Mater Dei is averaging 60 points a game in these CIF-SS Southern Section football playoffs.
St. John Bosco, Mater Dei’s opponent in the Division 1 championship game Saturday at Angel Stadium, is averaging 50 points a game in the playoffs.
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Murrieta Valley, which San Clemente plays in the Divison 2 final Friday, is scoring 64 points per playoff game. Santa Ana is averaging 46 points in the playoffs, Corona del Mar is averaging 42 points and Edison 40 points.
Are the defenses that bad? Or are the offenses that advanced?
Chris Rix, former quarterback at Santa Margarita and at Florida State, where he remains the only four-year starting quarterback in FSU history, and who now is part of Fox Sports West’s high school football coverage team, said it is the latter.
Offseason preparation now is hectic and it is detailed.
“When I was playing,” Rix said, “we were just seriously getting started in summer, just starting the 7-on-7 stuff. Now, teams are so well-tuned when the season starts.
“When I was playing, it was ‘Let’s score as much as possible.’ Now it’s, ‘No, we expect to score every time we have the ball.’”
It seems like some teams are doing just that.
Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:
• Fox Sports West will televise St. John Bosco-Mater Dei live Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Sam Farber provides play-by-play, John Jackson supplies analysis and Rix is the sideline reporter. If you’ve watched Fox Sports’ coverage of high school football you know that’s a very good team of broadcasters.
• Fox Sports West also is televising San Clemente-Murrieta Valley in the Division 2 final Friday at 7:30 p.m. Edison-La Mirada, the Division 3 final, will be televised by Prime Ticket on a delayed basis Friday at 8 p.m. All of the other football finals will be streamed live at foxsports.com/west/prepzone.
• One of the all-time experts on O.C. football is Fox Sports West play-by-play broadcaster Paul Westphal. FSW has him on the Calabasas-Capistrano Valley game Saturday. There are four games Friday involving O.C. teams, but Westphal is on the Paraclete-Los Altos game.
• Edison quarterback Griffin O’Connor, on the team’s season-long determination to make Dave White’s 31st and final season as Chargers coach a good one: “We practice hard every day for him. This has been our goal, to come to the CIF finals.”
• San Clemente advanced to CIF-SS championship games in 2014 and ’15, only to lose to Trabuco Hills in ’14 and to La Habra last season. Tritons coach Jaime Ortiz said those games are barely in the memory. “You live in the moment,” Ortiz said. “It’s all about what these kids on our team have done the past 13 weeks to get us here.”
• The CIF State office will announce Sunday the pairings for the football regionals. Only teams that win a section’s division title qualify for these playoffs that determine the state champions. There are 13 divisions in the regionals that will be played Dec. 9 and 10. Regionals winners advance to the CIF State Championships on Dec. 16 and 17.
• Teams selected to represent the North and South in the Open Division championship game skip the regionals round and go straight to the CIF State championship game.
• Sacramento State won the bidding to host some of the CIF State Championships in football after the CIF State-Stub Hub Center contract expired. The CIF State-Sacramento State contract is a two-year deal.
• Santa Margarita offensive lineman Brett Neilon was selected to play in the U.S. Army All-American Game on Jan. 7 at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
• Tony Henney, who coached Trabuco Hills to a CIF-SS football championship in 2014, said he was fired as coach at Westlake this week. Henney left Trabuco Hills after the ’14 season to coach at Westlake where his teams were 10-12 over two seasons. Westlake was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs both seasons.
• Edison has a busy sports schedule Friday. Its girls volleyball team plays Menlo-Atherton at 4 p.m. in the CIF State Division I championship match at Santiago Canyon College. The Edison football team plays at La Mirada in the Division 3 final in the evening.
• Santa Margarita plays Archbishop Mitty of San Jose in the CIF State girls volleyball Open Division final Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at Santiago Canyon.
• Admission to CIF State volleyball at Santiago Canyon is $12 for adults and $8 for seniors 65 and older, children 13 and younger and for students with valid student identification. CIF State finals events often can be purchased at tikatap.com.
• Orange Lutheran guard Chris Williams had a fine game to start his senior season. He scored a school-record 42 points in the Lancers’ 71-62 win over Redlands East Valley in a tournament game at Centennial of Corona.
• The CIF-SS has around 20 sponsors. We’re not going to name them all. Just know that if you’re going to a CIF-SS championship game, the CIF-SS folks would prefer that you get there driving a Ford that has tires from Les Schwab while you’re wearing something from TLC Sportswear, that you’ll get your pregame meal from Papa John’s Pizza, hit the Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru on the way home, keep yourself hydrated throughout with Gatorade, and if there’s any trouble you call in the U.S. Marines.
Contact the writer: sfryer@scng.com
