Football Info Find

I consider myself one of the few remaining knowledgeable people regarding the UT Arlington / Arlington State College football teams. I got there by acquiring knowledge from many different outlets and different ways. Over the years, I have bought 16 different ASC / UTA football media guides from various online outlets. Occasionally I search to see if I can find any of the 11 I am missing. 

I conducted one such search this month and there were a lot of the same sites I have seen the times I have looked, but one new one caught my eye. 

You won't find any links to the main page, but on the UTA athletics site, there's a football page. If you didn't know any better, it looks like any of the other 15 sports' sub-sites. The football page has the front page rolling news site, which is currently manned by Hall-of-Honor and former NFL-great Bruce Collie. 

At the top left, there's the typical schedule, roster, news and archives tabs.

If you click on schedule, it takes you to the main page. If you click on roster, the site directs to a blank 1985 roster heading page. If you click on the news page, the Collie story headline pops up. 

But clicking on the archive page brings a small amount of treasure. I noted the published information of other sports historical documents at the start of the summer. Early women's sports, volleyball and women's basketball all had media guides, rosters, stats, box scores and other information available. The same was done for football. 

Now, most of the archives are placeholders with no links. But there are links for the roster for 1959 through '77, stats for 1974-'76 and 1981, and the full media guide for 1975 and '76. The rosters are interactive and not a PDF, which is a nice touch, though there aren't any player bios uploaded. I wouldn't expect there to be any. Still cool to quickly fond which high schools the former players came from.

What was also very nice for me, the '76 media guide was number one on my list of ones I wished to acquire that I didn't have. Call me old-fashioned, I'd rather have the physical copy, but this is definitely a second-best option. You're on deck 1966 guide.

Does this signal anything? I'm not sure about any grand scale. The archive section was last updated on June 1, right around the time of the other sports.

But I checked for other disbanded sports by replacing the football part of the URL with the disbanded sport. Men's swimming, powerlifting and fencing all returned nothing. I'd love to get my hands of anything from the mid 1970's for the swimming team.

I don't want to be that guy that says gee, the June 1 date was after the student vote to fund a football team. They voted in favor and now there's something on the site.

But for the longest time, the Athletic Department had zero in the way of football information available. Even when a player made the Hall of Honor, there wasn't much made available. I remember when College Park Center opened and I saw a lot of things I never knew on their wall in the main concourse. I started gathering information before that. It obviously accelerated since.

I've become a self-taught subject matter expert. It would be great if other people could do something similar with far less work. Kudos to the department for making the information available.