Go East Young Man

The high school football playoffs were this past weekend in Tacoma and the schools that are located east of the Cascade Range came away with five out of six state championships.

If you add another school with eastside in its name then it was a clean sweep. However, Eastside Catholic is located in Sammamish so it is technically in western Washington.

But Eastside Catholic does have ties to the east side of the state. Head Coach Jeremy Thielbahr played and coached at Washington State University.

In his fourth year Thielbahr has guided the Crusaders to back to back state championships after two runner-up finishes. All four championship games were with the Bellevue High School (BHS) Wolverines.

The Eastside Catholic (EC) defensive coordinator is Rob Christoff son of Ritzville High School alum Andy (AJ) Christoff. Rob Christoff is also in his fourth year at Eastside Catholic.

The Crusaders rallied from a 42-14 halftime deficit to earn a hard fought victory over the Bellevue eleven.

It was definitely a wild football game but isn’t that how state championship games should be?

In the earlier game on Friday the two teams that were supposed to lose the week before played the 1B eight-man game and ACH came out on top 46-42 over Lummi.

In the games played the week before Lummi stopped Number 1 rated Neah Bay and ACH defeated powerful Liberty Christian from Richland. I guess that is why they play the games.

Prosser returned to the championship circle in the 2A division by getting past Tumwater.

The Mustangs and Thunderbirds are no strangers to the finals and both have hoisted the first place trophy on several occasions.

The Royal Knights dropped King’s in the 1A game 28-7. The Knights rolled over their opponents all season with only one challenge to speak of a 14-7 victory over rival Connell.

In the semifinal rematch the Eagles were overwhelmed by Royal 47-7. The Knights were led by Joe Lang who scored three touchdowns and intercepted two passes. I met Joe at the Undeberg Invite last spring.

He’s quite an athlete and a good kid to boot.

The Okanogan Bulldogs defeated the Napavine Tigers in a rematch of last year’s 2B championship game. Napavine dominated the statistics last year but lost the game 17-14.

This year was another wild one as the Bulldogs rallied to win 36-34 after trailing 27-14 in the third quarter. This is the fifth straight year an east side team has won the 2B championship.

We LRS Bronco fans are wondering what might have been if a play or two had different results a few weeks back.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the Gonzaga Prep-Skyline game Saturday night you missed a good one.

Talk about two completely different teams. The Bullpups ran the ball 83 times for 521 yards and only passed three times completing 1 for 43 more yards.

Skyline is mostly a passing team. The Pups had a great scheme to force the Spartans to throw short routes.

Skyline loves to throw the deep ball but they weren’t able to for fear of an interception as the GP safeties played deep centerfield.

The Spartan running game that worked so well against Lake Stevens never did materialize. The speedy Pups didn’t allow the big back from Skyline to get untracked.

When the final horn sounded the Gonzaga Prep Bullpups took home their third big school championship 34-16. This was their first football championship since 1986.

Throughout the game it felt like the announcers were waiting for the great Skyline offense to get going and take apart the Bullpup secondary but GP wasn’t going to let that happen.

The announcers had to acknowledge that there was some pretty good football being played on the east side of the mountains. Five of six championships were won by eastern Washington teams.

It kind of made me wonder why the powers that be at Root Sports aren’t telling the television crew to go east young man, they play football over there too!