5A high school football championship: Miners have performed just fine in the spotlight

SOUTH JORDAN — Bingham has walked a fine line this year.

Highly ranked nationally coming into the season, the Miners knew they needed to impress the national voters each week without getting carried away and running up the score.

From the beginning of the season, coach Dave Peck stressed with his players that being ranked nationally was a unique opportunity, and they needed to justify it every week with a solid performance.

"This is the first year ever that we've talked about rankings because we felt this was not a do-over year," said Peck. "How many times in the history of Utah high school football has there been a team starting out ranked in the top 10?"

Heading into this Friday's 5A state championship game against Fremont, Bingham is ranked No. 4 nationally by USA Today and No. 16 by MaxPreps. It began the season ranked No. 5 and 9, respectively, in the two polls.

Peck isn't sure why his team has slipped a little bit in the MaxPreps poll, but if it's because his team isn't winning convincingly enough he can live with that.

"We're going to play all these same teams for years and years to come, and we never want to embarrass anybody," he said.

Bingham is averaging 50.7 points per game this year, but it's only scored more than 56 points once. Of its 12 victories, the 35-point mercy rule was in effect by the end of eight of those games.

Peck is the first to admit that because of the national ranking, he's allowed his starters to play a bit more. In years past, Peck started making subs once his team led by 35 points, but this year he's allowed his starters to play another series or two.

"We've maybe tried to do things a little bit better than we have before, because we knew USA Today was here, or some of the other national people," said Peck. "Plus, these seniors have worked their whole life to play their senior year, and we wanted to leave them in a little bit longer."

Running back Harvey Langi said the team takes pride in the national ranking, but a lot of that stems from raising the bar for future Bingham teams to strive for.

Despite a 41-point average margin of victory and a team loaded with future college players, the Miners haven't necessarily overwhelmed teams from the opening kickoff. Sometimes they have, most notably outscoring Copper Hills 49-0 in the first quarter of an eventual 63-0 victory, but they've done a lot of the damage in the third quarter.