School: Byron
Nickname: Eagles
Colors: green and white
Stadium: Unknown
State championships: 1948, 1949, 1951, 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1960
Times worth remembering: Byron has lots of good times to choose from, but it’s hard to ignore the three-year stretch the Eagles had from 1956-58. In that time, the Eagles went 27-0-1 and won three consecutive Class B championships. To boot, the Eagles added another undefeated season and state championship in 1960. (Honorable mention goes to the 40-plus-game winning streak Byron put together in the late 1940s, which at the time was a national six-man record.)
Times worth forgetting: Byron’s shortcomings are rare. In fact, from 1946 to the program’s end in 1982, the Eagles only had three losing seasons. Two of those came in 1977-78, though, including an 0-7 season in 1977 in which the Eagles only scored 24 points the entire season.
Best team: The Eagles had 15 undefeated teams from 1946-82. Of those, two stick out — the 1960 11-man team, which went 10-0 and notched eight consecutive shutouts and gave up only 13 points all season, and the 1970 eight-man team, which averaged 57 points per game and won eight of its nine games by at least 28 points.
Biggest win: Byron made the jump from six-man to 11-man in 1953, but didn’t make the playoffs again until 1956. Once there, though, the Eagles quickly proved they knew how to play the 11-man game, too. The Eagles beat Kemmerer 19-7 in the Class B title game that year, a victory that completed the transition from six-man to 11-man powerhouse.
Heartbreaker: The Eagles came up just one game short of a five-year run of championships, and the 1959 title-game loss to Shoshoni was all that kept the Eagles from a half-decade run at the top. The loss itself wasn’t all that surprising — Shoshoni had beaten Byron 13-7 earlier in the year, and the Wranglers were in the midst of building a powerhouse program of their own — but losing a title game that ended the run was certainly a tough one to swallow. Then again, that loss probably provided the motivation for the undefeated championship season that followed in 1960.