Can North Crowley draw inspiration from legendary upsets ahead of the Duncanville game?

On Saturday, North Crowley will have a chance to end a dynasty in one of the nation’s most anticipated matchups this year.

The ninth-ranked team in the nation will try to give the No. 3 Duncanville its second loss since the start of the 2022 season and end its bid for a third straight Class 6A Division I state title. At times, 13-0 Duncanville doesn’t seem lethal, a giant that has won its games by an average of 31.5 points with two of the top four recruits in the nation — Alabama signee Keelon Russell at quarterback and Oregon signee Dakorien Moore at wide receiver.

Although only one of Duncanville’s games has been decided by fewer than 18 points, and although Russell was named the Gatorade National Player of the Year this week, North Crowley (14-0), located in southwest Tarrant County, is not in awe of its southwest Dallas County counterpart enters their semifinal at 3:00 PM at Allen’s Eagle Stadium. Not even after losing 52-10 to Duncanville in the same round last year.

“I couldn’t have scripted this any better given the opportunity to come here,” North Crowley coach Ray Gates said after last week’s 35-7 win over five-time state champion Allen. “It’s our time to have this type of run and show people that football in D-FW is not only D, but also over in F and V, we play. We have a team that beat us last year and our guys will be ready and prepared for the moment. You want to get back up there and shoot your best shot.”

Duncanville may seem invincible, considering Russell has thrown for 3,874 yards and 53 touchdowns this season while beating a pair of nationally ranked teams, and is 16-0 in the playoffs in his career. But North Crowley can draw inspiration from legendary upsets, including one by seven-time state champion Todd Dodge.

The Lovejoy coach’s 2015 team at Austin Westlake ended Allen’s 57-game winning streak and its bid for a fourth straight state title with a 23-17 victory in a state semifinal. Future NFL quarterback Sam Ehlinger led Westlake, and Allen had lost Kyler Murray — arguably the greatest quarterback in state history — to graduation the previous spring. But the Allen mystique was usually enough to intimidate opponents.

Not Westlake, as Dodge broke that game down in four-minute increments and tried to let the pressure build on an Allen team that hadn’t faced much adversity while winning by an average of 33.5 points that season. It also helped to have a superstar player like Ehlinger, who “kind of jumped out of the phone booth with his Superman cape,” said Dodge, who accounted for 385 yards of total offense and threw three touchdown passes in the game.

“When you go into a monumental task against someone like that who has won so many games in a row, if you try to upset them in the first quarter, it could be over. You just have to hang in,” Dodge said. “When we go into it, the pressure is not on us. The narrative that was created for Allen at the time, not by them but by the outside world, was that oh my god, they’ve won 57 straight, they’ve got to keep winning. It’s just an enormous amount of pressure on a bunch of 17-year-olds.”

There is good reason for North Crowley’s confidence, even though it is 0-3 all-time against Duncanville and has been outscored 144-49. North Texas signed Chris Jimerson Jr. has thrown for 3,285 yards and 50 touchdowns and Colorado signee Quentin Gibson has 31 touchdown catches — tied for seventh in a season in state history — as North Crowley averages an area-best 55.6 points and is two. winner from its first state title since 2003.

North Crowley had a Dallas-area college high nine players last week — one more than Duncanville — and has already beaten back-to-back state champions, shocking DeSoto 57-51 in Week 2 when Cornelius Warren ran in 152 yards and three touchdowns and Gibson had seven catches for 180 yards and four scores.

Gates, who is 40-2 in three seasons as North Crowley’s head coach, got his team ready to face DeSoto by giving a motivational speech about Buster Douglas, who knocked out Mike Tyson in the 10th round in 1990 in what is considered to be the most shocking upset in boxing history – and perhaps in all sports.

That type of pep talk has brought down other dynasties.

“If you’re not careful, your team starts looking at the whole story behind their wins, and you don’t stand a chance if you listen to the outside world on that,” Dodge said. “So you try to stay away from that and use examples of times where it’s happened before — whether it’s high school football, pro football or college football — where big upsets have happened and dynasties have been stopped .”

Last weekend’s disruption was a case in point

Dodge isn’t the only area coach with a plan for what it takes to beat one of the state’s all-time great programs.

Three-time state champion Denton Ryan wasn’t intimidated Saturday when it faced Aledo, which had won back-to-back 5A Division I state titles and has 11 state championships in the past 15 years. Ryan knew it could go toe-to-toe after leading Aledo 27-8 in the second quarter of a 42-27 regular-season loss in October. Coach Dave Henigan’s team got revenge with a 31-21 win in the regional final to improve to 3-0 all-time in playoff games with Aledo.

“We didn’t play the team that won the state championship, we played this team,” Henigan said. “We don’t talk about the other team. We talk about what we have to do and who we are. I don’t think their history or our history with them was included at all.”

Longview entered this season with the seventh-most wins in state history, but after moving up from 5A Division I to 6A in realignment, it was the underdog in Saturday’s 6A Division II regional final against DeSoto. The 24-team in the nation had won 15 straight playoff games and had eight players sign with colleges last week — including six with Power 4 schools.

Longview, whose only college signee so far is linebacker Brenden Reese with North Texas, routed DeSoto 50-14 as lightly recruited senior running back Kelvin Washington (three non-FBS offers) ran for 298 yards and five touchdowns.

“We have a bunch of no-name kids in terms of the national recruiting services,” Longview coach John King said. “I don’t know if we have a kid that’s even in the top thousand. But our kids don’t care. They grew up wanting to be a Lobo, they’ve been playing football together since they were in grade school, and they take it with honor and pride. Our kids knew what DeSoto had done, but the focus was on what we had to do.”

When dynasties fade

Sometimes it just takes a bad break or injury to end a dynasty.

Celina’s state-record 68-game streak ended, along with its hopes of a fifth straight state title, when it missed an extra point with 10 seconds left in a 21-20 loss to Daingerfield in the second round of the 2002 playoffs. The loss was Celina’s first since 1998, and it had outscored its opponents 2,642-529 during the streak.

In 2007, Southlake Carroll was chasing a fourth straight state title and had won 58 straight games against Texas schools when it lost 22-21 to Abilene High in a third-round playoff game. Carroll star quarterback Riley Dodge, who was MaxPrep’s National Player of the Year in 2006, left the game in the second quarter with a shoulder injury, and his backup fumbled a snap at the Abilene 10-yard line with eight seconds left as Carroll got into position to a game-winning field goal attempt.

On Saturday, North Crowley has a chance for a legendary win that would be one for the ages. It might not even be an upset.

Dave Campbell’s Texas Footballwhich creates computer-generated point spreads for all playoff games across the state, has North Crowley as a two-point favorite.

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