PriorBlog

Last night I took a little sanity break from work around ten and decided to check out the precarious balance of power in the ACC.  I was checking out the result of the Virginia Tech-Virginia game, which I thought for sure that Virginia Tech was going to win, but in fact they got trounced.  I had underestimated Virginia, and now, in order to rectify the situation, I decided to do a little background check on them to see how good they really were.  Looking at their schedule, I noticed that they had recently beaten the Longwood Lancers.  I recalled seeing this team’s name before.  I think maybe UNC beat them the year they went all the way.  I vaguely remembered seeing Longwood’s name, wondering who the hell they were, and finding out that they were something like 3-26 on the season, quite possibly the worst college team on the planet.

Funny to find them again on the schedule of another top twenty team.  Perennial fodder I guessed, but a quick check of their schedule revealed that this year they’ve amassed nine wins, which is not great, but at least they are becoming somewhat respectable.  Looking closer at the schedule I noted that a team called Virginia-Wise had lost to Longwood by about twenty points earlier in the season.  Could it be that since Longwood had made the leap to semi-respectability, a new team, this Virginia-Wise had become the very bottom of the college basketball food chain?

I clicked on to Virginia-Wise’s link to see exactly whom they’ve played.  For some reason there were only two games listed.  Surely they hadn’t bought uniforms just to play two games.  There must have been some more games, but games that were so unimportant, that they didn’t even bear keeping a record of.  The faithful companion of futility, the only one who understands him, is obscurity. 

This obscurity, this under-reporting, makes it impossible to tell who really are the worst teams.  What about the other games that Virginia-Wise played?  Did they win some, and if they did, who was it that they beat?  Assuming they did win some, that would mean that there were teams worse than them, and then there was no reason to suspect that some of those teams may have beaten teams worse than them and so on down the line, until you would have literally hundreds of thousands of teams. 

Could it be, that there exists alongside of us, without our having knowledge of them, any number of absolutely atrocious college basketball teams?  Mysterious groupings of individuals brought together at top secret military installations in the middle of the night to lose basketball games that nobody knows about, and all of this taking place to have a firm and mighty foundation to hold up the UNC’s and UCLA’s of the world.  My answer: very likely.

After leaving this fantasy of the secret basketball leagues I returned to my internet browsing, this time to google my own name in order to see if this blog has made me the most well known David Prior yet.  I am pleased to note that I am now in the top ten!  As excited as I am about this, what really overwhelmed me was that after clicking through some of the lesser David Priors, I came across this!

Needless to say, I was completely shocked.  Talk about a coincidence! 

Since I was now on Virginia-Wise’s website, I decided to see if they had played basketball games that ESPN’s website was hiding from me.  Sure enough, there they were, the secret games!  Just how bad is Virginia-Wise?  Consider some of their games.  They opened the season against a woman named Alice Lloyd… and lost!  That was an away game though, so we’ll let it pass.  They did however lose a home game later in the season to two guys “Emory & Henry.”  Personally I think these games would make interesting television in a vaudevillian sort of way.

Seriously though, here is an example of how incredibly obscure this team is.  Look closely at the schedule. On November 18^th they played either “Berea or Crown.”  In other words, nobody remembers which team they played.