors don't always act in college either, some don't decide to act until years later.  They should have their colleges listed.

Maybe all of this gets easier for me to digest if jasongerman9's wishlist items gets fulfilled and a succinct listing of each team a player played for in this professional and non-professional career were to exist. 

I think everyone would say that Shaquille O'Neal went to LSU.  But he actuall holds degrees from Louisiana State University, University of Pheonix, Barry (Florida) University and attended classes at the New York Film Academy's Filmmaking Conservatory.  Seems silly to list all of those.

Many of the players never earned a degree at the college they "attended".     I don't think earning a degree can even be considered here or we  would probably have to wipe the college off many players bios.     But if you are going to list the college that someone attended for even less than  a year, than we should definitely have any junior or community colleges listed.

I would actually like the idea of all the teams a player played for in their bio.  It might help finding cards a bit easier if you knew what years to look for without going into filtering.  That or have an expanded bio.  That might be a better option if we were to include all the colleges and such a person attended.

Actually I am leaning to that idea a bit more.  Having an option of an expanded biography could list all the teams they played for and colleges they attended.  Maybe have a button like the Card of the Day does now which allows you to expand it.