Happy Thanksgiving from Mississippi Magazine, and an especially Happy Turkey Day to the teams, fans, and programs of Jefferson County. For any of Week 14’s players in our readership who are destined to fall asleep from turkey/stuffing and wake up thinking they’re supposed to play on Friday, remember you’ve EARNED the right to kick back and watch Arkansas vs Missouri, then go have your own game the next day. Not many “Friday” athletes get to do that. Enjoy!

Lutheran North Crusaders at Hillsboro Hawks (Class 4 State Semifinal Game) (Saturday 11/25)

It is strange to write a prediction in which the better program – a Friday Night Lights brand that’s having its best season since 1991, to go with its finest year of all in the modern “Class/District” era – is the underdog team. Such as is the case when Hillsboro hosts the Lutheran North Barnstormin’ All-Stars for a 2023 state semifinal on the Saturday after Turkey Day. Hillsboro football has grown to stay ahead of Mississippi pigskin no matter what, even as its rivals cultivate just as many Division 1 prospects and hire coaches from the college ranks. HHS has got an epic 2-year winning streak going against fellow public schools, a fresh 7-0 streak against the school’s chief MRAC antagonists North County and FHS, and – if we’re being frank – a perfect W/L record in fairly officiated postseason bouts and regular-season contests alike since scarcely the tail end of COVID-19. Hillsboro is maxing-out everything it can do with a neighborhood team, but nevertheless represents just one place against a Lutheran North team of players selected from all over the place.

Check that. Hillsboro’s Hawks are representing more than just their city Saturday, even if they hail from just 3 or 4 small towns. As was the case with the “Dark Match” scrum at Cardinal Ritter this year, Week 14’s eagerly broadcast kickoff involves a Leon Hall club that’s representing all of MSHSAA’s best public-school teams against a Godzilla of epic proportions. Even shaking-up the Barnstormin’ All-Stars, like the Varsity Hawks were able to shake-up the St. Mary’s Dragons by halftime of 2022’s State Q-Final in St. Louis, would show that an artificial team’s lineup can’t waste the neighborhood. Hannibal showed in at least 3 of 4 quarters last weekend that such a mammoth feat is possible.

For years-on-end, The Geek half hoped that “Zip Code Tycoon” teams who killed their MSHSAA brackets, whether they be private schools like Valle University, public schools like Kirkwood, or Charter schools such as Lift For Life, would just go on ahead and win all of their stupid games by 200 points. Mississippi Magazine cheered as the rest of the Gateway City media blasted raspberries at John Burroughs Prep, an honest sports institution like St. Pius X or St. Vincent, as it cancelled a supposedly “forever” rivalry with Lutheran North just a few seasons ago. John Burroughs’ administrators were on the right track in our lowly opinion. Lutheran North’s coaches wouldn’t agree to play Mizzou, would they?

Cheering against the division killers is a Catch-22 because close games only legitimize what the Tycoon teams do in MSHSAA, which is to put rosters together from 20x or 30x times the talent-pool available to HHS and other contenders. Sure, students agree to say that they’re enrolling at Cardinal Ritter or St. Mary’s because they like the academics there, since that’s what it takes to skirt MSHSAA’s rules and start enrolling yourself a 12-0 record. But it seems to be an awfully crazy coincidence that yearly enrollees at Lutheran North or Valle U. are always of the exact size, makeup, track speed, and athletic experience boosters would hope for in a new kid on campus. If they claim they’re enrolling for the “physics” department, there’s coaches alongside who’re far more interested in the physics of pancaked opposing linebackers and linemen. If winning final scores turn into RIDICULOUS final scores in favor of county-wide rosters every single time, it conceivably could help alert MSHSAA that its genuine Varsity programs have run up against another kind of animal.

But if things won’t change any time soon, the Hillsboro Hawks, and Missouri’s other top neighborhood football teams, simply have no choice. Lutheran North is a Class 2 sized school that just happens to have a Class 6 sized football squad every year, and it can’t be promoted any higher than Hillsboro’s class. There’s nothing left to do but try to defy the odds, beat the All-Star teams fair and square (or at least “square”), and maybe start to convince enough STL kids that playing in rigged bouts for small-school powerhouses which are invented out of thin air isn’t worth it anymore. If that seems impossible, consider that Kirkwood High started losing to more public-school opponents than usual right around the time that Justice Johnson’s tragic murder let our children know – in the saddest possible way – what kind of danger it puts you in to leave a safe community and go commuting in STL to play football, just to lift more trophies and play in front of more cameras, while an unbelievable jerk brags on your recruitment from a perfectly safe home on a gated street. By the end of the 2010s, Kirkwood’s administration blew up in a scandal, and by the 2020s, its previously fake football team had become a real one. Many conferences won’t accept All-Star bids anymore, and St. Mary’s is among several private schools that have been relegated into playing OTHER private schools, as the John Burroughs-style programs refuse to play on Fridays. We observe Cardinal Ritter and Lift For Life (which ended up being a wan imitation of Valle University, anyway) actually hiding their scrums off of TV streams and radio in fear that they’ll be “popped” for violations. The artificial teams can’t fully participate in Friday Night Lights except to show up in the playoffs and kill the bracket.

Lutheran North’s top stat line tells us that the Crusaders’ bulldozing of Class 4 isn’t natural, so to speak, not produced from one neighborhood’s boys playing better football than another town’s. QB Dakari Hollis brings a 70% completion percentage, a 175.00+ passer rating, and last but not least, 34 touchdowns against 0 interceptions into the Hillsboro kickoff Saturday. We’re sure that Hollis is a terrific young quarterback with a good, accurate arm, but it’s hard to take those stats seriously out-of-context. Hollis’ TD-INT ratio ruins the shot for wide-eyed “innocent” All-Star team coaches who claim to have strolled onto campus and found themselves having 5+ scholarship kids on the OL. The best public school QBs in Missouri can throw for 30-40 TDs on a season, or complete 2 out of every 3 passes, but they don’t go 12 games versus opponents like Blair Oaks, Country Day, and Hannibal without ever committing JUST ONE TURNOVER. Not enough of Hollis’ passes have been disrupted in the pocket or batted into the air to cause a “standard” number of turnovers for the offense, because Lutheran North totally overwhelms its opponents’ pass rushes with a hand-picked blocking corps, to go along with 30 other hand-picked players. It’s a racket! And it can knock HHS flying out of the greatest playoff run it’s ever had. Is there any way to stop Week 14’s mean machine that hung 70 on Hannibal?

Hillsboro can’t rush the passer as nimbly as it did with Jaxin Patterson and Austin Romaine stationed behind the line last season. What the dynamic ’23 Hawks CAN do is “tilt” their Iron Man roster method a little bit, and load-up the defense to try to stop Lutheran North’s running game on early downs, and thus put Hollis into some uncomfortable turnover-ripe situations that he isn’t used to. If there’s a weakness in the Crusaders’ attack as compared to the St. Mary’s squad that knocked HHS out of the state playoffs last year, it’s that Lutheran North has been running a backfield-by-committee, spreading the bean around on hand-offs without a “Bell-Cow Back” as Herky coach Blane Boss likes to put it. The Crusaders’ backfield has a number of pretty good YPC averages but no deadly-dangerous D1 type of RB which Mississippi Magazine would expect to find rushing for a lineup having as much success as St. Mary’s in 2022.

Hollis is the Crusaders’ key rusher, and his offensive backfield is mostly foil for option plays and throws into the flat. HHS has played a lot of solid offenses in the same mold, led by QBs like Cole Rickermann and Nolan Reed. There’s a good chance Hillsboro will be able to cope with Lutheran North’s good old Read-Option plays, and force the Crusaders to stretch their playbook a bit trying to stay out of 3rd-and-8, in which any human or superhero at QB is vulnerable.

Hillsboro’s offense has enough weapons to make noise like Hannibal’s top prospects in their quarterfinal. We’ve agonized over Dan Fox of Crystal City not getting Kanden Bolton the football enough over the last 2 months, but for all of HHS’s newfound balance, it’s hard to fathom that coach Bill Sucharski won’t give senior Payton Brown every last possible opportunity to hurt the District 3 champs. Even if he doesn’t, well, the QB is also a “Brown,” and that settles that.

Confidence must be Hillsboro’s watch-word, especially if the Varsity Hawks have been scoreboard watching during the playoffs. The fact that Hannibal had only scored around 30 points when Lutheran North went into “Meep, Meep” mode in last week’s round. blasting its way to 70 points before Hannibal could get above the 40-mark, may cause some athletes to think that Hannibal’s final sprint to the finish line was nothing but a bunch of mop-up touchdowns. But a 70-61 win, almost by definition, doesn’t involve the winner’s JV defense waltzing around the field at the very end. Hannibal, if inadvertently, may have exposed Lutheran North’s other lonely weakness…lack of a tradition and civic pride.

Lift For Life, another football “collective” from all around STL, began 2023 looking like a dynamo that would beat Valle U. and potentially even Lamar for a small-schools state championship. Lift For Life Motorized Scooter Company cleaned out Duchesne 58-0 to kick off the season, then whipped a proud Westminster Wildcats side to go 2-0. Lift For Life’s schedule soon took the Charter school into a Murderer’s Row of 4 consecutive powerhouse opponents, but it’s easy to think of how Jefferson County fans would be thrilled with the results of that “0-4” experiment for one of our teams, as Lift For Life kept 3 of the 4 tilts close, nearly beat Farmington, and rejected blow-out efforts from Cardinal Ritter and Quincy Notre Dame. Lift For Life’s coaches, however, then found out what happens to a manufactured lineup of kids without tradition when everything suddenly goes south for a change. Lift For Life’s relatively poor finish, in which it labored to win Class 2 District honors and then got whitewashed by Valle U., was a product of reacting to the losing streak in a weak way. Naturally, the kids signed up to try to beat their fellow All-Star teams like Cardinal Ritter. When that didn’t occur, Motorized Scooter Company had lost its real “playoff” already. L4L slowly became rag-tag as the leaves fell.

We’re not suggesting that will happen to Lutheran North, a more consistent football factory, on Saturday. But the Hawks owe it to themselves and to MSHSAA to try to put the Barnstormin’ All-Stars behind on the scoreboard, or at least Behind the 8-Ball, to find out if the same kind of mental-game collapse would happen to any group of kids with little to fight for except the idea that winning with an All-Star team is fun. Perhaps that’s Hillsboro’s other sneaky advantage on Saturday afternoon, since HHS is unlikely to fold up should Week 14’s scrum produce a bad opening half for the home team. In the unlikely event that Lutheran North has a very sloppy day, takes 200 yards in penalties, and kicks the football, The Geek will refer to what a Dallas Cowboys player said about the Silver Star’s superficial vibe in the late 1980s – “It was all glamor and glory when we won. But when the wheels came off, there was no love for Dallas to fall back on.”

As was the case with Crystal City’s final bid in Week 13, it would be dishonest to say that we predict a Hillsboro victory over Lutheran North. But remember that any neighborhood team is now graded on a curve, you could say, when taking on a team of athletes who were selected instead of reared. Pundits know that Lutheran North, Cardinal Ritter, and their ilk have about a 12-touchdown edge over similar sized prep schools, and a 6-score advantage over the average state playoff contender in Classes 4 and 5. If the HHS Hawks can bust-up that racket and make Lutheran North think twice about romping to a Show-Me Bowl title with a roster that – regretfully – won’t be graduating in 2024, then win, lose, or overtime, the Varsity Hawks will have given countless Class 4 teams courage that their seasons won’t be doomed to elimination should Lutheran North (or another terrifying tycoon) be slotted nearby in a Show-Me Bowl bracket soon. PREDICTION: LUTHERAN NORTH BARNSTORMIN’ ALL-STARS 54, ACTUAL HIGH SCHOOL TEAM 28

Saturday’s C4 semifinal game between Hillsboro High and Lutheran North will stream on MSHSAA TV (we hope) and is available on 1400 AM (not 800 AM as erroneously listed) analog or on the web at MyMyInfo. Go Blue & White!