The Gridiron Geek’s Big Idea #1 for this season is to create a video channel for chat-interview style versions of the Jefferson County Power Poll and the Friday Night Predictions. It’s going to be fun, but it also saves TGG time to fact-check and improve the written content at Mississippi Magazine. How much time? Karl Bierach of the Seckman Jaguars booster squad was kind enough to interview The Geek on 2025’s JeffCo season as a whole in August, in what turned into a 20-minute video that 1000+ people watched. In that time, Mississippi Magazine’s team could have spent 12,672 hours creating summertime blog posts for a distracted Facebook audience, half of them out on vacation someplace, and garnered less than 1000 views with it.
In that interview, The Geek was thinking of Jefferson, St. Pius X, and Grandview when he said, “There may not be a stinker in the bunch around here.” Class 2 represents the wealth of county football as well as any of our gangs of teams, since their success comes against a very tough division.
MSHSAA coaches have gone on record to say Class 5 is tougher than Class 6. The way that Kirkwood shot to the top of Class 6 soon after its enrollment numbers rose could be a testament to that. But we’re not sure if it’s true anymore, given the rise of the Metro Catholic League, and considering how top-heavy the Suburban League’s pigskin is. It might sound more “wise and esoteric” for coaches to go around saying Class 2 is superior to Class 3. MO’s Class 3 brackets have grown to look rag-tag with the addition of promoted private-school teams, some of whom are unlucky to be there in the first place (Duchesne’s had a nightmare on Elm Street), with a collection of cupcakes under a scant selection of solid teams like St. James. Class 2 is where spectators can watch most of the public-enrollment Small School dynamos, the Hermann-s and Scott City-s, with Lamar lording over them all.
Class 2 is a tough business, but JeffCo’s got some kids who ought to be money in 2025. If the Blue Jays, Lancers, and Eagles are all in the same District again, well then, the state’s deepest brackets may get deeper yet. Who will have the inside track if they’re all jammed in District 2 together this time?
The Jefferson Blue Jays have a formula. If their coaches go around saying they’re going to suck, they turn out to be pretty good and go 7-4 that season. If coaches act unsure whether JHS will win or not, the Blue Jays go 9-3 and make an impact in the playoffs. You rarely see Jefferson’s faculty actually brag on a Varsity roster before the season, which is why it’s exciting to see Matt Atley’s staff doing it this year. They think they might have something special.
Senior quarterback Cooper Frisk returns to throw passes to senior Noah Buehler, protected by an O-Line that Atley claims could have “3 All-State kids” on it while speaking to Russell Korando of the Jefferson County Leader about the 2025 campaign. Pass-rusher Troy Jefferson has the makeup of a Class 4 stud like Antonio Pinkston at 6’3″ and 245 lbs., a key weapon for a Blue Jays team looking to maximize the impact of Buehler’s talented defensive backfield. A good set of DBs is like a oyster you can’t pry open when there’s a meek pass rush. Get to the opposing QB, and they’ll come alive.
Is there any weakness to be found in R-7 this August, other than Crystal Highlands Golf Club making its old 9th Hole into a dinky finisher? The Geek sees a potential lack of difference-making rushers, running backs who’re able to will their way to those all-important 4th-and-2 conversions in the playoffs. Especially now that Landon Weiss and Karson Haefner are out of High School, you don’t know who you’d hand that football to, other than Frisk.
St. Pius X and Grandview are in similar scenarios, in spite of Grandview’s lineup remaining much the same while changes occur at Hill Valley. Each team wants to get stronger on the offensive line and they appear to have done so. Tucker Rhinehart’s OL has garnered praise for its training camp at GHS. Frank Ray’s St. Pius Lancers are just getting bigger, a component that the Lancers lacked (and nearly made up for) in last year’s brave .500 trek. Supposing each team does get stronger at the LOS, the sky is the limit for Class 2 in JeffCo. If not, then say hello to 2024’s problems again.
Ray is a teddy bear in the coaches’ office until the depth chart is brought out, when he turns into a gutsy tour-de-force wielding a pencil. Ray was restless about a St. Pius lineup that improved almost every Friday of last season, but which had been rearranged in a panic late in the previous summer when Hill Valley realized how small it could be on the O-line. The coach flashed his on-campus recruiting chops persuading more than one 6+ foot and 230+ pound athlete to take up football – in the trenches, no less – to combine with the up-and-comer Carter Cain in making the SPX line potentially average 225+ lbs. where the 2 strings of platoons averaged maybe 185 lbs. last year. St. Pius and Crystal City’s offensive and defensive lines may compare well in power and effectiveness this fall, but it’s the Lancers who are making the biggest leap in raw power. 2024’s missing ingredient has been added to the pot.
Then there’s the QB scenario, in which two sophomores have already supplanted the senior Danny Degeare behind center. St. Pius will toss the ball around a little more this time, utilizing Jack Michaud as a two-way dynamo on the boundary. We don’t know who the backfield’s heir-apparent to Justin Lehn will be yet. What we know is that if Ray didn’t think he was already set at running back, he turned the roster upside-down for a solution in camp.
The Geek still doesn’t know why Jaxin Patterson calls HC Frank Ray “generational.” That’s to say, TGG knows that Ray is very, very good, and that he’s doing a fine job with the Lancers, whose numbers have shot up to “Class 3” levels across all classes on a huge SPX roster for 2025. The good vibes and the ambitious scheduling moves are great, but lots of coaches have tried good times and exciting venues to rouse a losing team, and failed to do so, every bit as much as coaches who scheduled Potosi and then screamed at everyone for years on end. (Sorry, DeSoto. We’re learning to forget.) The Lancers are improving fast enough that it gives Ray credit for being an effective head coach, but not a generational one. What’s the big deal?
We got a glimpse of the answer this January – that’s “January” with a “J” – when the St. Pius Lancers got right back to work. They worked out on New Year’s Day. They lifted weights on College Football Playoff days. They ran drills on snowy winter days when the whole campus was shut down. They just kept practicing all winter and all spring and all summer. No head coach can just tell a team to do that and expect it to happen. Ray knows what makes student-athletes tick, to the point where they’re organizing their own extra practices right after losing a game to end the season. No wonder Ray says that the more alternative sports his boys play at school, the better. They have to have a break from football sometime – like it or not. There is no denying that the big CEO has lit a big, roaring fire under the student-athletes at Hill Valley.
St. Pius has replaced last year’s out-of-state games with a winnable matchup against Roosevelt, to be followed by The Geek’s vote for THE COOLEST contest of the upcoming regular season in the Tri-Cities, a “St. Pius Bowl” between St. Pius X of Festus and SPX of Kansas City. If the Lancers can add as much punch to their strong execution as we think they might, Week 9’s game at Valle University will not be a snoozer.
Finally, The Geek has invited a couple of St. Pius players over to help answer a few of your questions … oh, what’s that? Sorry, they just started practicing again. Look, fellows, if you throw a forearm shiver at that closet door, it’s not going to -BANG- -CRASH- see that’s what I told you.
Grandview’s offensive line “numbers” are going down – in a good way. The Varsity Eagles looked like a potential “Wall of Granite” going into 2023 and again going into 2024, but the premise was speculative, with pundits peeking at a potential list of 7-to-10 true bruisers in the Grandview depth chart, many of whom didn’t pan out or stick with the team. This summer, the Eagles and their new head coach Cory Hanger have weeded out the riffraff to come up with a veteran OL-DL combination of proven heavyweights. Hanger tells the JCL that he believes his RB combination could average 5 yards-a-pop during Rhinehart and Ethan Smith’s senior campaigns. That’s promising because Isaac Walker, returning for what could be a banner season, was already netting way over that average on his carries for the Birds of Prey.
You can trace a line from Week 10’s defeat at St. Pius, to the criticism of former Grandview head coach Jason Kimminau on behalf of The Geek and other local commentators, to the dismissal of Kimminau and the promotion of Hanger this summer. But the HC change may have been inspired by something else. Grandview was once one of the better pass-defending teams of any small school in Jefferson County. GHS, regretfully, has been one of the worst pass defenses in the JCAA since 2023. What happened? Maybe a new HC can find an answer.
We like Grandview to score points and play exciting games this autumn, with a familiar cast of weapons that begins-and-ends with senior QB Brennan Martin. But without a defense that can stop the long ball, opponents will keep scoring early on wide-open drives against Grandview, taking the Eagles out of their comfort zone. Hanger’s first job is to get his DBs unscrambled and make GHS’s rivals earn their touchdowns.
The Hillsboro-Dittmer school has added a Week 1 road trip to Quincy Notre Dame in place of a scrapped game against Chaffee. That settles it – The Gridiron Geek *never* wants to hear another word about Grandview scheduling “easy” out-of-conference foes. Going from Chaffee to Quincy Notre Dame is like going from playing Vanderbilt to facing Boise State. Quincy has it easier in Illinois (just like the Broncos in the Mountain West) but it’s still a private school that went 10-2 last season and roared with a 7-0 record over the Central State Eight.
Grandview has found its “Baylor,” “Senatobia,” and “St. Pius of KC” all rolled into one, and the brave Eagles are taking that contest on in the FIRST WEEK this season. Is the St. Pius influence spreading? Grandview was one of the JCAA’s dissenters on kicking out SPX, after all.
Class 2’s state playoffs were crazy-entertaining last year, fooling a lot of prognosticators if not Mississippi Magazine. Lamar, the eventual winner, was ranked out of the top 10 in C2 late last summer, one of the dumbest things The Geek has ever seen from a local media with some doozy-mistakes on the ledger. 2024’s District 2 champion Bowling Green nearly took down the Lamar Tigers in a wonderful cross-regional semifinal.
If Hermann ever got an offense (and got out of the Meramec Large Schools conference) HHS might beat Lamar and win the whole darn thing. But it’s noteworthy that Valle U. is expected to land in Class 3, not Class 2, even though Valle was upset by Bowling Green in 2024’s state quarterfinals. That makes Class 2 more wide-open to an upstart like St. Pius or Grandview, or a former semifinal bid like Jefferson R-7.
Hermann’s ace pass rusher Daeden Hopkins graduated this spring. Maybe a bunch of Bowling Green’s patented 99-man roster spots turned over too. We like the notion of C2D2’s top seeds from 2024 perhaps falling back a bit, just as the Lancers, Eagles, and Blue Jays look solid with more upperclassmen in key places. Of course, MSHSAA could always screw up this forecast royally by putting our trio in different Districts, or different Classes in 2025 (don’t put it past them). But if beating BGHS is all it takes to get to the state level, it doesn’t seem so impossible.