Data sources

Source hierarchy

1. Official governing-body and league recordsChampionship histories, record books, official results, and format documentation.
2. Official school, team, and venue recordsHistorical schedules, venue histories, relocations, names, and season-specific home sites.
3. Government, university, and authoritative GIS recordsVenue locations, boundaries, and geographic identifiers.
4. Reputable specialist historical databasesUsed for corroboration or when primary records are incomplete.
5. High-quality secondary referencesUsed transparently when stronger sources are unavailable, with confidence and limitations recorded.

Wikipedia can help locate primary material and may support a provisional or corroborated field, but it should not be treated as inherently authoritative merely because it is convenient. The current release still contains secondary-source dependencies; those are disclosed rather than hidden.

Required provenance

Each championship record should identify, at minimum:

• the season and champion claim;
• the championship basis or selector;
• the historical program or franchise identity;
• the home venue or multi-venue policy for that season;
• the coordinate source and precision;
• the source title, organization, URL, and retrieval date;
• verification status, confidence, conflicts, and notes.

Current college football release

Dataset version

2026.1

Verified seasons

1992–2025

Champion data hash

sha256:f010689f65d6da10c99e0cd3e3a0d6aaab3d1722db2c96b6fff3b095219d478b

Algorithm

wgs84-frechet-v1

Locality data

geonames-cities1000-rg1.5.1

Generated

July 23, 2026

Coverage boundary: Coverage begins with the 1992 Bowl Coalition season. Pre-1992 eras are configured but disabled pending the historical dataset extension.

Published source register

Geographic datasets and attribution

The current locality resolver uses the GeoNames cities1000 populated-place gazetteer and emits qualified nearest-place or rural-area labels. The numeric epicenter remains authoritative; the locality name is a separate interpretive layer.

• GeoNames geographic database — place names and coordinates, CC BY 4.0.
• OpenStreetMap contributors — basemap data and attribution.
• U.S. Census TIGER/Line — planned containment-boundary input.
• USGS GNIS — planned U.S. populated-place cross-check and rural fallback.

Versioning and corrections

A source correction does not overwrite an immutable public artifact. The canonical data is updated, affected ranges are recalculated, QA is rerun, and a new content-hashed release is published. The manifest changes only after the new files have been verified.