A pair of national sports news outlets mentioned Walter Johnson High School’s football team today and not for the best of reasons.
The Wildcats lost to Magruder High School on Friday by the extremely rare football score of 4-2. You can read The Gazette game story here.
The two safeties to one safety final surely is a sign that both teams had a bad offensive night. Besides the strange scoreline, it’s not exactly earth- shattering news.
But in today’s age of football-crazed sports media, it got picked up by the high school sports blog on Yahoo! Sports and by ESPN football columnist Gregg Easterbrook:
In the end, there was no overlooking the general offensive ineptitude of both squads, even if Johnson kicker Matt Murtha had two different chances to connect on field goals, but missed first from 33 yards and then on the aforementioned 36-yard attempt in the final moments.
The win left both teams at 1-4. Perhaps it was only fitting that Magruder won without earning a single first down in the second half.
For some reason, Yahoo! Sports blogger Cameron Smith refers to Walter Johnson as “Johnson,” throughout his piece. From Easterbrook:
In Rockville, Md., Zadok Magruder High defeated Walter Johnson High 4-2. And all the safeties were by the same team! The Colonels of Magruder led 4-0 as the clock ticked toward all-naughts, but were pinned against their goal line, fourth-and-long on the 1. Magruder took a deliberate safety, then survived a missed field goal on the game’s final snap.
So, it’s not the most flattering attention for Walter Johnson, which is 1-4 on the season thanks to a forfeited game in week one. Wootton had to retroactively forfeit the game, which it won 41-0, because it used an ineligible player.
Still, Walter Johnson seems to be doing a fine job at the thing schools are meant for. (You know, education.) Earlier this year, the Wildcats were ranked No. 148 in a list of the top 2,000 public high schools in the country.
