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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Pat Preston

American football player, college athletics administrator (1921-2002)

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 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ7143928 ↗
Source-derived summary

Paddison Wade "Pat" Preston (June 15, 1921 – June 23, 2002) was an American professional football player and coach and college athletics administrator. He played professionally as a guard for four seasons in the National Football League (NFL) with the Chicago Bears. Preston served as the athletic director at Wake Forest University from 1954 to 1955.

Editorial summary

“Pat Preston” enters the record as american football player, college athletics administrator (1921-2002). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Preston, American and football can confirm, complicate or overturn.

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—1921, 2002, 1954, 1955—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1921-06-15. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Preston, American and football.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Pat Preston” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Preston, American and football provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7143928. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 2002, 1954 and 1955.

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 “Pat Preston”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Pat Preston primary sources, Pat Preston archive and Preston 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 “Pat Preston”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Pat Preston” 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.