After years — more than a decade — of not being able to locate the 1994 Class 1A nine-man all-state team, I finally have it. Thanks to my former coach at Midwest, Mike Good, for the hookup! This team was the last team dating back to 1932 that I had yet to locate. The completionist in me is quite happy right now. The listings are on the 1990s all-state page.
Also, I fixed Kemmerer’s coach for 1999; it was Jason Sleep, not Joe Aimone. Thanks to Chris Wagner for his help with that fix!
–patrick
A few quick updates to the site:
I fixed the score for Upton’s 34-26 loss to Newell, S.D., on Sept. 9, 1977. This game is famous for being the most overtimes in a game in Wyoming history with five OTs. I noted this game a few weeks back in another blog post, where I first noticed the discrepancy between what I had (32-24) and the actual final.
I also found three coach names — two first names and one full name — for the coaches’ project. I found first names for Cody’s coach in 1921, E.E. Phillips, and Evanston’s coach in 1924, Julian House. I also found Greybull’s coach in 1925, John Simpson.
All the updates have been made on all the relevant pages.
–patrick
Eighteen years.
That’s how long this site, at least in its earliest iterations, has been online.
I first posted the framework for what would become wyoming-football.com online in early 2005 and officially moved it to this URL in mid-2006.
I was just over 23 years old when I started the site. I’m now 41. And my life has changed in significant ways in the past 18 years.
When I started, wyoming-football.com was a repository of historical information. It still is, but it’s grown into much more than that.
The problem with growth is that it requires time and energy.
At 41, I no longer have the time or the energy to run the site as I have the past several years. After some serious thinking, I have decided to return wyoming-football.com to its roots as a repository.
Don’t worry: The site will stay. What will change is how much time and energy goes into doing live work on social media and on the site in real time on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays during the season.
Two big changes are forthcoming this fall.
First: Live updates to the site will end. Instead, the season’s scoreboard page and standings will be updated once a week, probably each Sunday during the season. Team pages will no longer be updated weekly with results. Meanwhile, one big bulk update will continue to come at the end of each season for updates to team pages, similar to what I do with champlists.com and wyoming-basketball.com.
Second: Social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook will stay, but I will not use them for live score updates during the season.
Other activity you see on the site right now will continue, albeit some things may change slightly.
On The HQ — the blog where you’re reading this right now — weekly blog posts with picks will continue during the season. I will also likely post less frequently, although hopefully more thoughtfully, during the offseason, and I will stop doing individual posts for each coaching change that takes place during the offseason.
I won’t stop research, or accepting tips on research, on information from games that are missing it, or seasons where coach information is missing. That work will continue, but at my own pace, on my own time.
I will continue to produce the annual preview magazine, as long as its sponsors and the publisher want to continue doing so.
However, another edition of “A Century of Fridays” will likely never be made. Better get the latest edition while you can.
A HUGE thank you to those of you who were willing to support me over the past 13 years when I asked for the financial support necessary to maintain this site, whether through a book purchase, a page sponsorship or a Ko-fi donation. And another huge thanks to those who have helped support the site with your time and energy researching — and sharing — details about the sport and state we all love. Page sponsorships will continue as long as the sponsors are willing.
That said, I have other things I also want to do with my life, and for the first time in 18 years, I feel ready to devote my time and energy to those things, too — at least on Thursday and Friday nights and Saturday afternoons in the fall.
–patrick
With the archive of weekly football rankings complete, I wanted to turn my attention to something that I now have the opportunity to fully research and expand upon: the shared state championship.
Several championships were already listed as shared on my state champions listings. In the pre-playoff, polls-only era, this isn’t unprecedented. However, with both the complete AP and UPI rankings now fully available, it’s afforded me a chance to look back at season-ending polls to see if everything matches up.
In short, it doesn’t. And that’s what this post is designed to do — give some teams the props, and championships, they’ve earned but not had listed here.
This isn’t a new exploration of mine. When I first worked through shared champions in 2009 on this site, I made the decision to solely accept the UPI polls. With the extended research, though, I’ve come to the realization that both the AP and UPI polls were just about as equally valid, run just as often and about just as far and wide across the state as each other.
I defaulted to the UPI rankings because they were the favorite of my adopted hometown paper, and later my employer, the Casper Star-Tribune, which often didn’t even run the AP rankings for an entire season. But the AP rankings definitely had validity, and they need to be recognized as such. That means this site should accept the champions of both the AP and UPI polls, not just the UPI.
So that’s what I’m doing.
This means four teams — Torrington and Glenrock from 1972, Deaver-Frannie from 1971 and Cheyenne Central from 1966 — will retroactively have the championships they earned in those years added to the site. All four were AP champions in some form:
Two other final polls where teams shared the top spot in the polls were NOT added for the following reasons:
Other shared championships that are already listed will remain, including Byron and Glenrock sharing the 1968 Class B championship, Sheridan and Laramie sharing the 1958 Class AA championship, and Sheridan and Natrona sharing the 1957 Class AA championship.
Shared titles before the start of statewide polls in the mid-1950s were “by acclaim” champions, as no formal polling system existed prior to the AP/UPI polls, and in earlier days the polls by the Wyoming Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association.
Researching the polls week to week has given me significantly more insight to the processes used in these times to choose a state champion. I think these updates accurately reflect the sentiment at the time.
And it makes me glad that we have playoffs these days.
–patrick
One thing that constantly amazes me is that no matter how much research I do into Wyoming’s sports history, I always keep finding more interesting things.
The latest? Wyoming’s 1930 all-state football team, published in a Nebraska newspaper published in 1957.
Yep, you read that right.
The 1930 all-state team was one of just a handful of missing all-state teams on wyoming-football.com, a list that now includes only the all-class teams from 1926 and 1932 and the elusive 1994 Class 1A nine-man team.
But I did not expect to find the 1930 all-state team the way I did, published in an out-of-state paper nearly 30 years after the season was done.
In doing research for a big project (details coming, maybe this summer), I fell into a deep dive of looking into Sheridan’s 1930 championship team. I started looking into a few of the players, particularly guys like Raymond “Jeff” Doyle, Sheridan’s speedy halfback; center Rusty Thompson; and end Clarence Brokaw. They were cornerstones of the Broncs’ team that beat Laramie (and later Cody) for the championship in the final year before state-sanctioned playoffs and the formation of the Wyoming High School Activities Association.
When I threw their names into a search on newspapers.com — a subscription made possible by the site sponsors (thank you!) — I stumbled into a column from the Oct. 29, 1957, edition of the Scottsbluff Star-Herald in Nebraska from Bill Madden. More on him in a bit.
In that column, Madden said the upcoming game between Scottsbluff and Laramie would be his first time seeing the Plainsmen since 1930, when he was a boy in Sheridan and the Plainsmen came north for a key game. He then went into detail on the 1930 game between the Plainsmen and Broncs, which for all intents and purposes decided the state championship, and those who played in it. Madden said the rosters included five all-staters from Sheridan (Doyle, Thompson, Brokaw, guard Clint Endicott and tackle Albert Husman) and two from Laramie (end Lester Forsyth and fullback Wes Christenson).
But in addition, he also mentioned the other four players named all-state that year: tackle Dan Sedar and quarterback Porter Davis of Natrona, guard Fay Thompson of Midwest, and halfback Don Tottenhoff of Cheyenne Central.
That’s 11 guys. An all-state team from that era only had that many. I double-checked the names in other publications and yearbooks I could access online, and the list looks legit. No unexpected names here.
However, Madden didn’t cite his source, which is always a big question in research like this. After looking into his career, though, if there’s one Nebraska journalist whose word we can trust on matters like this, it’s Madden’s.
Madden grew up in Sheridan an avid sports fan and attended Hastings College in Nebraska. From 1955 to 1974, Madden was a sportswriter for the Scottsbluff Star-Herald; he then moved on to the nearby Gering Courier, where he stayed until he retired in 1991.
He was named to the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame in 1996; his bio said he was “a noted historian of high school athletics.” In reading a selection of Madden’s work, it’s easy to draw comparisons to Chuck Harkins, Casper Star-Tribune sports editor in the 1970s and the one person who has taught me more about Wyoming sports than anyone else I’ve never met. Madden died in 1997.
In his 1957 pontifications of a 1930 football game and the all-state players in it, Madden didn’t need to cite a source because he was the source. That’s good enough for me.
The 1930 all-state team is now listed among this site’s all-state listings — with any luck, never to be lost again.
–patrick
Some digging into Jackson’s early days turned up four new games for the listings — two against a nearby rival, one against a college and one canceled by snow:
I added Jackson’s first two games in program history, a 26-6 victory against Driggs, Idaho, on Oct. 17, 1930, in Jackson, and a 12-0 loss to Driggs on Oct. 24 in Driggs. Jackson played four other games that season against the Jackson town team, but games against non-scholastic opponents are not counted in the listings. I also added Jackson’s Oct. 4, 1930, game against Big Piney that was supposed to be Jackson’s first game but was canceled due to snow.
I also added Jackson’s 18-0 loss to Ricks College, Idaho, played on Sept. 16, 1932; I also added it to the missing games list as I could not determine a location, although it was probably in Idaho.
In addition to the Jackson updates, I also added the location for Torrington’s 51-0 victory against Guernsey on Oct. 16, 1931; it was in Torrington.
I also added Cowley’s coach for 1936; it was G.W. Rollins.
All the updates have been made on all the relevant pages.
–patrick
Thanks to a new financial supporter — the Wyoming Department of Transportation, whose “Buckle Up for Life” campaign now proudly supports numerous pages on the site — I have been able to pour some more financial resources back into the site.
One of those was a full subscription to newspapers.com, which has allowed me to pursue missing out-of-state results with a renewed energy. Some updates to the site include:
Found the result for Lusk’s 51-0 loss to Edgemont, S.D., on Sept. 27, 1935, in Edgemont.
Found the date and location for Lyman’s 27-6 loss to Park City, Utah, on Aug. 30, 1968; the game was in Park City.
Found the location for Sundance’s 27-0 loss to Spearfish, S.D., on Oct. 29, 1926; it was in Sundance.
I also found the following games were never played: the Nov. 16, 1942, game between Torrington and Scottsbluff, Neb.; the Nov. 22, 1929, game between Torrington and Gering, Neb.; the Nov. 17, 1925, game between Sunrise and Morrill, Neb.; and the Nov. 24, 1922, game between Newcastle and Crawford, Neb.
Also, historic playoff brackets have been reconfigured. Check out any of the archived brackets from the Results by year page to see their new look!
As always, if you can help me track down any information for games on my missing games list, please let me know!
–patrick
Here’s a quick overview of some of the pages on wyoming-football.com that saw updates at the conclusion of the 2022 season:
Scoring records: For just the 18th time in state history, two 11-man teams combined to score triple digits, as Cheyenne Central (42) and Sheridan (63) finished just outside the top 10 with 105 combined points scored. It did mark the third highest combined point total in an 11-man playoff game, though, just four points shy of the record.
Burlington finished in the top 10 all-time in single-season scoring with 659 total points, good for ninth.
Cheyenne East and Cody both reached the top 10 in points scored in an 11-man season. East was No. 2 all-time with 553 total points, while Cody was eighth at 531. Oddly enough, neither one won a state title. Cody’s 48.27 points per game, meanwhile, finished fifth in state history for 11-man teams.
On the flipside, Guernsey-Sunrise’s 66.13 points allowed per game ranked 10th all-time in most points allowed in a season.
Streaks: Cody’s 26-game winning streak, which came to an end in the Class 3A title game, finished tied for eighth among Wyoming’s longest winning streaks. And Lyman’s 20-game winning streak, which ended early in the season, finished in a tie for the 22nd longest. Snake River, meanwhile, enters the 2023 season on a 21-game winning streak, good for 19th-longest in state history.
Cheyenne South’s 29-game losing streak, however, is tied for the sixth-longest losing streak in state history. Pinedale has now lost 22 games in a row, a streak that’s tied for 20th-longest.
Snake River’s scoring streak moved up to second-longest in state history at 137 games; however, the Rattlers have a ways to go to break the state record of 175. Sheridan, meanwhile, has scored in 95 straight games entering 2023, the eighth-longest scoring streak in state history.
Cokeville had its 35th consecutive winning season and its 37th consecutive non-losing season, both continuing state records. Sheridan’s 16th consecutive winning season, though, moved the Broncs up into a tie for second-longest such streak in state history behind Cokeville.
Laramie’s 22nd consecutive losing season moved the Plainsmen into a tie for the longest streak of consecutive losing seasons. Moorcroft is now tied for fourth on that list with 14 losing seasons in a row, with Worland and Wyoming Indian tied at sixth with 13 and Cheyenne South and Wright tied for ninth with 12.
Individual records: Several players notched games or seasons worthy of the individual records page. They included:
Coaching: Four coaches cracked the 50-victory barrier for their careers and entered Wyoming’s top 100 list for total victories for coaches — Shoshoni’s Tony Truempler, Buffalo’s Rob Hammond, Sheridan’s Jeff Mowry and Snake River’s Jack Cobb. They are all among the top 18 active coaches in the state in career victories in Wyoming. Barring retirements, Natrona’s Steve Harshman (227 victories), Southeast’s Mark Bullington (165 victories) and Douglas’ Jay Rhoades (130 victories) will enter 2023 as Wyoming’s top three active coaches in career in-state victories.
State champions: Sheridan’s 29th state championship continued a Bronc state record.
Weekly rankings: Of the five state champions, only Class 1A six-man Snake River completed a wire-to-wire run as the No. 1-ranked team in the state. Meanwhile, both Class 2A Big Horn and Class 3A Star Valley won a title despite not being ranked first at any point during the season.
Finally, Wyoming’s newest football program, the Casper Christian Mountaineers, saw their team page go up at the end of the 2022 season — too late for the season but just in time to start chronicling their history.
–patrick
I was able to add a couple more first names to the all-state listings thanks to some help — Cindy Asay in Lovell hooked me up with some first names of Lovell players, and Andrew Towne at the Torrington Telegram chipped in some Torrington first names.
Update: Thanks to those of you who left comments below to help — they were valuable! And another big thanks to the Stat Rat, Jim Craig, for helping me find the others so far.
Update 2, Sept. 4, 2022: With some more help from the Stat Rat, we are down to only six first names that are still missing. I’ve cleaned up the list below to remove names that have been found.
Thanks for the help!
And here’s a list of the first names I’m still missing for all-state selections, by school:
Buffalo
1929: Metcalf
Douglas
1922: F. Rice
Lovell
1925: Brosheaus (maybe Brosious)
Midwest
1935: Barsh
Thermopolis
1925: Guffey
University Prep
1920: Sonners
–patrick
Some recent site updates, thanks to new information I found through yearbooks and old press clippings:
Torrington beat Lyman, Neb., 34-6 on Nov. 8, 1934, in Torrington.
Noted that the game between Oct. 13 and 16, 1943, between Buffalo and Campbell County was played in Gillette; it’s still on the missing games list because I have yet to pin down a date.
Noted that the Oct. 15, 1966, game between Jackson and the Rock Springs JV was canceled due to snow.
Noted that the Oct. 9, 1956, game between Reliance and Pinedale and the Oct. 11, 1940, game between Ranchester and Big Horn were not played.
Noted that Ranchester’s coach in 1948 was Bert Johnston, not Silas Lyman.
Updated Campbell County’s coaches for 1943. The Camels actually used three coaches that season — Chet Bowen for the first game, Ray Ritter for the next three games, and Ben Dobbs for the final four games. It was war times.
Corrected the spelling for Campbell County’s coach from 1950-52; it was Albert Consbruck.
I’m also working on a separate all-state project, and in that work I’ve corrected a handful of misspellings or players listed with the wrong team in all-state listings. I’ve also added about a half-dozen first names for players who were missing those names on lists. I’m still missing 50 first names on all-state teams from 1920 to 1936.
All of the updates have been made on all the relevant pages.
–patrick