Transfers

Didn't seem to impact Rishard Matthews (Saddleback???!!), or Eddie Pleasant (Kennedy), all that much. Both clearly had targets on their backs, yet lifted their HS teams to high points, and wound up drawing NFL paychecks for 5+ years. In Mathews' case, his year there was the only time Saddleback won a playoff game in the 5 years prior, or 13 years since.

You might be somewhat shocked if you knew Tom Brady's, Aaron Rodgers' & Brett Favre's record in high school.

Intuitively, I believe you are actually better prepared for the next levels in sports, or life for that matter, when you have to struggle. When you're surrounded by such a high level of talent, I think it gives you a false sense of how good you might actually be, as mistakes aren't always as glaring when your surrounding talent masks them. For a QB in particular, if your OL is so stout you're rarely touched, or your WR's regularly a head taller and have less than 5+ yds of separation from their DB's, and you've got a very good RB to boot, what part of your game gets exposed or even challenged?

JT Daniels throws for over 12,000 yds and 152 TD's in THREE seasons! 15-0, national champs, Gatorade POY as a junior. Clearly destined for greatness, right? So much so, that high school was no longer even a challenge. 2,600 / 14 / 10 with a 5-7 record his frosh year at SC paints a different picture.

Prior year, Tate Martell led Bishop Gorman in a similar fashion...15-0 Gatorade POY, 41 passing TD's, 21 rushing TD's landed him a ticket to THE Ohio St University. It would be a mild understatement to say his college career has fallen short of expectations being so highly regarded out of HS.

Intent isn't to cast aspersions against either guy's football ability, just arguing that being surrounded by what's essentially an all-star team, isn't the best thing for either the individual player's development OR a coaching staff.

#1 Mater Dei DID play Villa Park, and

#2 JW North is now 8-1 (unbeaten except for the Servite game), and will be one of the top seeds in their playoff division.

Just sayin'.

At least CIF SS teams are still willing to play us. 

Seems odd that with all they've got going for them by playing and practicing together as an all-star team, there would be more than 1 active NFL player each at MD and Bosco - both backup QB's.

Active NFL players by HS (CA)

And this is where I think these schools have gone astray from their original mission. Their new mission is to develop college football players and be nationally "relevant." 

Come here (as a frosh or a transfer) and you'll get to compete with the other genetic outliers who you'll be seeing on Saturdays. The best only deserve to compete each day against the best. These realities become a kind of cumulative force, assuring that the pipeline of studs to such a "destination school" remains steady.

No one who has tasted this kind of success is going to voluntarily climb back down the ladder to normalcy. It's too intoxicating. Re-building is for other schools; the best simply re-load. We'll see this when next year's QBs are revealed in January.


* As a side note, I think all our Catholic high schools are susceptible to a kind of "savior complex" by which we reason that the high-talent athlete--no matter how mismatched he is for the culture of the school--is only benefiting by being at our school; that, in terms of academics and school environment, he is, objectively, in a better situation at our Catholic school than he would be at his local public high school. While this is almost certainly true, it ignores the core mission and, taken to its logical conclusion, will lead to the school simply becoming a football factory. Eventually, enough of these athletes will end up creating a football subculture all its own, detached from the wider student body and subject to its own rules and patterns of existence. I suspect this is the case at Bosco and Mater Dei, as I saw it even to a small degree at Servite in the 2009-20011 heyday.
 

Two towns, one team?