Sources · methodology · data quality
Data Quality
Validation against the official record book, every correction applied to the source data, and the known gaps.
537 of 571 record-book entries for players whose careers fall entirely within the statistical era match the computed totals exactly (94.0%); 554 (97.0%) are within two units. The remaining differences are documented in the data-quality report and almost all reflect small corrections on the official side or errors on the source pages (for example, a 2024 cumulative-statistics page that credited an opponent's quarterback to Wheaton — the box score was used instead).
Corrections applied to source data
47 corrections- Dropped 1942-12-05 vs Elmhurst University (L 40 - 49) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1942-12-07 vs Augustana College (IL) (L 50 - 55) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1942-12-12 vs Northern Illinois University (L 32 - 41) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-01-09 vs Eureka College (L 61 - 62) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-01-11 vs Concordia University Chicago (W 38 - 33) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-01-22 vs Elmhurst University (L 39 - 46) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-02-06 vs North Central College (L 29 - 54) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-02-13 vs North Central College (L 34 - 46) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-02-16 vs Lake Forest College (W 55 - 36) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-02-20 vs North Park University (W 64 - 42) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-02-22 vs Eureka College (L 52 - 64) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Dropped 1943-03-01 vs Lake Forest College (W 42 - 31) listed under season 1951 on the opponent-history page: those are 1942-43 basketball scores.
- Corrected date 1999-11-07 -> 1999-11-06 for 1999 vs Elmhurst University (opponent-history page date disagrees with the season report).
- Corrected date 1999-11-14 -> 1999-11-13 for 1999 vs Augustana College (IL) (opponent-history page date disagrees with the season report).
- Season report lists 2002-10-19 as 36-6 but the opponent-history page has 2002-10-19 vs Carthage College as W 35 - 6; kept the opponent-history score.
- Season report lists 2002-10-19 as 36-6 but the opponent-history page has 2002-10-19 vs Carthage College as W 35 - 6; kept the opponent-history score.
- Corrected date 2017-10-16 -> 2017-10-14 for 2017 vs North Central College (opponent-history page date disagrees with the season statistics page).
- Season report lists 2024-11-23 as 32-35 but the opponent-history page has 2024-11-23 vs University of Wisconsin-Stout as W 35 - 32; kept the opponent-history score.
- Added 2000-11-11 vs Augustana College (IL) (W 37 - 30) from box score 2000_augie.htm; it is missing from the opponent-history pages.
- Box score dated 2017-10-16 matched to game on 2017-10-14 vs North Central College (same season and score).
- jersey override for Ben Peays matched 0 players; not applied
- 2025 season record and coach taken from the 2025 statistics page; the official year-by-year page had not been updated yet.
- Record-book lines inside the statistical era with no player of that name in the season reports, left unattached: Aiden Kingsbury (2022-2025), Freddy Ellis (2000-2003).
- 86 players appear only in the record book and the media guides — careers that closed before the first surviving season report. They have profiles built from those lines alone.
- Paul Boehms: official record book career spans 1994-1997; the archive has no season report for 1994, 1995, 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- Jeff Ford: official record book career spans 1996-1999; the archive has no season report for 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- Tim Hardy: official record book career spans 1995-1998; the archive has no season report for 1995, 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- Jerry Hawkes: official record book career spans 1995-1998; the archive has no season report for 1995, 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- Ben Peays: official record book career spans 1996-1999; the archive has no season report for 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- John Peays: official record book career spans 1996-1999; the archive has no season report for 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- Mitchell Slater: official record book career spans 1996-1999; the archive has no season report for 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- Blake Stevens: official record book career spans 1994-1997; the archive has no season report for 1994, 1995, 1996, so only the record book's totals survive for those seasons.
- 1997-2005 story 'Football downs North Central 38-10 to retain the "Little Bra' carries no dateline; dated 2000-09-30 from the North Central College score in its headline.
- 1997-2005 story 'Wheaton gridders down Wabash 17-14 in home opener --- Boxsco' carries no dateline; dated 2000-09-16 from the Wabash College score in its headline.
- 1997-2005 story '#25-Wheaton tops North Central 41-7 to retain the Little Bra' carries no dateline; dated 2002-11-02 from the North Central College score in its headline.
- 1997-2005 story 'Wheaton Thunder Football 2003 Game Stories #5-Wheaton remain' carries no dateline; dated 2003-11-08 from the North Park University score in its headline.
- 1997-2005 story 'Thunder earns 21st straight regular season victory in a 65-6' carries no dateline; dated 2004-09-18 from the Greenville University score in its headline.
- 1997-2005 story 'Thunder win season opener against Gustavus Adolphus 42-21 (B' carries no dateline; dated 2004-09-11 from the Gustavus Adolphus College score in its headline.
- 1997-2005 story 'Wheaton Thunder Football 2004 Game Stories Wheaton's season ' carries no dateline; dated 2004-11-27 from the University of Mount Union score in its headline.
- 1997-2005 story 'Thunder gridders defeat North Park 56-14 (Boxscore)' carries no dateline; dated 2004-11-06 from the North Park University score in its headline.
- Story archive sources: 772 stories from athletics.wheaton.edu and 113 from cciw.org. Each story keeps a `source` field, and its relative url and image path resolve against that publisher's host rather than a shared one. The athletics story API exposes seasons 2005 onward only and the Wayback Machine holds no /news/ URLs before 2007, so 2006 is the practical start of the online record; nothing earlier is on the open web (the Wheaton Record, 1875-present, is still being digitized by the College Archives, and pre-2005 newspaper coverage sits behind commercial archives).
- cciw.org story bodies arrive with the site's related-stories rail and footer attached, and two thirds also carry a 'Follow the CCIW' sign-off plus the conference's standing boilerplate paragraph; all of it is trimmed in scripts/crawl_cciw.py so only the article remains.
- 11 of the 113 CCIW stories carry a byline; the rest are unbylined conference releases. On one (the 2026 preseason poll) the byline field holds a press contact rather than an author and is normalized to the person's name.
- 167 stories from 1997-2005 come from the college's first athletics website (www.wheaton.edu/Athletics/football/), which published game stories and news notes years before athletics.wheaton.edu existed and whose story API only reaches 2005. Each season's stories page was overwritten as the season went on, so they are recovered by reading every Internet Archive capture of it and de-duplicating on the body text; the fullest capture of each story wins. 150 carry a dateline, and stories linking back go to the Wayback capture they were read from, the page itself being long gone. 2006 onward is left to the athletics newsroom's own archive.
- The Wheaton College Record (Wheaton's student newspaper) supplies 5 game reports from the 1919 season. Seven issues of volume 32 were scanned by the University of Illinois and are on the Internet Archive; published before 1929 they are in the public domain, and they are the only pre-2005 Wheaton football coverage that is both online and free to reproduce. The Archive's OCR is a single reading-order dump of a multi-column broadsheet, so stories jump between columns and pages and advertisements bleed into neighbouring text; every automated segmentation of it produced articles that began mid-sentence or ran into unrelated stories. These four were therefore transcribed by hand from the page scans (data/transcriptions/record/) rather than machine-extracted. The Record is dated by month, so each carries a month-precision date and the site never renders a day for them.
- Source conflict inside the Record itself: the game report in v.32:3 gives the Mt. Morris score as 26-0, while Coach Gary's season table in v.32:4 gives it as 27-0. Both are transcribed as printed and neither is silently corrected. Coach Gary's table is also the only surviving account of the full 1919 schedule: Northwestern 6-3, Lake Forest 19-6, St. Viators 8-0, Y.M.C.A. College 7-6 (W), Mt. Morris 27-0 (W), plus a second-team win over St. Albans 12-6.
- Per-game box scores (1999-2011 StatCrew game files) were summed and compared with the official season reports: rushing, passing, receiving and tackle totals agree exactly in every season except 2005 tackles (season report revised after the games, box total 18 lower) and scoring in 1999-2000, where four 1999 game files and the St. Xavier 2000 file carry no scoring summary, so PAT kicks in those games cannot be attributed.
Name resolutions
78 applied · abbreviations, nicknames and last-name-only entries| As printed | Resolved to | Rule | Seasons |
|---|---|---|---|
| wes cannonnier | wes cannonier | manual | 2013 |
| rusty rosen | randy rosen | manual | 1998 |
| day | andrew day | last-name-only | 2005 |
| roche | scott roche | last-name-only | 2009, 2010, 2011 |
| furrow | jon furrow | last-name-only | 2015 |
| zylstra | noah zylstra | last-name-only | 2015 |
| estes | peyton estes | last-name-only | 2019 |
| williams | tj williams | last-name-only | 2019 |
| steve pagh | stephen pagh | roster | 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 |
| p ittersagen | pete ittersagen | roster | 2006, 2007, 2008 |
| an studebaker | andy studebaker | roster | 2006 |
| m steinbrueck | mark steinbrueck | roster | 2006 |
| gr roszkowiak | grant roszkowiak | roster | 2006 |
| tom christner | thomas christner | roster | 2006 |
| j schirman | jordan schirman | roster | 2007, 2008 |
| g roszkowiak | grant roszkowiak | roster | 2007, 2008 |
| m griffiths | matthew griffiths | roster | 2007 |
| a studebaker | andy studebaker | roster | 2007 |
| z bratkovich | zach bratkovich | roster | 2007 |
| j carpenter | justin carpenter | roster | 2007 |
| matt griffiths | matthew griffiths | roster | 2008 |
| m cook | morgan cook | roster | 2011, 2012 |
| drew reiter | andrew reiter | roster | 2012 |
| mike swider | mikey swider | roster | 2012 |
| and lindquist | andrew lindquist | roster | 2013 |
| a langemeier | austin langemeier | roster | 2013 |
| jake killeen | jacob killeen | roster | 2016 |
| will smith | william smith | roster | 2018, 2019 |
| jackson schmid | jack schmid | roster | 2018, 2019, 2021 |
| c grotelueschen | caleb grotelueschen | roster | 2019 |
| jon burtram | jonathan burtram | roster | 1998 |
| j roberts | jordan roberts | roster | 2012 |
| g roberts | grayson roberts | roster | 2012 |
| h thorson | hunter thorson | roster | 2012 |
| g cook | garrett cook | roster | 2012 |
| p dansdill | pat dansdill | roster | 2012 |
| a dansdill | adam dansdill | roster | 2012 |
| b johnson | ben johnson | roster | 2012 |
| j swider | justin swider | roster | 2012 |
| andre lindquist | andrew lindquist | roster | 2013 |
| a lindquist | andrew lindquist | roster | 2015 |
| z lindquist | zach lindquist | roster | 2015, 2016 |
| m smith | marcus smith | roster | 2015 |
| k johnson | keith johnson | roster | 2015 |
| t sigler | tyler sigler | roster | 2016 |
| d gray | daniel gray | roster | 2016, 2017 |
| brayde anthony | brayden anthony | roster | 2019, 2022 |
| ma tucker | matthew tucker | roster | 2021 |
| ch bonacquisti | christian bonacquisti | roster | 2021, 2022 |
| n jones | noah jones | roster | 2021 |
| d skakavac | dimitrie skakavac | roster | 2022 |
| phili lochirco | philip lochirco | roster | 2022 |
| nicholas beard | nick beard | roster | 2023 |
| andrew studebaker | andy studebaker | abbrev/nickname | 2005 |
| b ittersagen | br ittersagen | abbrev/nickname | 1999, 2001 |
| b wolfsberger | bryant wolfsberger | abbrev/nickname | 2000, 2001 |
| br pastermack | brian pastermack | abbrev/nickname | 1999, 2000 |
| david tofilon | dave tofilon | abbrev/nickname | 1999 |
| g granberg | ga granberg | abbrev/nickname | 2001, 2002 |
| g kirkendall | geoff kirkendall | abbrev/nickname | 2001, 2002, 2004 |
| geoffrey rowson | geoff rowson | abbrev/nickname | 2005 |
| j heckendorn | ja heckendorn | abbrev/nickname | 2002 |
| j moore | jeremy moore | abbrev/nickname | 2015, 2016 |
| jon wills | jonathan wills | abbrev/nickname | 2000 |
| m gutierrez | ma gutierrez | abbrev/nickname | 2002 |
| mitch slater | mitchell slater | abbrev/nickname | 1999 |
| peter ittersagen | pete ittersagen | abbrev/nickname | 2005 |
| jd leman | jd leman | record-book merge | 1998, 1999, 2000 |
| br ittersagen | bryan ittersagen | record-book rename | 2000 |
| ty gose | ty gose | record-book merge | 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 |
| d thornfeldt | drew thornfeldt | record-book merge | 2001, 2003 |
| g tillotson | grant tillotson | record-book merge | 2001 |
| ga granberg | garrett granberg | record-book rename | 2003, 2004 |
| gr tillotson | grant tillotson | record-book merge | 2003 |
| dr thornfeldt | drew thornfeldt | record-book merge | 2004 |
| jd east | jd east | record-book merge | 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 |
| tj williams | tj williams | record-book merge | 2017, 2019 |
| bryan ittersagen | br ittersagen | roster-to-report | 1998 |