Football with a dash of existential crisis
I’ve spent a fair bit of time looking through the old editions of the Tribune Phonograph while trying to find content for the History Corner section, and while doing so, I stumbled across an interesting set of stories. These pertained to the 1972 Colby football season, during which the Hornets lost only one game and won the Cloverbelt conference championship for the second season in a row.
It was fascinating to see the season develop over each issue. The Hornets’ season started out with some questioning whether or not the team could repeat after having lost so many players to graduation. A loss to Mondovi in their first game did not do much to sway those opinions. Their confidence clearly started to build after defeating Stanley-Boyd 30-7 in week three. There were some bumps in the road, with Thorp giving them more problems than most would have expected in the middle of the season, but they beat Stanley-Boyd once again in the conference championship game and head coach Duane Teska was quoted afterwards as stating that the 1972 team was the best he had ever coached up until that point.
First, I found it so interesting to go back and look at the exploits of a team from fifty years ago. I had of course heard tales of Teska, who coached the Colby football team for many years, but it was almost like stepping into a time machine, reading his thoughts after a game.
I also found it interesting how some things have changed over the years, and how they have stayed the same. The WIAA playoffs would not start until 1976, so a conference championship was the highest honor that a team could achieve. Some of the teams are still in the Cloverbelt, all these years later, but others have moved on, including Colby.
Going through these stories, though, I came across something that I thought was just as interesting. I found that the author of these stories would offer predictions for next week’s scores, a move which I, as someone who also writes high school football articles, can only categorize as “bold.”
High school football can be, especially early in the season, when most teams are playing non-conference opponents, difficult to predict, in my opinion. Given its nature, where large numbers of starters graduate from year to year, knowing what the next might bring is often a task of making large generalizations about a program or something more akin to soothsaying. Especially now, where teams are expected to compete against others from across the state in the playoffs, rather than just their local area like it was in the early 1970s, knowing how each of these teams will stack up can be a difficult task.
Even for those who make the playoff brackets, determining how teams will stack up against each other is not easy. And that is with all of the technology that we now have that allows us to go back and watch games if we so please. Back in 1972, there was no such thing. Granted these were area teams, so the person writing these articles probably had a better grasp of what each of them would likely offer, but even with that, I can only applaud the bravery to throw such predictions out into the public. I know I probably won’t be doing anything like that in the near future.
It’s interesting to wonder if, in fifty years time, someone might go through the old book containing this year’s issues and go on the same journey that I just did. To read about the ups and downs of this season’s Falcon and Hornet teams and get a sense of what the game was like at the time. To wonder why the author hadn’t given his predictions on the games, only to remember that, at the time, they didn’t have highly advanced AI to calculate such things. More likely, no one will ever do such a thing, but the thought that such a thing is possible is a bit eye-opening.
I don’t know if there is any real conclusion to these musings. I think it was just a fun experiment in the impact a newspaper can have, even decades later. Sorry, random reader from 2072, should you exist. If you want something more interesting, I wrote about how bad of a dancer I was last week… Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I guess that fact will be burned forever into the annals of time. Whoops.
Ah well, at least they won’t know about my secret letter to Josh Hader begging him to come back to the Brewers even though he’s done even worse since going to the Padres. Oh wait…
A C ertain Point of V iew
eporter
