WHSFB HQ — The Wyoming high school football blog

So, yeah, I haven’t done anything for the official start of the 2008 Wyoming high school football season.

Know why?

Because Zero Week is a waste.

Not a waste in the sense that players and coaches don’t get anything out of it. They do. Be it in a scrimmage, a jamboree or an actual real game, Zero Week does give players a chance to feel real hits from players they don’t know, coaches a chance to see what works and what doesn’t.

The thing is, nobody really cares about it. Even in the real, four-quarter, officiated games, teams don’t take stats. They can barely remember who scored the touchdowns. And if they lose, they just chalk it up as a scrimmage game that doesn’t mean anything anyway.

I say, if you’re going to scrimmage, then scrimmage. Keep your practice jerseys on, let the officials stay home and scrimmage. None of this hairy “let’s play three quarters and then do situational drills” waste.

And if you’re going to play a game, play a game. Play to win. Keep stats. Put your best players on the field and try to outscore the other guys’ best players. Don’t hold back simply because it doesn’t count for your playoff seeding.

Rant over. For now.

–patrick

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For some reason, I haven’t been giving Laramie its due for its 1971 Class AA championship. The Plainsmen did indeed win the AA championship game, beating Rock Springs 20-2 in the last game of the season.

But the first time I went through the 1971 season, I failed to mark that game as the championship. I had the game logged, the score, the date, the location — just not the significance.

Since then, I’ve been sitting on 1971, not sure what happened in that last game. So yesterday, I finally got around to double-checking what happened. Just like my gut had told me, the Rock Springs-Laramie game was indeed for the state championship.

The changes have been updated on all the needed pages, including listing the championship on the top of the Laramie team page.

(I’m still working on double-checking everything after my hack earlier this week. It was incredibly frustrating, as I lost my main index page and a few other small items, stuff only I will notice. I don’t think it affected anything other than the main index page, but if you see anything weird, let me know.)

–patrick

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I’ve spent the last week or so jotting down all the apparent bye weeks for each team listed in the database since 1960. One of my new projects will be to verify the fact that these were actually bye weeks and that I’m not just missing a game. There are 776 dates that I’ll be going back to double-check… eventually.

In doing this little side project, I found a few errors that I had made along the way. I’ve added four new streaks to the winning and losing streaks list. Three involve Glenrock. Glenrock made the winning streak list twice, once with a 24-0 streak from 1970-72 and again with a 22-0 streak from 1966-68. Glenrock also made the unbeaten streak with a 25-0-1 run from 1966-69 (the 22-0 streak was part of this one).

Also, I added a losing streak by Kemmerer, an 0-20 stretch from 1987-89.

I also corrected two incorrect win-loss records. I corrected Cokeville’s record in 1994 to 9-1 and corrected Dubois’ record in 1993 to 4-3. Those two corrections have been reflected on the standings pages — winning percentage and number of victories.

That’s about it for now.

–patrick

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