WVSSAC Super Six Football Championships

Anyone can win Class AAA prep football race
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
By DEREK TAYLOR- Charleston Daily Mail

It's hard to remember a recent year in which the Class AAA football championship was as up for grabs as it appears to be this season.

With the playoffs a little more than two weeks away, the state's biggest class has yet to produce a true favorite. There are, rather, more than 10 teams that can stake some kind of legitimate claim that says they're going to reach the Super Six in Wheeling on Nov. 1.

Such a high number of teams with title hopes can often be found at the beginning of September. That many teams in the hunt during the next-to-last week of the regular season, though is quite rare.

For the better part of this decade Morgantown and Parkersburg have taken turns as the Class AAA state titlist. Aside from Parkersburg South's win in 2003, no other school has won the big school championship since J.R. House-led Nitro took the crown in 1998.

As a matter of fact, aside from the four aforementioned schools, Martinsburg's runner-up finishes in 2001, 2003 and 2004 mark the only appearances by another school in the state championship game this decade. Nitro was runner-up in 2005.

While two of the five 'usual suspects' -- Parkersburg and Martinsburg -- are among those that have shown themselves capable of reaching the title game, many of this year's candidates are entering rare air for their programs, at least for this decade.

George Washington hasn't played in a title game since its 1982 state championship, the school's only in football. The Patriots are a win against Beckley away from the No. 1 seed in the playoffs, and have shown they have the depth, talent and coaching to finish off what would be a storybook title run.

University has had some strong teams since moving to Class AAA in the late 1980s. The Hawks reached the title game in 1994 and the semifinals on two other occasions. However, many in Morgantown feel this may be the best chance for a John Kelley-coached team to win a title in his tenure at the school.

Robert C. Byrd, led by all-state receiver Jordan Griffin and school-record passer Cody Gilmore, has perhaps its best-ever team, and has a solid chance at entering the playoffs with a 10-0 mark. However, its schedule might have the Eagles fall all the way to the No. 4 seed, which would put Byrd in a bracket with top-ranked George Washington. The furthest the Eagles have advanced in the playoffs is the quarterfinals, which they have done four times.

There will be at least three local teams with first-round home games after the regular season ends on Nov. 3. The winner of Friday's game between Capital and Riverside in Quincy will be host to a first-round playoff game, as will St. Albans.

The Friday night showdown at Riverside looms as the biggest area game remaining on the regular-season schedule. However, the Red Dragons' position as the fifth-ranked team in Class AAA is a precarious one with a road trip to Cabell Midland on Saturday on the horizon. The only teams to challenge St. Albans this season -- Nitro (58-14), Huntington and Hurricane -- each possessed and utilized their abilities to throw the ball to challenge the Dragon defense. Midland, too, has that capability, and has been playing much better in the second half of the season.

There are two other teams -- Bridgeport and Brooke -- that can honestly say they've got a shot at reaching Wheeling based upon their regular-season performances. Brooke's loss to Wheeling Park came without star tailback Scott Victorio in the lineup, and the Bruins' other defeat was to University in overtime.

Bridgeport's only setback was a 20-16 nailbiter at Robert C. Byrd, in which the Eagles engineered a drive in the final two minutes to win. The Indians are averaging more than 40 points per game.

Lurking behind all of this is Nitro. The Wildcats have shown that -- with the exception of their loss to George Washington early in the season -- they can score almost at will on any team. The question for Coach Scott Tinsley's team is going to be if it can stop anyone if and when it clinches a playoff spot.

If Nitro can play solid defense, it has as good of a chance as any team to reach the finals.

The last time the class of big schools had so much of an open field was perhaps 1998. That year, Parkersburg had shut out nine regular-season opponents en route to a 10-0 season while Nitro and House were breaking national offensive records left and right in the Kanawha Valley.

Neither of those teams was even the state's top seed. That distinction went, instead, to Morgantown. The Wildcats eventually went to Parkersburg and scored more points on the Big Reds than had been accomplished in the previous 10 games, and later went to Wheeling.

The rest, of course, is history. House threw 10 touchdown passes against the Mohigans as the Wildcats claimed their only state title.