Random Thoughts: extremely random

SCOTT TRUXELL/independent sports

The latest installment of Random Thoughts centers around a surprise team, some sad news, stat of the day, fun facts, predictions and Texas A&M football.

Surprise team

Hands down, the surprise football team in the area is Shawnee. The Indians went 0-10 last year but are 2-0 this year. They have three very interesting games on tap – Bath this Friday, then Celina and Defiance. They have a decent chance in each of those games.

Sad news

With just days to go until the season opener, Cleveland Browns play-by-play radio announcer Jim Donovan made the announcement last week that he’s called his final Browns game.

Donovan has been battling cancer on-and-off for over 20 years. He missed some of last season for treatment and it was believed it had gone into remission. It didn’t and according to Donovan, it’s back and more aggressive.

We wish him all the best as he turns his full focus to his health.

I’ll say this about Donovan – during his 25 years, he’s seen what could arguably be considered the worst stretch of Browns football in franchise history. When the team returned in 1999, no one had any idea how horrible it would be. Yes, there’s been a flash of success here and there and under Kevin Stefanski, they’ve been competitive, for the most part. But the Hue Jackson years and some other years were downright painful. Yet you’d never know it listening to Donovan. He somehow still found a way to make things entertaining.

Stat of the day

St. Marys Memorial is 2-0 this season, with convincing wins over St. Henry and Celina. The Roughriders have yet to complete a pass though. However, it’s fair to note that of the 132 plays run by the Roughriders through two games, 130 have been rushing attempts. The other two plays were passes – both against St. Henry in the opener.

Fun fact

If you check out the website fantastic50.net, you’ll see that Van Wert has the ninth most difficult football schedule in Division IV this year. Ottawa-Glandorf has the third most difficult and Elida has the seventh toughest schedule, according to his rankings.

If you go to Division VI, Coldwater and Parkway are 1-2 in terms of most difficult schedules. Spencerville is fifth, Crestview is seventh and Allen Easte and Bluffton are 9-10.

The free site is run by Dr. Drew Pasteur, a mathematics professor at the College of Wooster. It’s a fun and informative website and I would say his rankings and predictions are fairly accurate. Between that site and joeeitel.com, we Ohio high school football fans are spoiled.

Fun fact II

Defending Division II state champion Massillon Washington will only play four Ohio opponents in a nine-game regular season. The other five are out of state opponents and of those, two are international opponents. One is (was) NFL Academy London (UK), a team the Tigers beat 35-20 in the opener, and the other is Football North (Ontario, Canada) in Week No. 7. 

Predictions

Speaking of predictions, after a great Week No. 1, I kind of took a beating with last week’s predictions. Check out Thursday’s Pigskin Pick’Em feature for more details.

Texas A&M

I don’t want to be negative here but I started thinking about this while watching Saturday night’s Notre Dame-Texas A&M game. It was a great game, one which the Fighting Irish won 23-13.

I wondered – it’s been said that Kyle Field is one of the most difficult places to play in all of college football. It may be, who knows, I’ve not had the pleasure of being there. I know it’s loud, I know they have the 12^th man thing, but none of that has translated into results in the win-loss column lately.

The best recent season for the Aggies was 2020, when they went 9-1 under Jimbo Fisher, who was canned last year and given a payout of something like $76 million. If you go back 10 years, Texas A&M’s record is 77-43, with many of those losses coming at home. 77-43 isn’t horrible by any means, but it’s not exactly elite either. They haven’t won a conference title since 1998, when they won the Big 12. What am I missing here?

As always, if you have thoughts or comments on any of the above subjects, feel free to email me at sports@thevwindependent.com.