End of football's age of innocence? State's new high school championship threatens last vestige of once-pure sport
Dec 15, 2006

San Francisco Chronicle

High school football has hit the big time. From the best-selling book to the feature film to the prime-time TV series, "Friday Night Lights" isn't just a catchphrase out of Texas anymore.

Top teams from coast to coast are televised nationally on ESPN, often drawing more than a million viewers. Big-name teams, like Concord's De La Salle, are flown around the country for marquee showdowns with other nationally ranked schools.

Even MTV has jumped on the bandwagon. The network created a reality series, "Two-A-Days," in which reporters embedded themselves with a high-powered high school team in Hoover, Ala., for the 2005 season. The series covered everything from big games with major rivals to puppy-love spats with the cheerleaders. MTV says the show drew 46 million viewers this fall.

Now, for the first time since 1927, California's best teams will play for three divisional state championship titles at a 27,000-seat, state-of-the-art stadium in Carson (Los Angeles County). And all of the bowl games will be televised live throughout the state.

Some prep sports fans are giddy. Mike Wilkes, a correspondent for the influential MaxPreps.com Web site, calls it "the biggest day in high school football in the history of the state.''

But others wonder what we are getting into. California, which has 1,433 high schools, was the last holdout in the nation to stage a state high school football playoff. Some don't think that was a bad thing.

"I think this is the last pure level of sports,'' says football coach Earl Hanson, whose Palo Alto team will play Lutheran-Orange for the Division II title. "Everything else gets so commercial and corrupted.''

As the local teams fly down to Southern California (airfare provided by the California Interscholastic Federation, which oversees high school sports), you have to wonder: Will this be remembered as the year California high school football became overexposed?

"That's a legitimate concern,'' says Mark Tennis, editor of the CalHiSports.com Web site. "When you get someone like Jimmy Clausen being compared to LeBron James and John Elway, that's when you have to be careful.''

What? You haven't heard of Jimmy Clausen? Jeez, where have you been? Clausen, the 6-foot-3-inch quarterback for Oaks Christian-Westlake Village (Los Angeles County), which will play Cardinal Newman-Santa Rosa on Saturday, has been profiled in Sports Illustrated as "The Kid with the Golden Arm,'' tracked by high school Web sites and reportedly offered scholarships by 46 colleges. (He's picked Notre Dame.)

"I am in the same grade as him,'' says Nick Goodspeed, quarterback for Palo Alto. "But at the same time I think of him as this guy who is kind of like already in the NFL.''

Wasn't that what we liked about high school sports in the first place? That the players were just regular guys from the neighborhood?

"That personal connection is huge,'' says MaxPrep's Josh Morgan. "These are the kids down the block.''

Charming idea, say others, but those days are long gone.

"That's just sort of the reality of our times,'' says interscholastic federation director of communications Emmy Zack. "You get a kid like Clausen, and everybody wants a piece of him.''

Besides, as Marie Ishida, executive director of the federation, says, "These kids were going to get recognized whether you have a state championship or not.''

That's because big-name schools are already veterans of live, national television coverage, out-of-state road trips and national rankings. As Leo Lopoz, athletic director at De La Salle, says, the networks aren't broadcasting these games as a public service to promote exercise for teenagers.

"In general, there are definitely more promoters looking to put games on TV,'' says Lopoz. "And you are definitely seeing companies wanting to put money in our demographic.''

Games like Saturday's championships are not only relatively inexpensive to televise -- the unspecified payments go to the federation, which will use the funds for educational programs -- but they deliver viewers in the coveted 18-to-24-year-old male demographic.

"We've had games in Ohio and Pennsylvania where we got a four or five rating,'' says Randy Freer, chief operating officer for the national Fox Sports Net. "I think high school football today is more popular today, in a wider area, than at any time historically.''

But is this the crest of the wave of interest or just the beginning of a perfect storm?

The MTV show might be the cautionary tale. At Hoover High, one of the players says on tape, "Football is like a religion, and the players on our team are celebrities.'' The 2005 game between Hoover and Nease High in Florida was seen in nearly 1 million households on ESPN.

Is that the future for California? Not as long as schools like Palo Alto and De La Salle represent the state. Lopoz says their conversations with television networks are usually short and direct.

"Can we go in the locker room?'' the reporters ask.

"No,'' Lopoz replies.

Nor can Goodspeed picture an MTV crew on the Palo Alto High campus.

"That kind of thing is kind of mind-blowing to us,'' Goodspeed says. "At our school, a football player is only recognized on game day because he is wearing a jersey.''

And if you are worried about this spilling over to other sports, there may be a silver lining. Freer, at Fox Sports, says viewers appreciate that high school football is more about the game, unlike basketball, which tends to spotlight the individuals.

"That's why you will see us doing very little high school basketball,'' he says.

That, says De La Salle's Lopoz, could save high school football from becoming overhyped and commercialized. We all know that sports fans love to buy the sneakers, shorts and jerseys from their favorite basketball players.

"But,'' Lopoz says, "I don't see too many kids in California walking around in football cleats.''