Derby shooting for redemption, not revenge, in state championship football game
They looked around the quiet locker room and didn’t need to say anything.
“We were all just kind of looking around at each other and knowing, ‘We want to be back in this place playing next year at the same time,’ ” Hunter Igo said.
Igo, then a junior, and the rest of the Derby Panthers football team had just lost in a state championship game for the first time since 2002: a 49-42 defeat to Blue Valley North.
On Saturday, as if returning to the final wasn’t inspiring enough, Derby will play the same team again, in the same game.
“There is no revenge (factor), but the kids know what it feels like to walk off that field with a second-place trophy,” Derby coach Brandon Clark said. “These kids are hungry to get in front of their friends and family and show them how hard they’ve been working.
“This team is zoned in. They’re locked in, and it’s pretty cool to see.”
Blue Valley North will look vastly different outside of one player — albeit arguably the best player in the state, and possibly the greatest quarterback in Kansas high school history.
Graham Mertz enters the championship game with 3,651 passing yards and 49 touchdowns. He will be without 35 seniors from last year’s title-winning season.
But Blue Valley North is not weak by any stretch of the imagination. Cameron Burt comes into the game with the most receiving yards by any player in Kansas high school history in a single season, with 1,705.
But Derby has proven to be at another level in 2018, headlined with 22 seniors and one of the state’s best defenses in recent years.
The Panthers enter Saturday’s showdown with the No. 1-ranked scoring defense in Class 6A, allowing just 6.7 points per game. Derby has rolled through the first three rounds of the bracket;. no team has scored on them more than once, including No. 3 Manhattan in the state semifinals.
But as good as the Derby defense has been, the Panthers’ offense has been its equal.
For everything Mertz and the Blue Valley North offense have done in 2018, the Panthers still enter this one a point behind the Mustangs for the top scoring offense in Class 6A, at 46.2 points per game.
They are a train on both sides. They don’t have the headline recruit or one player that demands attention, but this Derby squad is the most complete team in Kansas high school football, and it has been years in the making.
“We’ve got our middle-schoolers showing up in the morning for zero hour and lifting,” Clark said.
The Panthers are shooting for their fifth title in school history and third in four years. Derby has already become the 10th active school in Kansas history to reach 10 championship games.
But no one in Derby is satisfied with that.
“It’s just expected of us,” senior Jackson Syring said. “It’s expected for us to work hard and do things off the field to get ourselves in better shape.
“It’s the law in Derby.”