This week's bizarre high school football score

I'm guessing I'm not the only sports editor who dealt with this, but I had a football coach who only called in his game when they won. They weren't very good, so I only heard from him three or four times a year. I made a point to get out there one Friday night when I knew they were going to get slaughtered. He wasn't particularly excited to see me, but I taked with a couple of the players, went back to the office and wrote a very fair, straightforward piece on the loss.

I actually got some calls from parents on Monday, mainly positive ones because I got their kids' names in the paper and a couple of photos. But until they switched coaches, I wasn't going to go out of my way to chase him down if he wasn't honest teaching his own team life lessons.

 

I actually like the internet era because every game has at least one person live tweeting scores and you can get a final score at a minimum. The details can go in the Sunday roundup ... at least if you still have a Sunday paper.

 

One of our area schools, I've given up on trying to call on Friday night. They're a decent team and the coach is a good guy, but he doesn't have a stat guy and is bad with certain details.
Like the final score.
He doesn't say they won when they lost or anything like that, but more than once he's given me a score that was sorta close, but not quite the actual score. Like he'll say 38-24 when it was 40-22.
If he can't get that right, trying to pin down details to report seems like a bad idea.
They post a highlight video with stats on HUDL at some point during the weekend, so I wait for that instead amd write a brief from it as best I can. Sometimes it gets online Saturday, sometimes Sunday. No one seems to mind.
They lost 50-0 tonight, though, so this one might not get up at all.

 

Pittsburgh's Westinghouse High School enters a City League semifinal with 11 players after mass suspensions.

And they win 68-0.

Westinghouse beats Perry in City League football playoffs

 

Apparently the team has dangerously few players to begin with and the suspensions obliterated the team. They planned on bringing up JV players, but the team claimed they wouldn’t be ready in time. Which begs the questions 1) why do they have a JV squad is they can’t count on a full varsity roster and 2) why is the JV not ready to play?

 

I wanna know had bad this brawl was: "seven of his players will be suspended for six games"

 

19 on varsity, 24 on JV and an enrollment of 250, for a public school. Same school that produced the likes of Bill Russell, Frank Robinson and Curt Flood.

 

Bad enough that the game was ended early, from what I’ve read.

 

I've been compiling high school football stats since 1980 (i'm at the same weekly since I started in high school) and I can, without a doubt, say this has been the most frustrating season in my career! It's amazing to me how many teams (I cover 1 each week and follow 11 others) do not have someone tracking stats during a game. Getting coaches to report info in an accurate and timely fashion has become crazy. One team apparently failed to take a camera to an out-of-state game and its opponent only had the first half recorded!! For some odd reason, one head coach does have someone tracking stats during games, but he lets that person take the stat book home so I don't get anything from him until Saturday afternoons when his guys reports to him! I'm also a stickler for accuracy and that's why I cover as many games as possible.
One school restarted its varsity football program this season after not playing since 2019 (they actually started in 2021 but stopped after 4 games due to lack of numbers). The head coach there seems to be a good guy, but he can't coach a Paper Football team much less a high school team. Totally in over his head. They had to stop a game at halftime a couple weeks ago due to injuries. I track both teams but their opponent's HUDL account was frozen (they track their stats off that game film) so they had no access to the film. So, I found it on the NFHS Network and decided I would watch it and stat the game myself.
So, the in over his head coach sent me what they recorded for the one-half on Maxpreps. The Maxpreps stat sheet showed them with 68 yards rushing and 1 pass completion for 40 yards. Well, from my viewing (no plays were missed because the NFHS feed for the game was constant) the only pass completion they had was nullified by an ineligible downfield penalty. As for the rushing, they had exactly two (yes 2!) plays go beyond the LOS and had negative 25 yards rushing! Wouldn't you think the head coach would have enough sense to know those stats were all wrong? And, they weren't counting kickoff returns as rushing as they had kickoff returns recorded. I didn't even bother to determine if those were accurate!
Thanks for taking your time to read this post and allowing me to vent!

 

Nice work @BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo.