On Saturday, North Crowley has a chance to end a dynasty in one of the most anticipated matchups in the country this year.

The ninth-ranked team in the country will look to hand No. 3 Duncanville its second loss since the start of the 2022 season and end its bid to win a third straight Class 6A Division I state title. At times, Duncanville doesn’t seem lethal at 13-0, a juggernaut that has won its games by an average of 31.5 points with two of the top four recruits in the country – Alabama freshman Keelon Russell at quarterback and Oregon freshman Dakorien Moore as a fullback receiver.

Although only one of Duncanville’s games was decided by fewer than 18 points and Russell was named the Gatorade National Player of the Year this week, North Crowley (14-0) in southwest Tarrant County isn’t fazed by its southwest Dallas County counterpart going around 3 p.m. in the state semifinals at Allen’s Eagle Stadium. Not even after a 52-10 loss to Duncanville in the same round last year.

“I couldn’t have planned this better when I had the opportunity to come here,” North Crowley coach Ray Gates said after last week’s 35-7 victory over five-time state champion Allen. “It’s time we had this kind of run and showed people that football in D-FW isn’t just D football, but that we play over in F and W too. We have a team that beat us last year and our guys will be ready and prepared for the moment. You want to be at the top again and do your best.”

Duncanville may seem unbeatable considering Russell has thrown for 3,874 yards and 53 touchdowns this season, beating two national teams and is 16-0 in the playoffs in his career. But North Crowley can draw inspiration from legendary upsets, including upsetting seven-time state champion Todd Dodge.

Related:Five storylines for the Duncanville-North Crowley state semifinals: Star receivers face off

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

Not Westlake, as Dodge broke the game into four-minute increments and tried to build pressure on an Allen team that hadn’t faced much adversity and won by an average of 33.5 points this 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 totaled 385 yards of offense and threw three touchdown passes in the game.

“When you face a monumental task against someone like this, who has won so many games in a row, and you try to upset him in the first quarter, it could all be over. You just have to hang in there,” Dodge said. “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 had won 57 times in a row and they needed to keep winning. That’s just a lot of pressure on a group of 17-year-olds.”

There are good reasons for North Crowley’s confidence, even though it is 0-3 all-time against Duncanville and has been outscored 144-49. North Texas freshman Chris Jimerson Jr. has thrown for 3,285 yards and 50 touchdowns, and Colorado freshman Quentin Gibson has 31 touchdown catches — which ranks seventh in a season in state history — while North Crowley averaged an area-best 55.6 points and is within two wins of its first state championship since 2003.

North Crowley had a Dallas-area college record 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 for 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, prepared his team for the game against DeSoto by giving a motivational speech about how Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson in the 10th round in 1990 is considered the most shocking surprise in boxing history – and perhaps in all sports.

This kind of encouragement has brought down other dynasties.

“If you’re not careful, your team starts to deal with the entire story behind their victories, and you don’t stand a chance if you listen to the outside world,” Dodge said. “So you try to stay away from that and give examples from situations where it’s happened before – whether it’s high school football, professional football or college football – that major upsets have happened and dynasties were stopped.”

The excitement of last weekend sent a message

Dodge isn’t the only regional coach who knows what it takes to beat one of the state’s all-time great programs.

Three-time state champion Denton Ryan wasn’t intimidated Saturday as he faced Aledo, which has won back-to-back 5A Division I state titles and has 11 state championships in the last 15 years. Ryan knew it could be a neck-and-neck race after giving Aledo a 27-8 lead in the second quarter following a 42-27 regular-season loss in October. Coach Dave Henigan’s team got revenge with a 31-21 win in the regional final and improved to 3-0 all-time in a playoff matchup against 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 need to do and who we are. I don’t think their history or our history with them was even considered.”

Longview began 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 No. 24 team in the country had won 15 straight playoff games and signed eight players with colleges last week — including six with Power 4 schools.

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

“We have a lot of no-name kids as far as national recruiting goes,” Longview coach John King said. “I don’t know if we have a child who is even in the top 1,000. But our children don’t care. They grew up wanting to be a Lobo, they played soccer together since they were in elementary school, and they accept that with honor and pride. Our kids knew what DeSoto did, but the focus was on what we needed to do.”

Related:10 players to watch in the state semifinals, including the No. 1 wide receiver in the country

When dynasties fade

Sometimes all it takes is a serious fracture or injury to end a dynasty.

Celina’s record 68-game winning streak ended along with their hopes of a fifth straight state title when they missed an extra point with ten 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 she had outscored her opponents 2,642-529 during the winning streak.

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

On Saturday, North Crowley has a chance for a legendary win for the ages. It might not even be a surprise.

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

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