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Billy Shaw

American football player (1938–2024)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 8, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

William Lewis Shaw was an American professional football player who was a guard for the Buffalo Bills in the American Football League (AFL). After playing college football for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, he was selected by the Bills in the second round of the 1961 AFL draft. Shaw was the prototypical "pulling guard" who despite his size held his own against much bigger defensive linemen like Ernie Ladd, Earl Faison and Buck Buchanan. He won three straight Eastern Division titles and two AFL championships in 1964 and 1965 with Buffalo.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Billy Shaw” as american football player (1938–2024). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Billy, Shaw and American.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1961, 1964, 1965—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Billy, Shaw and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Billy Shaw”, the useful work is to connect “american football player (1938–2024)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1964 and 1965.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Billy Shaw”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Billy Shaw primary sources, Billy Shaw archive and Billy research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Billy Shaw”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Billy Shaw” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.