North Football History

Winning has been a way of life for the North Montgomery football program.

Next week the Chargers will begin their 47th campaign and through the first 46 seasons the Chargers have posted a 280-207 record, winning 57.4 percent of their games. That means the program has averaged 6.08 wins per season since the school opened its doors in the fall of 1971.

North Montgomery has never had a decade in which it didn’t have a winning record. Here is a breakdown decade-by-decade:

1971-79 47-43

1980-89 53-44

1990-99 74-41

2000-09 63-49

2010-16 43-40

TOTAL 280-207

As you can see the 1990s was the top decade. That, of course, was fueled by the back-to-back state championship seasons when the Chargers posted 13-1 records in 1995 and 1996. The 13 wins in a season is a school and county single-season record for most wins. The 26 wins in back-to-back years is also a school and county record. And so is the 35-4 stretch from 1994-96.

Southmont did have a three-year stretch where it only lost four games in three years, but managed only 26 wins.

In addition to the back-to-back seasons, North Montgomery has posted two other seasons in which it has ended the year with just a single loss. The first came in 1986 when the Chargers lost a heartbreaking 20-19 game in the second round of the sectional at the hands of Zionsville. The last one-loss season for North Montgomery came in 2008 when the team fell to Indianapolis Chatard 42-20 in the regional title game.

There have been a total of 10 out of the 46 seasons in which North Montgomery has ended the season with eight or more wins. Overall, out of the first 46 seasons the program has 26 seasons when it has ended with a winning record and five more seasons when the team ended at .500. That leaves 15 seasons the Chargers ended the fall with a losing record.

The program has never suffered a winless season or a season with just one win. Three times ( in 1976, 1981 and 2005) North Montgomery won just two games. The most losses in a season came in 2005 when the team went 2-9.

The longest stretch of winning seasons is six. That has been accomplished once. It took place from 1991-96 when North Montgomery’s teams went 7-3, 8-3, 6-5, 9-2, 13-1 and 13-1. The streak reached five from 2006 to 2010 when the team put together seasons of 8-3, 6-5, 12-1, 7-4 and 7-3.

The longest stretch of losing seasons came between 1976 and 1981 when the team had six years without a winning record. During that stretch, the team had a combined record of 19-41. Since that time, the school has had two times when it had back-to-back losing seasons but has gone three years in a row of losing seasons.

#NMFootball