High school football: 3 teams above everyone else in Class 3A

When you break down the field for this year's 3A state tournament, it becomes immediately obvious that a handful of teams will likely fare better than everyone else.

But nobody should take anything for granted.

To have success in the postseason and accomplish something that only one of the 16 teams in this year's field will ultimately accomplish, teams are going to have to play extremely well from start to finish.

"We told our kids last week that the great teams play great this time of year," said Park City coach Brandon Matich. "Our kids in this program have been through first-round losses as freshmen (and) as sophomores, and we don't take these games for granted.

"We know it's gonna take every ounce of every single one of our guys to be successful on this run. There's only one team that gets to win their last game, and our kids realize that."

The 3A tournament gets under way this weekend with eight first-round games at home sites.

On paper, there clearly seems to be three teams — defending champ Juan Diego, Park City and Hurricane — and then everyone else.

"There's a huge discrepancy," said Morgan coach Kovi Christiansen, "between the top three teams in the league and some of the other ones that made the playoffs."

But that's not to say that life will easy for those three teams. Indeed, everyone else will be out to show that they've got what it takes to knock them off.

The Park City Miners had the lesson that "anything can happen in a state tournament game" painfully driven home when they experienced gut-wrenching first-round upset losses three years ago and then two years ago before advancing to the semifinals a year ago.

If anybody needs further proof that those types of upsets still happen, they need only look back to last weekend. That's when Desert Hills stunned Hurricane, 27-20, in their Region 9 season finale.

Hurricane will nonetheless be a big favorite when it hosts ALA at 5 p.m. Friday and still should be regarded as one of the three overall favorites for the whole tournament.

But Hurricane coach Chris Homer hopes his guys will learn from what happened last weekend, and he pointed out that others could learn from it, as well.

"Everybody in our program thought that we were gonna beat Desert Hills, and we didn't. And I'm sure everybody in our program thinks we're gonna beat ALA, but who knows?" Homer said. "It's one of those games that, maybe our loss serves as a wake-up call across the state that you've gotta prepare better and you've gotta come ready to play, regardless of your talent level. If you don't come to play and you make mistakes, you can lose."

e-mail: drasmussen@desnews.com