Over the last sixty years, the average accuracy rate for groundhogs on Groundhog Day has only been about 28 percent.
Punxsutawney Phil’s got a slightly more impressive record—he predicts correctly about 39 percent of the time.
Maybe they’re using the wrong animal for the job. The original “groundhog” wasn’t a groundhog at all, but a badger.
The tradition is a German one, and when German immigrants came to America, they couldn’t find a stinkin’ badger in all of Pennsylvania (at least not any that looked like their Old World variety), so they had to settle for the much more common groundhog.
