Friday marks the end of the 2024 high school football season, and what a season it’s been.
Five of the seven WEIS coverage area teams made the playoffs. Three of them won region championships. Two of them had undefeated regular seasons.
But now it all comes down to the Cherokee County Warriors (13-1) to bring home a championship trophy from Protective Stadium in Birmingham.
It won’t be easy, and it shouldn’t be. It is a state championship game after all.
The Jackson Aggies (13-1) have been the top-ranked Class 4A team in the Alabama Sports Writers Association football rankings all season long. Their lone loss was at Class 6Astate championship participant Saraland in their season opener, 35-27 back on Aug. 23.
The Aggies have outscored their opponents 630-182 this season, an average score of 45-13 per contest. They’ve only given up 38 points in the playoffs, with all of those points coming in the past two weeks against Tallassee (41-10) and Region 1 rival St. Michael (49-28).
In the win over St. Michael last week, junior quarterback Landon Duckworth accounted for four scores. He had touchdown runs of 10 and 5 yards, and he also connected with junior receiver Keeyun “Red” Chapman on a pair of long touchdown passes (77 and 40 yards).
Duckworth has thrown for 3,109 yards and 35 touchdowns this season. He’s also run for 631 yards and 12 scores on 59 carries.
Limiting Duckworth will be the top challenge facing Cherokee County’s defense, but back when these two teams met for a state title in 2009 at Tuscaloosa’s Bryant-Denny Stadium, that season’s Warrior defense had the daunting task of containing another outstanding Aggie athlete: running back Damion Bracy.
Bracy finished 169 yards on 31 carries with three touchdowns that day, but the Warriors stopped him when it mattered most. On a fourth-and-1 at the Warrior 44-yard line and trailing 27-24 with a little over three minutes remaining, Cole Sterling threw Bracy for a 3-yard loss.
That set the stage for quarterback Coty Blanchard, who directed a 10-play, 53-yard drive in which he scored on a 5-yard run with 26 seconds remaining, giving the Warriors a 31-27 victory for the school’s first and only state football championship.
Since then, that 2009 team has been the standard all other Warrior teams have been held to. For the past two seasons, the current Warriors have come close to joining them in the history books, but they fell just short of state titles.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Warriors’ 2009 state championship. Much like the 2024 Warriors, that 2009 team went through heartbreak a season prior before winning it all.
Wouldn’t it be a storybook ending if this year’s Warriors were able to join them?
Yes, Jackson is probably the more talented team, and yes, it’ll take the Warriors playing their absolute best game of the season to come out on top.
But a little historical motivation can be a powerful thing sometimes.
The pick: Cherokee County.
