Hillsboro 34, Lutheran North 12
The Geek admits to never thinking much about what it would be like to cover a Show-Me Bowl for Mississippi Magazine. Oh, sure, we can technically do whatever we want on a 12-team blog that has to report on all of MSHSAA anyway. When TGG was briefly working for a sports crew based in Paducah, we had scouting reports coming in on 2 sports in 3 states! This postseason, Harrisburg’s loss to Crystal City in a District basketball football game gave us yet another chance to bring up the weird world of Arkansas pigskin, Pulaski Academy, and those dastardly on-side kicks. But to cover the MSHSAA Show-Me Bowl after all dozen of our schools were eliminated from play always felt like throwing good volunteer-hours after bad. Less people were reading, and there’s always plenty of coverage of state championship games to go around regardless. We get better ratings in winter by just talking about the NFL and the Super Bowl, dishing on head coach hires-and-fires in the Dirty Dozen, or merely ranking our fans’ alma mater teams top-to-bottom while looking forward to that next season.
Such won’t be the case this time. Mississippi Magazine didn’t even post anything right after HHS’s historic W over Lutheran North on Saturday, and yet a small post-game note on Facebook is garnering 2.5K views. That’s views for the “preview of a recap” of Hillsboro’s amazing show in the semis. The Gridiron Geek is under pressure to get everything right in less than a day’s time, AND to get everything right on the Kearney Bulldogs, Hillsboro’s next and final opponent, as we begin to take a look at them. This has not happened to the Mississippi Conference since Y2K or to the blog since always. That’s a lot of pressure to please! Oh, and the official Box Score from Saturday’s bout JUST came out today. EEP!
But in a stroke of luck, MSHSAA TV’s broadcast of Hillsboro’s surreal blow-out of Lutheran North ran 2 hours without a hitch. There were even multiple versions of it that worked fine (first time for everything). Thanks to Live Stream STL and other providers, those who couldn’t make it out to Leon Hall on Saturday were still treated to one of the nicest surprises of any Missouri playoff bracket in recent memory, as Lutheran North’s hand-picked Varsity lineup was exposed, erased, and eliminated by the well-coached Hawks for 3 quarters. The Geek – wrong as ever – gave Hillsboro a chance to win an anxious, nail-biting 4th quarter over the Lutheran North Barnstormin’ All-Stars if the Hawks even got that far. But shockingly, it was Quarter 4 when the HHS defense simply closed the door on a 34-12 advantage, which led to a fascinating hour-or-so of relatively quiet joy in Hawkville. HHS had done the impossible…and in just 36:00!!!
Saturday’s kickoff was a clash of tradition against size and speed. Tradition won, by a TKO in the 3rd Round. Hillsboro outclassed Lutheran North from the opening bell onward, getting out on the front foot of Preston Brown’s offense and generating too-sweet-to-believe matching 146-yard stat lines for the Brown brothers running the ball. The only genuinely worrisome moment came when Lutheran North, trailing 0-7 in the 1st quarter, punted the Hawks down to the 1, and Hillsboro only gained a couple of yards on its first 2 snaps from there. But this isn’t the Blue & White of the 2010s. Preston’s drop back on 3rd down was accompanied by a lovely skinny-post pattern from Chase Sucharski that left Hillsboro’s star WR wide open, and Sucharski sealed a catch-and-run that gave HHS spark for another TD drive. Scoreboards read “14-0” Hillsboro over Lutheran North before you could say “The Geek overrated these guys.”
Bill Sucharski coached circles around Saturday’s semifinal rival, looking polite but businesslike on the sideline with what can only be described as a Stanley Cup Playoff Beard. Lutheran North tried the old trick of running “goal-line defenses” out in midfield against Hillsboro’s ground game, like how Large Schools from the Mississippi used to play against the Herculaneum team which used a trademark Mid-Line Dive Play to reach the Show-Me Bowl in 1991 and in 1995. The Gridiron Geek could have told Lutheran North’s defense that Hillsboro isn’t that style of a team these days, and that the Crusaders – from a strategy and tactics point-of-view – were not up against Wishbone pigskin from Missouri, but the Baltimore Ravens instead.
Did Lutheran North adjust following Hillsboro’s clutch, beautiful scoring drive that wound down the 1st-half clock and put a dominant 28-0 lead on the board? Apparently not enough, because Lutheran North’s defense began crowding the scrimmage line again as soon as HHS neared midfield on its first 3rd quarter possession. Preston Brown stepped back and surveyed the defense long enough to make the Crusaders panic, and start clumsily rushing around end all at once. In a flash, the electrifying junior QB took off through a seam up the middle and sprinted past Lutheran North’s defensive backfield, almost as though they were just kids who grew up in their Varsity team’s neighborhood. It was 34-0, and quarterback Dakari Hollis wanted his visit to end soon. Hillsboro High slammed the racket of recruited private-school rosters, and TKO’d an All-Star team.
Sucharski’s offense did exactly what Mississippi Magazine thought it should do – usually a bad idea! – and opened up on Lutheran North’s overconfident defense from the outset. Brown’s 9-of-12 for about 100 yards passing from the pocket isn’t a sexy stat line, but it’s the kind of model-of-efficiency performance that we thought could finally set a private-school division killer on the rocks. Leon Hall’s ground game is proving to be just as devious and dangerous out of wide-open formations as it used to be from Lee Freeman’s tight Flexbone setups, proving a generation of coaches wrong who said that an old-school option offense would “lose too much” if its QB ever focused on passing the bean.
Hillsboro’s special teams spanked Lutheran North’s about as badly as it outshone Cardinal Ritter’s virtually nonexistent kicking game in Week 8. Yet it was the defense of Leon Hall that made the biggest statement of all in Week 14’s semifinal. HHS intercepted Hollis for the first time all season, and held STL’s leading signal-caller to less than 20 completions and no touchdowns on close to 40 total drop-backs. Payton Brown’s game-sealing interception of Hollis received the Steak & Shake “Shake ‘Em Up” defensive play-of-the-game award from MyMyInfo in the site’s highlight-reel recap.
(MyMyInfo also says the Hawks will travel to “Far Out Field” for Saturday’s Class 4 Final, which is awesome.)
The Varsity Hawks’ 2023 Show-Me Bowl game at Faurot Field kicks off at 11 AM this Saturday. Kearney’s record coming into the title tilt is another dose of irony, since it’s the Bulldogs who have had a “2010s Hillsboro Hawks” type of year, and started slow before finishing like a house-on-fire. Kearney is as powerful of a rushing team as Hillsboro, but utilizing a regular “NCAA” setup instead of the Hawks’ complex playbook. It works to both schools’ advantage that Webb City and Cardinal Ritter have each been promoted into the Class 5 division.
Kearney doesn’t scare The Geek as a team as versatile as Hillsboro. But it looks like the Kearney Bulldogs, who last won a state football championship in 2015, might share Webb City’s advantage (and Valle U.’s advantage) in having Varsity rosters made up of kids from sports-legacy families throughout a wide rural landscape. KHS doesn’t seem like a Class 4 enterprise when you look up “Kearney, MO” on Google. In “Waiting For Guffman” style, the most important building in Kearney is acknowledged to be a tiny house, alone in a big field. But it’s said to be the birthplace of Jesse James.
We’ll have to wait and find out if Kearney’s fight song was written by John Lee Hooker.
Before moving on to Week 15’s Show-Me Bowl in earnest, The Geek wants to get a few Hillsboro-related items off his chest. There’s been a weird backlash to our HHS reporting from a few lonely corners in 2023. Surely not from Leon Hall’s coaches, players, or Booster Club leadership, since The Geek hasn’t heard from any of those people except in good cheer, and they keep coming to Mississippi Magazine in droves. But the backlash is still notable because it’s the first time this reporter has ever gotten backlash to positive coverage. Bloggers are all used to getting backlash for our negative remarks – getting clapped-at by fans for growing to like and support their team is a freaky brand-new phenomenon.
One neglected soul showed up to the Facebook Group to attack in Middle School style, repeating every nice thing TGG said about Hillsboro or Mississippi Area football along with a smarmy P.S. to let everybody know how stupid…liking Hillsboro is supposed to be? You know the drill:
You: I like the back section of this textbook.
Them: “I like the back section of this textbook.” I love it.
You: You don’t really sound like you love it.
Them: “You don’t really sound like you love it.” Heh heh. Another real smart thing to say. Heh.
You: (Recite the Gettysburg Address, daring them to act like that’s stupid too)
Them: Why so uptight? We’re all friends here, you jerk.
Hillsboro’s part-time photographer does not kindly approve of Mississippi Magazine, and we blame Limited View Pictures’ prejudiced town gossip for that. (Today’s Q-Final Game image from Facebook was carefully confirmed to be NOT one of Mr. Stuthers’ others.) We’ll never use another photo from HHS football’s main Facebook scroll unless Sucharski personally emails the blog one, and even then, we’ll have to make sure he’s not faking up the middle before pitching-out. Finally, there’s a thread of our “fan mail” (like comments from Week 1) that says The Geek is constantly itching to bring up Festus-area teams from “where he grew up” in EVERY last article, and all the blog’s reporting on HHS + 8 other teams is an excuse to do so.
Are they nuts? TGG has made every excuse to put Crystal City in every post for 2 years running, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go and mow Bradley’s Farm with a lawn tractor. But we can’t be afraid to hurt anyone’s feelings by bringing up Festus, North County, and other victims of Hillsboro ’23 who happen to be blood rivals of the Hawks. That’s like talking about Army West Point without talking about Navy, and just ignoring all those “Beat Navy” stickers everywhere you turn.
Hillsboro’s 29-28 thriller with Festus in 2023’s District Final not only proved to be pivotal in the Hawks’ otherwise surprisingly simple run to the Missouri state finals, but with hindsight, we can also see the emergence of Hillsboro’s pass defense – with or without Division 1 edge-rushers on board – as a tremendous weapon. There’s that last-ditch INT to prevail in Week 12, followed by Saturday’s epic passing defense against Lutheran North. Nevermind that talk about a pair of graduated NCAA prospects removing the domination factor for Hillsboro’s edge rush and open-field coverage. The Hawks have turned a corner in that department that reminds The Gridiron Geek of how Nebraska went from a clumsy pass-defending team to the versatile group which beat Miami, Florida, and nearly Florida State in national championship games later in Tom Osbourne’s career.
Hillsboro kids enjoy beating the Mississippi Conference, right? It would be rude to bring up FHS, Farmington, or North County if the Hawks hadn’t been knocking hell out of those teams, but as it stands, we can’t imagine that it brings Leon Hall down to hear about another one of its massive success-streaks. Dramatic wins over top rivals are the story of almost any championship season and Hillsboro’s shouldn’t be any different. Last but not least, TGG will confess here-and-now to having grown up in Herky, not Festus, and to have considered R-6 the “bad guys” for most of his life until 2013.
Hillsboro was the second-favorite High School team in TGG’s household as a kid, and one of the first 5 sports teams that your humble narrator ever cheered for. We probably compensate with a broad all-county view when Herky and Hillsboro are in the offing, because you don’t want your 9-year-old self to emerge when you’re trying to explain pigskin to school kids and grandmas. So there’s that. Never fear, though, Mississippi Magazine isn’t about to bring up our other 11 teams for the sake of talking about them. It’s only if they’ve played and lost to Hillsboro’s greatest team in 4+ decades, and only to talk about more angles for Blue & White’s season to end all seasons. All due respect to Kearney, but that goes for Varsity Bulldogs too. Hillsboro is our team of the hour, and that “hour” could last right through the holidays.
Hopefully the skeptical minority of readers will see that Hillsboro’s run is more special if viewed in broader terms. As a Varsity team that likes to win lots of football games, the Hawks are fine and dandy. But that still makes them one of 322 teams to qualify for the Show-Me Bowl since 2000. Consider instead how prohibitively good Missouri’s best private-school teams looked after the St. Mary’s Dragons tripped Jaxin Patterson’s lineup in last year’s quarterfinals, and after Cardinal Ritter’s sudden 2-class promotion did not prevent the Lions from making a meal out of another District. Hillsboro’s become “Perseus” of MSHSAA’s public schools as of Week 15, defeating “The Kraken” in the form of Lutheran North. All at once, the Lutheran North-s of the world appear to have chronic bad points, all of which Coach Sucharski’s team punished in the semis.
Hillsboro didn’t beat a Show-Me Bowl worthy team on Saturday. Lutheran North showed up with linemen out of shape, WRs out of sorts, and a vaunted offense that wasn’t prepared to match what Preston Brown’s unit can do. It seems that some of the All-Star teams – Lutheran North and Lift For Life being 2 prime examples from 2023 – are skating by on their talent while ahead in easier games, and sorely unprepared to get gobsmacked in the gullet by a courageous public-school group that grew up together and are prepared to fight for each other for 48:00. HHS played like it could have surpassed Hannibal’s offense and won 73-70 on a Nick Marchetti field goal if it had to. But the “dull” way that the second half turned out is actually more exciting in the big picture. Hillsboro just gave everybody a road map for beating MSHSAA’s manufactured teams in the playoffs. Start fast, surprise them with a lead, and expose the short order pick-up team’s subpar fundamentals with teamwork and grit.
Were 2022’s Hillsboro Hawks a less disciplined playoff unit? No, they were unlucky. If private-school powerhouses are going to keep assembling rag-tag lineups of fast prospects and hoping for the best, then the St. Mary’s formula of getting really good running backs and handing-off to them is probably the better way to go. It’s simple, and hard to stop if the RBs are big and fast enough. But that’s also NOT the kind of style that attracts the flashy skill-players Cardinal Ritter and Lutheran North got their hands on this season, meaning St. Mary’s might also have been lucky to have a perfect lineup of players who were also willing to put in the dirty-work for a power team. Brands that attempt St. Mary’s formula may find themselves short of athletes – those that try the Lutheran North method could be racing on a track with trap doors in it. You can only go so far with playground-style football before a club like the Hillsboro Hawks exposes it for what it is. Public school sports dynasties looked like a dying breed as of 12 months ago. The mighty Varsity Hawks have knocked that door to Columbia wide open, producing an all-public Show-Me Bowl in Class 4 to go with Park Hills Central’s public-school opponent for its own Show-Me Bowl bid. Teamwork, passion, determination, and love have won the day over a handful of schools’ dastardly attempt to exploit MSHSAA’s system.
Darn skippy, it’s a Show-Me Bowl with ACTUAL HIGH SCHOOL TEAMS in it! We’ll get a sharp look at Hillsboro’s match-up against Kearney, and maybe-just-maybe a round of bonus predictions to go with Hillsboro’s, later this week on the Magazine. Congrats again to HHS!