3 things I think about prep football’s Week 4

  • I think Kaiser’s Anthony Brown (above) should play running back in college, as opposed to cornerback. I saw the USC-committed senior play for the first time in Friday’s 19-14 loss to Colony, during which he rolled up 199 yards on 27 carries with a pair of touchdowns. He plays a lot bigger than 5-feet-11, 180 pounds and I have no doubt he would make a fine cornerback given his athleticism and fondness for contact. USC has yet to indicate where it would like him to play but he has an ideal skill set to play running back: vision, burst, aggressivness and flat-out play making ability. Brown is one of those players too electric not to play offense.
  • I think teams with difficult nonleague schedules are going to find themselves in much better standing when things get tense in about a month. Now, this depends on the difficulty of a given team’s league but a team like Colony (4-1) needs to stack its nonleague schedule given the lack of playoff success of its own Mt. Baldy League. But a team on the rise like Damien (1-4) runs the risk of being so beat up after taking on four top-notch teams, including two defending CIF champs, that it may not have enough left for Sierra League play. I’m curious to see how Ayala, which has faced one high caliber team, will stack up with Chino Hills, which scheduled a much more difficult slate. Nonleague scheduling is a delicate thing given the fact it is done well in advance and there is plenty of unpredictibility involved. It’ll be interesting to see how different philosophies effect the rest of the season.
  • I think the Bonita-San Dimas game, being played on Friday, creates one of the two best atmosphere’s I’ve seen in California high school football. Only the Redlands-Redlands East Valley game is comparable in my mind. I haven’t covered a state championship game but Bonita-San Dimas is a more charged atmosphere than any of the CIF championship games I’ve been to. Both schools have bye weeks before the game so as to create as much hype as possible. They participate in non-football competitions leading up to the game, for example, seeing who can raise more money for charity. It’s just a good old-fashioned rivalry that lives up to the billing.

Leave a comment. Ask a question. Or e-mail me at clay.fowler@inlandnewspapers.com

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