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

2026.17

Verified seasons

1869–2025

Champion data hash

sha256:c8be6b702b443a9b00f3fa10fefcb64c45974d0439cba3aed53ebc2052de74d7

Algorithm

wgs84-frechet-v1

Locality data

usgs-gnis-populated-places:sha256-8b6e2a3e678898ea+ca-metro-seed

Generated

August 7, 2026

Coverage boundary: Champion coverage spans 1869 through the latest completed season using the NCAA FBS Championship History inclusion table. Pre-1992 coordinate rows expose program_home_reference_point or historical_site_reference methods where season-specific venue chronology remains provisional.

Published source register

Geographic datasets and attribution

The preferred locality resolver uses the U.S. Geological Survey's national GNIS Populated Places extract. GNIS includes named communities of every size, including many unincorporated places omitted by population-threshold gazetteers. The resolver emits a qualified nearest-place label; the numeric epicenter remains authoritative and the town name remains a separately versioned interpretive layer.

• USGS GNIS Populated Places — preferred official U.S. named-community source; public domain.
• GeoNames geographic database — disclosed fallback when a build does not contain the full GNIS extract; CC BY 4.0.
• OpenStreetMap contributors — basemap data and attribution.
• U.S. Census TIGER/Line — planned legal-boundary containment layer.

Public data downloads

The published CSV files expose the championship inputs, all derived ranges, and the locality audit. Coordinate methods, precision, source URLs, selector text, and inclusion decisions remain visible so an independent reader can reproduce or challenge the result.

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.