The Stars Align

I follow 1.9375 teams in football.  Well, technically it is 4, but I weight them just the same and it comes out to 1.9375:

1) Washington Redskins (1.000) – Pre Season, Regular Season, Post Season, Home, Away it doesn’t matter.  I watch.

2) JMU Dukes (0.7500) – My College Alma Mater (Class of ‘98). I try to go to all the home games but invariably miss one or two.  I will check the scores of away games or even listen over the internet on occasion.  I will even go to an away game if it isn’t too far (I will travel further to go to a match up against a 1-A school).  I am still kicking myself for missing the national championship game in 2004 even if I was literally in the process of moving in to a new house and in a new city in a different state over Christmas.

3) Waynesboro High School (0.1250) – My High School Alma Mater (Class of ‘94). If I am in town and they are at home I might go to a game once or twice a season, maybe.

4) University of Virginia (0.0625) – I will see what the score is if I think about it.  With the exception of a bowl game, I haven’t been to a game in at least 9 years.  I will go to a bowl game only if it is close enough.

So, why am I bringing this up? Well, with the exception of JMU, all of these teams have been pretty bad in recent years.  Some of them will top .500 for a season here or there, but that seems to be pretty rare. 

My best friend and I follow the same teams.  We grew up in the same town and both attended WHS.  In fact, we met in the weight room almost 15 years ago before our football team’s playoff run my senior year (both of us were offensive linemen). 

A few years ago we noticed that all four teams never seemed to win on the same weekend.  With all of them being pretty bad that isn’t surprising, but it was amazingly awful nonetheless.  In fact, even if you remove UVa from the list, the remaining three didn’t win on the same weekend either. Unfortunately it was not all that unusual for all of them to lose on the same weekend.  But this past weekend was the exception (all of my teams were at home):

WHS 41 / Covington High 20#10

JMU 41 / #5 UNH (New Hamshire) 24

UVa 24 / Duke 13

Redskins 16 / Dolphins 13

Hopefully this isn’t the sign of a coming apocalypse but the birth of a new era where my favorite sports teams actually win games.